Table of Contents

The Horus Heresy Volume Five – Cover

The Horus Heresy Volume Five – Title Page

Fear to Tread – Cover

Fear to Tread – Title Page

The Horus Heresy

Dramatis Personae

Melchior

Part One – The Northern Cross

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Ullanor

Part II – Cathedral of the Mark

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Nikaea

Part III – The Red Angel

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Epilogue

Shadows of Treachery – Cover

Shadows of Treachery – Title Page

The Horus Heresy

The Crimson Fist – John French

Dramatis Personae

Prologue

One hundred and forty-one days before the Battle of Phall

The Imperial Palace, Terra

Eighty-eight days before the Battle of Phall

Twenty-eight days before the Battle of Phall

The Imperial Palace, Terra

The Istvan System

The eve of the Battle of Phall

The day of the Battle of Phall

Epilogue

The Dark King – Graham McNeill

The Lightning Tower – Dan Abnett

The Kaban Project – Graham McNeill

Raven’s Flight – Gav Thorpe

Death of a Silversmith – Graham McNeill

Prince of Crows – Aaron Dembski-Bowden

Dramatis Personae

Prologue

Part I – The Kyroptera

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Part II – Son of the Sunless World

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Epilogue

Angel Exterminatus – Cover

Angel Exterminatus – Title Page

The Horus Heresy

Dramatis Personae

Book One – Terra Figula

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Book Two – As above, so below

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Book Three – Coniunctio

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Betrayer – Cover

Betrayer – Title Page

The Horus Heresy

Dramatis Personae

Prologue

Part One – Armatura, The War-World

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Part Two – Nuceria, The Homeworld

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Epilogue

Mark of Calth – Cover

Mark of Calth – Title Page

The Horus Heresy

The Shards of Erebus – Guy Haley

Calth That Was – Graham McNeill

Dramatis Personae

Dark Heart – Anthony Reynolds

The Traveller – David Annandale

A Deeper Darkness – Rob Sanders

The Underworld War – Aaron Dembski-Bowden

Athame – John French

Unmarked – Dan Abnett

About the Authors

Legal

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 ~

Primarchs

Sanguinius, Primarch of the Blood Angels

Horus Lupercal, Primarch of the Sons of Horus

The IX Legion ‘Blood Angels’

Azkaellon, Sanguinary Guard Commander

Zuriel, Sanguinary Guard Sergeant

Lohgos, Sanguinary Guard

Mendrion, Sanguinary Guard

Halkryn, Sanguinary Guard

Raldoron, Captain, First Company

Orexis, Sergeant, First Company

Mkani Kano, Adjutant, First Company

Cador, First Company

Racine, First Company

Venerable Leonatus, Dreadnought, First Company

Amit, Captain, Fifth Company

Furio, Captain, Ninth Company

Cassiel, Sergeant, Ninth Company

Meros, Apothecary, Ninth Company

Sarga, Ninth Company

Xagan, Ninth Company

Leyteo, Ninth Company

Kaide, Techmarine, Ninth Company

Galan, Captain, 16th Company

Dar Nakir, Captain, 24th Company

Madidus, Sergeant, 24th Company

Gravato, 24th Company

Novenus, 33rd Company

Deon, 57th Company

Cloten, Dreadnought, 88th Company

Tagas, Captain, 111th Company

Alotros, 111th Company

Reznor, Lieutenant-Commander, 164th Company

Ecanus, 202nd Company

Salvator, 269th Company

Dahka Berus, High Warden

Yason Annellus Warden

The VI Legion ‘Space Wolves’

Helik Redknife, Captain

Jonor Stiel, Rune Priest

The Traitor Legions

Erebus, First Chaplain of the Word Bearers

Tanus Kreed, Acolyte of the Word Bearers

Uan Harox, Captain, Eighth Company of the Word Bearers

Maloghurst, Equerry of the Sons of Horus

Fabius, Apothecary Majoris of the Emperor’s Children

Imperial Personae

Athene DuCade, Shipmistress of the Red Tear

Corocoro Sahzë, Astropath

Halerdyce Gerwyn, Remembrancer

Tillyan Niobe, Gardener

Unknowns

Ka’Bandha

Kyriss

‘War is hell.’

– Wyllam Tekumsah Shirmun, Recovered
Writings of the Age Before Night [M7]

‘If one wishes to go unseen by devils, one should not place their faith in angels.’

– attributed to the remembrancer
Ignace Karkasy [M31]

The war that came to Melchior was fought by gods and angels; it cracked sky and earth, burned mountains and turned oceans to ash, but in the end it was all about a single objective. On the white salt plains of the Silver Desert, where millions of conscripts and faithful had toiled to build the praise-towers and empath-chapels, the nephilim gathered for the last fight.

Over the months of the war, they had fallen back, leaving each battleground behind no matter if they had been the victors or the vanquished. It was almost as if the towns, the plainslands and the canyons had been tainted to them by the shedding of blood. The nephilim turned their backs and threaded away, and slowly it became clear where they were heading. From orbit – once their egg-like starcraft had been killed and void superiority lost to them – the lines of displacement were wide enough to be seen with the naked eye. Streams of figures, black ribbons of refugees being herded from each point of the compass, plain against the landscape like the dark plumes of smoke from the burned cities.

The war of the gods and angels could have been ended from that high vantage point. It would have required only the time and patience needed to drive the enemy into their last stronghold and then bombard it into oblivion.

But this was not that kind of battle, nor were those who fought it inclined to stand and wait. There were affronts of great scale that needed to be answered in kind, lessons to be learned and demonstrations to be made to the galaxy at large. The nephilim had offended, and they had to be seen to be punished for their crime.

And then there were the people. Not all of them sang the hymnals, their faces streaked with joyful tears as they looked up at the giants that walked among their number. Not all of them gave everything they had, from chattel to first-born, at the word of the nephilim. Many were among the multitude without choice, shackled and made slaves. They deserved to be freed; to suggest they be sacrificed on the altar of war was unconscionable.

Some said all the worshippers were slaves, if one were to widen the definition. In the end, the point was moot. To free the people of Melchior, the nephilim had to be exterminated, down to the very last of them. On that point, there was no disagreement.

In the heart of the Silver Desert, on the sparkling white gypsum wreathed in waves of radiated solar heat, the nephilim gathered with their great entourage among the broken rocks and escarpments, and there they sang their peculiar ululating songs and toiled at the copper frames of their constructions. Waiting for the enemy to come.

Knights in moon-pale armour trimmed with black formed a massive phalanx of ceramite, shields and guns. There were eight thousand of them, the marching of their booted feet crunching the top layer of salted soil into powder, which swirled into the air as fine as paper-smoke. White upon white, wreathed in haze, they seemed to float towards the edges of the great nephilim encampment on a rumble of sound, a peal of thunder that had no ending to it. At the edge of their battalions were war machines – battle tanks, hovering skimmers supported by invisible columns of contra-gravity, low and blocky things that resembled armour-plated trilobites, fighting vehicles that bristled with gun barrels. Peering out above the mist there were hundreds of battle standards and pennants; they carried variant designs of the sigil on the shoulders of the warriors, the black face of a sly canine with a crescent moon beneath its snout, along with unit citations and squadron marks.

The tallest flag, the one that rode at the very tip of the formation, had a unique design – an eye rendered in a manner that resembled sigils of Terra’s antiquity, open and daring, watchful like that of a predator. The pennant was carried by a champion among champions, and he stood resplendent in artificer-wrought armour, marching at the right arm of a demigod. A master of war.

Horus Lupercal, primarch of the Luna Wolves and lord of the XVI Legion Astartes, halted in his tracks and raised a heavy, gauntleted hand, pointing into the lines of barricades and revetments marking the edge of the nephilim host. A ripple broke back across the ranks of his warriors as they too came to a stop and awaited his commands.

The hard, severe light of Melchior’s sun cast a fathomless black shadow at his feet. ‘You see them, captain?’ Horus asked softly, without turning to his subordinate.

Captain Hastur Sejanus, praetor of the Fourth Company of the Luna Wolves, nodded grimly. The near-hit of a nephilim shriekpulse earlier in the campaign had damaged the bones of his skull, and they were knitting together well but the healing process had the side-effect of giving him a constant, low-level headache. The gnawing pain made him irritable and robbed Sejanus of his good humour.

The giants were on the move, surging forwards from their encampment. The captain of the Fourth heard the whistling, tremulous noise of their sing-song voices as they came, and the cries of the men and women who rushed to get out of their way. Massive footfalls drummed across the taut surface of the desert sands.

Horus tipped back his head, looking away, up and up, into the near-cloudless sky. For a moment, the commander seemed uninterested in the enemy approach.

Sejanus glanced around at his lieutenants and made quick gestures in battle-sign, ordering the heavy support and Dreadnought units arranged along the edges of the Luna Wolves formation to make ready. Lascannons, heavy Drako-pattern bolters and magazine-fed missile launchers were prepared. Behind him, the captain heard the sound of eight thousand weapons being armed.

‘Here they are,’ he said, compelled to say something as the first of the alien giants rose up and stepped over the inner, human-scaled barriers of their bulwark. The nephilim had a kind of unhurried, careful agility that reminded Sejanus of sea-going creatures seen through the walls of a glass tank. They moved through air as if they were swimming in water, deceptively slow. But he had seen first-hand how fast they could go if they wished, darting and spinning, becoming difficult to hit.

Sejanus was ready to give the order there and then, but Horus sensed his intent and shook his head. ‘One final chance,’ he said. ‘We’ve come this far. We may still be able to save lives.’

And before Sejanus could answer, his liege lord was walking forwards, out of the lines of the ranks towards the closest of the colossal xenos.

It was a grey; Sejanus had absorbed the surveillance data on the aliens via a hypnogogic transfer and he knew what little the intelligence officers of the Imperial Army had gleaned about the command structure of the nephilim. The colours of their bloated, oblate bodies seemed to designate general rank and position. The blue were rank-and-file types, often at the front lines. The green seemed to perform a role similar to that of an Apothecary or perhaps a squad sergeant. The grey were apparently commanders, thought of as ‘captains’ by the analysts for want of a better word. Attempts to translate the screeching native speech of the aliens had proven fruitless; the upper registers of the sounds existed in hypersonic ranges that were beyond even the reach of a Space Marine’s genhanced hearing. That, coupled with the strange light-patterns that flashed over the lines of photophors in their skin, made breaking their tongue a fool’s effort.

The nephilim had no trouble doing the reverse, however. They had come to Melchior speaking Imperial Gothic as if they had been born to it. And what they said had denied a whole star system to the rule of distant Terra, and the Emperor of Mankind.

The grey saw Horus and moved towards him, light-flashes on its epidermis sending a silent command to the lines of greens and blues forming up behind it. They halted, and around their thick, pillar-like legs, Sejanus saw humans clustering to the aliens in the same way that children would cling to a mother. The converts were all armed with weapons looted from Melchior’s planetary defence forces. Their faces were faintly visible behind the thick, translucent masks that they wore. The masks blurred their aspects, making their features seem uniform and unfinished; the intelligence corps believed that the conscript masks were made from the epidermal layers of nephilim flesh. Greens had been observed cutting out patches of their own skin for this ritualistic process, and it was theorised that somehow the wearing of the alien flesh bonded the conscripts to their xenos slave-masters. Sejanus had personally observed a post-battle autopsy on a dead nephilim and seen the profusion of wiry innards and gelatinous organs that made up the forms of these things. Hulking entities of roughly humanoid outline, they were smooth like carvings of soapstone, with abstract shapes approximating arms and legs. Their dome heads emerged from their shoulders without a neck, and an array of olfactory slits and eye-spots ringed the surface of their skulls. In this light, the nephilim looked like things of blown glass, their semi-transparent flesh glowing in the bright day.

Horus halted, the grey bending slightly to look down at him. Each of the xenos stood over twice the height of the tallest legionary.

‘I will make the offer one last time,’ Horus told the creature. ‘Release your thralls and leave this place. Do this now, in the Emperor’s name.’

The nephilim’s photophors glistened and it spread its stubby, three-fingered hands in a gesture of false openness that it must have copied from a human. The air in front of the alien vibrated as an invisible pane of force rippled into being. Strange harmonics whistled and hummed; this was how the xenos spoke, creating an external, ethereal tympanic membrane, manipulating the passage of air molecules through some as-yet-undetermined means. It wasn’t psychic in nature – that had been ascertained already – but technological. Some kind of instrumentality bonded into their organic forms.

‘Why do you oppose us?’ it asked. ‘The need does not exist. We want peace.’

Horus placed one hand on the pommel of the sword at his waist. ‘That is a falsehood. You came here unbidden, and you took a name from the ancient mythology – that of Terra, Caliban and Barac.’

‘Nephilim,’ it sang, its voice high and peculiar, sounding out each syllable of the word. ‘The fallen seraphs.’ The grey took a heavy step closer to the primarch, and Sejanus’s hand reflexively tightened around the grip of his storm bolter. ‘Worship them. Praise us. Find peace.’

‘Find peace.’ The humans huddling at the feet of the aliens echoed the words as if they were a benediction.

Horus’s attention never once strayed from the alien. ‘You are parasites,’ he said, his words carrying on the wind across the plains, breaking the silence that followed. ‘We know how you draw your sustenance. You feed on the emanations of life. Our Imperial psykers have seen it. You need to be adored… to be worshipped like gods.’

‘That…’ it said, the sound-voice humming, ‘that is a kind of peace.’

‘And with your technology you control minds and cage spirit. Human minds. Human spirits.’ Horus shook his head. ‘That cannot stand.’

‘You cannot stop us.’ The grey gestured towards the acres of copper towers and strange antennae behind it. There were thousands of the nephilim now, a sea of giants moving forwards in slow, loping steps. ‘We have fought you, we know your way. And you can only win if you kill those you profess to protect.’ It pointed at a group of converts. The alien made the hand-gesture again, trains of white light moving under its skin. ‘Join us. We will show you, you will understand how beautiful it is to be… in communion. To be at once a god and a mortal.’

For a moment, Sejanus thought he saw something dark pass over Horus’s face; then the instant was gone. ‘We have dethroned all the gods,’ said the primarch, ‘and you are only pale shadows of those false things.’

The grey let off a hooting cry in its own language and the legion of nephilim advanced, each of them phosphorescing an angry yellow. ‘We will destroy you,’ it said. ‘We outnumber you.’

Horus gave a rueful nod and drew his sword, a massive blade of oiled steel and adamantium. ‘You will try,’ he said. ‘But today you face the Emperor’s sons and his warriors. We are the Luna Wolves, and this Legion is the anvil upon which you will be broken.’

From high overhead there was a low crackle and a sound like distant thunder as sonic booms from the upper atmosphere reached the desert floor. Sejanus looked up, his acute eyesight picking out lines of white contrails, hundreds in number, flaring out behind great crimson tears and scarlet-hued hawks as they fell at supersonic speeds towards the silver sands.

‘We are the anvil,’ Horus repeated, pointing with his sword. ‘Now behold the hammer.’

The heavens screamed.

Ejected from the launch tubes of a dozen capital ships and battle-barges in low orbit, a rain of ceramite capsules tore through the outer atmosphere of Melchior and fell like flaming meteors towards the Silver Desert. Falling with them were diving hawks: Stormbirds and assault gunships turning and wheeling through the air towards the gargantuan nephilim encampment.

They were red as blood, red as fury, and they carried company upon company of the warriors of the IX Legion Astartes. The speed of their assault was the key to victory; the alien invaders and their zealots had successfully been drawn out to confront the massed forces of the Luna Wolves, leaving the defences on their flanks thinned and permeable. But the xenos giants were not slow in their thinking, and the moment they understood that they had been duped, they would attempt to regroup and fortify.

The Blood Angels would not allow that to happen. The nephilim would be broken and cut down, their cohesion shattered by the brutal deep strike that even now was moments from point of impact.

The first skirling impulse of sonic power shot up past the descending assault force, energetic beams of oscillating air sparking spontaneous flashes of heat-lightning. Down in the desert, the quickest of the aliens were reaching their thick arms upwards as if groping for the high clouds, using the resonance of their glassy skeletons as waveguides for the shriek-attacks.

Drop-pods clipped by the sound beams went off course, spiralling out of the landing quadrant towards the white salt erg; others not so fortunate ripped open or slammed into brutal collision with their fellows. The lead Stormbird, crimson like its cohorts but adorned with wings of gold, wove a course through the sonic barrage, guiding the flock into a blazing power-dive.

Heavy lasers and missile pods about its nose and wings spat fire back towards the nephilim defenders, blasting black craters in the hard-packed sand. They were closing with each passing second, but were still too high for accurate targeting; instead, the Stormbird’s gunnery crews were suppressing the enemy far below, forcing them to open up the space where the warriors would make planetfall.

And when the point of no return was crossed, the red and gold aircraft turned into a tight, descending spiral. Across the ventral hull, plates of metal unlocked and slid back along hydraulic piston-rails, allowing the howling air into the open compartment revealed behind them. Other aircraft in the formation did the same, hatches releasing to bare their interiors to the sky.

From the lead Stormbird came a figure clad in armour the shade of the sun. A primarch, another demigod.

An angel.

He threw himself into the pale sky, embracing the pull of gravity like a lover, letting it speed him towards terminal velocity. Unmasked, his gallant face set in determination, a mane of flashing tresses snapping in the wind, he cried out his defiance.

From his back there was an explosion of white as snowy pinions unfurled, great wings extending out in wide arcs to catch the flow of the air and effortlessly harness it. Gold trinkets, teardrops of precious red jade and ruby, silk tabards and chainmail of platinum rattled against a suit of ceramite and plasteel so ornate, so glorious that its artistry seemed better suited to a gallery of the highest reckoning. Against the drag of the airflow, he unsheathed a wicked red sword with a curved, barbed hilt; it was the cousin to the blade held by his brother Horus far below.

With him were warriors no less determined, no less fierce in countenance. Assault legionaries of a dozen companies bore down with the snarling jets of jump-packs upon their backs, guns in their hands and retribution hard in their eyes. Leading them were the Sanguinary Guard, whose golden armour and white wings echoed those of their liege lord; but the wings that held the Guard aloft were made of enamelled metal, and like the assault squads their flight was powered by spears of orange flames from blazing fusion motors.

The primarch landed with an impact greater than a point-blank barrage from a Vindicator, a perfectly circular ripple of shock resonating out from the crash of his boots upon the desert sands. Nephilim blues rushing to attack were blasted off their feet and they struggled to right themselves, only to be gunned down by the ornate wrist-bolters of the falling Sanguinary Guard and the fusillade of the assault squads.

The angel Sanguinius drew up from the crater his arrival had shaped and met his first foe. A bellowing nephilim green came hurtling at him, shouting pulses of sonic disruption powerful enough to shatter bone and break rock; the alien towered over the primarch, and its lucent flesh was alight with violent, flickering speech-colour. There was a crackling cadence as it ran, the outer dermal layer of skin hardening into a natural sheath of misted, glassy armour.

His sword-tip rose up in a bright arc of glittering metal and met the nephilim in the centre of its torso mass. The blade bit into the glass-skin and shattered it effortlessly, fragments pealing with tinny bell-tones as they ricocheted off the primarch’s battle plate. The weapon went on, deep and true, the monomolecular edge slicing through into gelatinous internals, breaking silicon bones and opening up the alien to the air. Bifurcated, the green-skinned creature came apart with a death-howl that ripped into the dust as it collapsed.

Sanguinius shook silvery, metallic blood off his blade and threw a nod to his honour host. Each of them looked back at him with the mirror of the primarch’s own aspect, their helmets sculpted into a noble ideal of his face. ‘First blood, Azkaellon,’ he said, addressing his words to the Commander of the Guard.

‘It is fitting, my lord,’ said the warrior, tense with the rush of imminent war.

Sanguinius nodded once. ‘My sons know their mission. Strike hard and strike fast.’

Azkaellon saluted, removing his helm to present the hard lines of his face to his master. ‘Your will.’ As he spoke, the rumble of the remainder of the landing Stormbirds was joined by the crashing impacts of the drop-pods. The ground quaking beneath them, the ceramite teardrops slammed into the sand and split open like the blossoming of lethal flowers. Line warriors emerged from each pod in combat-ready formations, alongside Librarians, black-armoured Wardens and battle Apothecaries. Azkaellon saw them all look to Sanguinius for their lead; like them, he was proud to be here, in the company of his progenitor and primarch. ‘No xenos will be spared,’ he promised.

Sanguinius raised his sword in a return salute. ‘The others…’ The angel didn’t say the words, but the Guard Commander knew who he meant. The slaves. ‘Liberate as many as you can. They’ll fight with us now they know they have not been forsaken.’

‘And the conscripts?’ Azkaellon pointed towards a rough skirmish line of the masked human worshippers as they advanced warily towards the red-armoured legionaries. ‘If they oppose us?’

A moment of sorrow passed over the great angel’s aspect, dimming his radiance for an instant. ‘Then they too will be set free.’ Sanguinius held up his blade and the gesture brought a roar from his assembled sons that beat at the sky.

A cohort of lumbering blues crested a low ridge and the battle began in earnest for the Blood Angels.

At the start, it had been Horus who called the tune of the battle plans. In the strategium of his flagship, the Vengeful Spirit, the master of the Luna Wolves faced his brother across a wide hololithic display and showed him the plan he had conceived to break the will of the nephilim. It was shock and awe, an implacable and showy display of combat might, the kind that Sanguinius’s sibling had made his own time and again throughout the wars of the Great Crusade. In a sea of red and white, Horus wanted the Blood Angels to march shoulder-to-shoulder with their cousins, cowing the aliens with the sight of an army of thousands rolling without pause to the gates of their last bastion. And then through those gates, over the battlements, not stopping, not pausing to parley or hesitate. Like the ocean these things sprang from, Horus had said, we will roll over the aliens, drag them down and drown them.

The sheer bombast of the plan was its greatest strength, but Sanguinius had not been easily swayed to it. Across the hololith, the two brothers had argued and countered, to and fro, one presenting obstacles and challenges to the other. To an outside observer, it might have seemed aloof, almost callous to see these two mighty genhanced soldiers talking over a monumental confrontation as if it were little more than a game of regicide.

But nothing could be further from the truth. The Blood Angel looked into the panes of the holograph and saw the countless icons representing civilian concentrations, the play of the geography, the deceptive desert landscape full of hidden chokepoints and kill-boxes. In his mind, Horus had already weighed the tactics of the engagement and made a regrettable, but necessary choice. He had made the difficult decision and then moved past it, ridden on. Not from heartlessness, but from expedience.

Sanguinius could not do so as easily. The blunt, brute-force approach was better suited to their more intemperate kinsmen, to Russ or to Angron, and neither Sanguinius nor his brother Horus were so artless, so focused upon the target to the detriment of all else.

But it was difficult not to allow the cold rage instilled by the actions of the nephilim to be given its rein. The alien giants, mocking humanity’s great dream with their talk of peace and unity, had left a trail of destruction behind them that had claimed a hundred worlds before they had come to rest upon Melchior.

Sagan, the DeCora Spine, Orpheo Minoris, Beta Rigel II. These planets had been denuded of all human life, populations herded into empath-chapels as big as mountains and then slowly consumed. The true horror of it was that the nephilim used those they preyed upon to do their soldiering for them, snaring the pliant, the lonely, the sorrowful with their ideal of an attainable godhood. They plied them with stories of eternal existence for the faithful, of endless sorrow for the agnostic; and they were very good at it.

Perhaps the xenos really believed that what they were doing was somehow taking them closer to a form beyond flesh, to an afterlife in an eternal heaven-state; it did not matter. With their technologies they implanted bits of themselves into their thralls to further their communion, they cut their own flesh and made the masks to mark their devotees. The nephilim controlled minds, either through the transmitted power of their will or through the weak character of those they chose.

They were an affront to the Emperor’s secular galaxy, not only an offence to the purity of a human ideal but in their insidious cuckoo-nest displacement of those who foolishly gave them fealty.

For what the aliens fed upon, what the scouts of the Blood Angels and Luna Wolves had seen and reported back, were the very lives of those who cherished them. The empty chapels were piled high with stacks of desiccated corpses, bodies aged years in hours as all living essence was siphoned from them. It had sickened the primarchs as the true understanding of the enemy they faced was, at last, revealed.

The nephilim fed on adulation.

Thus, Sanguinius would deny these repellent xenos their sustenance and defeat their arrogance in the same blow. The invaders believed that the Emperor’s sons would never starve them by resorting to the murder of the humans they took as their cattle, and that was so. Yet what the nephilim considered a weakness, the Angel made a strength. So confident were they of their unassailable position, they had met Horus’s arrival with almost the full might of their forces, daring the Luna Wolves to strike at them.

And with the aliens turning their backs, their belief in their victory already blinding them to the unbreakable strength of intent within the warriors they now faced, the true angels fell in fire on Melchior and became the hammer of the Emperor’s wrath.

Running at a charge, the primarch was a hurricane, racing into the thick of the nephilim lines and taking to the air in deft, agile moves. With his sword and the shorter blades of a glaive built into his vambrace he made kill after kill, shouting down those who tried to deafen him with their dirge-waves. Flanking him, Azkaellon and Zuriel, first and second of his personal guard, used their wrist-mounted Angelus bolters to pour cascades of fire into the enemy line. With each hit, the warheads of the mass-reactive bloodshard rounds exploded into hundreds of magno-charged monofilaments; every concussive impact upon the skin of a nephilim caused bloody detonations inside the torsos of the alien creatures. Lakes of bluish, shimmering internal fluids littered the battleground, shrinking slowly as the silver sand absorbed them.

At the heels of the Guard came the captains leading their assault companies. Raldoron, the Blooded of the First, hurled bolter fire from the weapon in his steady hand, his elite veterans emblazoned with ebon fetishes carved in the fashion of the hunter tribes on the Blood Angels home world of Baal. The First Captain was joined by elements of Furio’s Ninth Company shield-bearers, Galan’s men of the 16th with their favoured blade-staves, and Amit with the Fifth, every one of them bearing boltgun and flaying knife.

Heavy weapon barrages concentrated on the copper towers and the walls of the empath-chapels, denying the nephilim the infrastructure of their haven, forcing them to engage head-on. To the south, where Horus had drawn his feint, the great tide of battle was shifting and breaking. The Luna Wolves had first dug in, blockading any progress or escape by the xenos, and now they advanced. Extending into a wide arc, the line of Horus’s soldiery forced the varicoloured giants back, pressing them on to the blades and the guns of the Blood Angels. With brutal inevitability, the trap the Emperor’s sons had devised aboard the Vengeful Spirit closed like a vice. With each passing minute, they left the aliens less and less room to manoeuvre. Many of the nephilim’s converts began to surrender, droves of them crying out in pain as they tried to peel off the bonded masks; while those too far along the road to worship spent their lives for their masters in a vain and fruitless attempt to slow the pace of the Space Marines.

Sanguinius had no pity for these dupes. They had allowed themselves to be drawn in by pretty words, let themselves be ruled by their fears instead of by their hopes. And in much greater measure, he had only anger for the nephilim themselves.

Over the bodies of the alien dead, the crimson legionaries and their golden warlord turned fury upon the giants. The whickering music of the aliens’ strange songs became an atonal scale of panicked noises punctuated by chugging snarls of aggression. Horus’s landspeeder squadrons raced overhead, bracketing a phalanx of blue-skins with salvoes from their graviton guns and multi-meltas, punching through curls of smoke as the outer rings of the encampment burned.

Galan’s war-cry drew the primarch’s attention and he spared the captain a glance. There was such ferocity, such resolve in the face of the warrior, and Sanguinius felt a surge of pride to be fighting alongside his sons. Legionaries born of Baal and Terra alike, united many years earlier by the Angel himself under a banner of incarnadine, these were his sharpest blades, his brightest minds. In battle they were unparalleled, and for a moment the primarch allowed himself to feel the pure, wild joy of the fight. They were going to win; that had never been in doubt.

The enemy was in disarray, and their villainy was unquestioned. This was a righteous battle, the victory of the Imperium as inevitable as the rising of Melchior’s sun. Sanguinius and Horus would win this day, and a lost world would be brought back into the fold once more. This would be done, by battle-brothers and brothers in blood, by primarch and legionary alike. He could taste the victory on his lips, sweet and dark like good wine.

And so there, on Melchior’s shining sands, the nephilim were put to the sword.

In the aftermath, the freed slaves were isolated from the converts who still remained alive for fear that revenge killings would explode from a mob mentality. Horus took on this deed, in no uncertain terms drilling those who claimed to lead the liberated that justice would be delivered to all turncoats – but it would be Imperial justice, right and true and conducted to the letter of the law.

In the meantime, the convert prisoners were given back-breaking menial work, overseen by troopers from the Imperial Army brigades that had come to support the Legions. The converts carried the dead nephilim to great pyres set about the desert and were made to burn the corpses of the aliens they had worshipped; others were formed into work gangs whose task was to dismantle the copper devotional towers they had forced their fellows to build only days earlier.

Sanguinius stood atop a shallow hill of pale rock and watched the sun dropping towards the distant horizon. His wings were pulled close, and the xenos blood shed upon him as he fought was gone, cleansed from his armour. He nodded to himself. Melchior was safe, the victory secure. Already his thoughts were moving towards the next battle, the next world in need of illumination.

A smile grew on his lips as he sensed his brother’s approach, but he did not turn to look at Horus. ‘There is a question that concerns me greatly,’ said Sanguinius, with false gravity.

‘Oh?’ The lord of the Luna Wolves halted at his side. ‘That sounds troubling.’

Neither of them paid heed to it, but directly below in the shallow canyon beneath the rise, many of the common soldiers, prisoners, even their own legionaries, paused to watch. It was a sight to see a single primarch in the flesh; to behold a pair of these gene-forged transhumans at once was something that many of those watching would remember for as long as they lived. For many different reasons.

‘How can I ease your disquiet, brother?’ Horus went on, affecting a serious mien.

The Angel eyed him. ‘If the grey had done as you asked, if it had set the thralls free… Tell me, would you really have let the aliens go?’

Horus nodded, as if the answer were obvious. ‘I am a man of my word. I would have let them leave the planet’s surface, make for orbit…’ He cocked his head. ‘But when they met your ships up there, well…’ He gave a small shrug, the huge shoulders of his battle plate exaggerating the motion. ‘You’ve never been as agreeable as I.’

The smile became a moment of laughter. Sanguinius gave a slight, mocking bow. ‘So true. I must content myself with merely being the better warrior.’

‘Don’t make me pluck those wings,’ Horus retorted.

‘Perish the thought!’ said Sanguinius. ‘Without them I’d only be as handsome as you are.’

‘That would be tragic,’ Horus agreed.

The moment of levity passed and in the next exchange they had gone from the easy humour of a pair of siblings to the manner of two allied generals. ‘What ships have you chosen to remain to administrate the compliance?’

Horus rubbed his chin. ‘The Sword Argus and the Crimson Spectre, I think. Their Army platoons can garrison here, make sure the nephilim cult is dead and buried. If all goes well, they will disengage and reconnect with my expeditionary fleet in a few months.’

The winged primarch glanced up into the sky. ‘I fear we have not seen the last of these creatures.’

‘The Khan hunts their birth world even as we speak. He will finish what we started here today.’

‘I hope so. The technology the aliens used, the ease with which they infiltrated the minds of these civilians... It’s troubling. We can’t allow it to go unchecked.’ Sanguinius looked back at his sibling. ‘So, where next for you?’

‘The Ullanor Sector. A dozen systems have gone silent, from New Mitama all the way out to Nalkari. I suspect another xenos incursion.’

‘Orks?’

‘Likely. I could use your support, brother.’

Sanguinius smiled again. ‘I doubt that. And I could not oblige even if I wished it. My astropaths have been agitated for days, divining messages from our scouts in the Perseus Null. Compliance is sorely needed there, I have been told.’

‘Father’s great plan… It does not often allow us the chance to cross paths,’ noted Horus. His brother thought he sensed a thread of regret beneath the words. ‘How much glory did we share this day? Not enough.’

‘Agreed.’ There had been a moment when the primarchs had met during the engagement, when a horde of nephilim grey-skins had rushed at them with ear-splitting barrages of noise radiating from the glass spines growing out of their limbs. The brothers stood back to back and weathered every blow, cut down each attacker. The moment had been the fulcrum around which their victory had turned. ‘I confess I would relish the opportunity to share the battleground with you again,’ Sanguinius went on. ‘And not just that. I miss our conversations.’

Horus’s frown deepened. ‘One day we will be done with all this.’ He gestured at the desert sands and the debris of the battle. ‘Then we can talk and play regicide to our hearts’ content. At least until the next crusade.’

Something in his brother’s tone gave Sanguinius pause. There was a meaning buried in there, a moment that he could sense but not grasp; something that perhaps even Horus himself was unaware of.

The chance to examine the thought was lost when a figure in crimson armour came running up the low hill. ‘My lords. Forgive the interruption.’ Raldoron bowed and shot Horus a wary look before turning to his primarch. ‘The Angel’s presence is required… elsewhere.’

‘Is there a problem, First Captain?’ Horus asked the Blood Angels officer.

Raldoron’s expression was unreadable. The warrior had a gaunt, solid face beneath a high queue of grey-white hair, and he betrayed nothing. ‘A Legion matter, sir,’ he said. ‘It requires my lord’s personal attention.’

Sanguinius fixed his captain with a hard stare. He was one of his most trusted men and carried many honours alongside his stewardship of the elite veteran company, hard-won through decades of war in the Emperor’s name. Raldoron was equerry to the primarch and held the new honorific ‘Chapter Master’, serving in a similar role to the warriors of Horus’s advisory cadre, the Mournival. He was not a man given to impulsive and ill-considered actions, so his intrusion here was cause for concern. ‘Speak, Ral.’

There was momentary pause, so tiny, so fractional that only someone who knew Captain Raldoron as well as his liege lord did would pick up on it. But it was enough to signal that something was amiss.

‘One of our brothers has been… lost, sir.’

Sanguinius felt his face become a mask, as cold seeped into his veins. ‘My brother, please excuse me.’

He never registered Horus’s reply; he was already moving, following Raldoron out through the mist of battle-smoke wreathing the darkening desert.

They did not speak, not as they walked, not as they boarded the land speeder that Raldoron had secured for the transit across the warzone. Sanguinius retreated inside his own thoughts and prepared himself for the worst as the First Captain piloted the flyer out across the eastern flank of the conflict area. They moved in the nap of the earth, rolling up and down shallow inclines, skirting the remains of blasted praise-towers and fallen battlements. As the grav motors slowed and they neared their destination, the primarch saw that the matter had been contained exactly as he had wished it to be. Raldoron, ever the planner, had made sure that a wide circular area was secure, a barrier of Blood Angels legionaries standing face-outwards in a wide combat wheel hundreds of metres across. None of them looked up as the speeder passed over their heads and dropped down to settle in the courtyard of a bombed-out empath-chapel.

‘In there.’ Raldoron’s grim words carried over the low hum of the idling engines as he jutted his chin towards the ruin. ‘I isolated him the moment I was certain.’

Sanguinius felt the cold in his blood spread to his hands as they walked towards the slumped shape of the building. The walls had listed to the right and the ceiling had come down, forcing the oval church to sink into the sands beneath. A second, smaller group of legionaries stood around the black maw of the entrance; they were from Raldoron’s honour guard, and they also did not face the site they were guarding nor react to the presence of their primarch.

‘His name?’

‘Alotros,’ said Raldoron. ‘A battle-brother of solid, if unremarkable service. From Captain Tagas’s command, the 111th Company.’

‘What does Tagas know?’ asked Sanguinius.

‘That Brother Alotros is dead, my lord.’ A figure in gold armour emerged from the dark doorway and saluted. Azkaellon’s severe expression spoke volumes as to what had gone on. ‘Killed by the xenos, atomised in an explosion. A noble end.’ The Sanguinary Guard deliberately stepped into the path of his commander and halted, glaring at Raldoron. ‘You should not have brought him here.’

Raldoron opened his mouth to speak, but his primarch talked over him. ‘That is not your place to decide, Guard Commander.’ Azkaellon paled slightly at the force behind Sanguinius’s hard, even tone. ‘Now step aside.’

Azkaellon did as he was told, but he could not remain silent. ‘This should be dealt with by us, sir. Quietly.’

‘Quietly?’ echoed the primarch, his voice suddenly distant. ‘No, my son. No Blood Angel will ever die in silence.’

Inside the fallen alien temple, the stink of fresh blood hung in the air, powerful and metallic. Sanguinius licked his lips; he couldn’t stop the reflex reaction. His omophageaic membrane tasted several different varieties of human vitae, analysing them as instinctively as a vintner would know the ages and textures of a wine’s bouquet. There was alien blood spilled here too, the acrid tang of the nephilim among it all.

He found the golden boots of his warplate casting ripples out across a pool of dark fluid that had formed a small lake in the gloomy interior of the chapel. There were many, many dead in here with him, arranged around the edges of the chamber as if they were an audience watching the stage of a theatre in the round. Smashed fragments of nephilim neuro-tech – synapse sinks, empathic matrices and the like – littered the ruin. But none of the violence wrought here had come from the battle fought through this day. No, the scene here was not one of war, but of madness.

He saw Alotros the moment he entered the temple, the thermal form of him clear to the primarch’s bio-augmented vision against the cold bodies of the dead. The Space Marine was crouched down on one knee as if in a gesture of fealty. With careful, steady actions, Alotros sat in the middle of the lake and mechanically cupped handfuls of the dark fluid, one after another, to his lips. He drank silently, unhurried.

‘Look at me,’ ordered Sanguinius. His heart tightened in his chest and a very specific kind of sorrow gripped him as Alotros slowly obeyed.

The Blood Angel’s armour was badly damaged; fibre-bundle musculature ripped, ceramite cracked. It appeared that the chestplate had been torn open across the sternum and a brutal wound opened beneath it. The primarch recognised the hit pattern of a nephilim shriekpulse, and looking closer he saw the trails of dried blood visible from Alotros’s nostrils, his ears, the corners of his reddened eyes. Such a hit would have boiled the brain matter of an ordinary human, and even for a legionary the impact should have crippled flesh and torn at neural pathways. Alotros was pallid and in obvious pain, but he seemed detached from it. The warrior had taken a point-blank strike from one of the alien weapons and survived, a rare happenstance; but, Sanguinius corrected himself, he had not survived. Not really. At this very moment, somewhere else on the battlefield, Captain Tagas and the men who had been Alotros’s squadmates were making their peace with his death.

His lips, his chin, the exposed flesh of his neck, all were wet with the blood he had been patiently drinking, mouthful by mouthful. Alotros looked at his primarch with bleak, animal eyes. Sanguinius saw a hunger there, the same hunger he had seen before in other eyes, in other places. At first only rarely, but now with a grim regularity.

Alotros released a deep, rumbling growl and slowly came to his feet. His hands tightened into talons and he showed his teeth. Fangs flashed in the gloom. In another time it would have been said that his soul had been usurped by some hellish phantom, that his blood was poisoned, that he was possessed. But such ideas were fantasies. The warping of this good warrior came from something within him, not from a mythical, otherworldly external force.

Sanguinius knew that it was already too late, but he could not go on without trying. He offered his hand. ‘My son,’ he began. ‘Step back, if you can. Step back from the abyss and return to us. I will save you.’

Alotros blinked, as if the words were foreign to him and their meaning difficult to grasp.

‘This is my fault,’ said the primarch. ‘I am to blame. But I will amend this, if you help me.’ He took a step forwards. ‘Will you help me, Alotros?’

It was with a father’s hollow regret that Sanguinius saw his words fall upon stony ground. A feral intent, an impulse drawn up from the very deepest bestial core of the warrior, emerged on the Blood Angel’s face, and finally whatever was left of Brother Alotros of the 111th Company simply went away.

In a berserk, furious rage that exploded out of nothing, the legionary tore across the empath-chapel in great splashing bounds. The primarch hesitated; with power sword, glaive-blade or infernus pistol, it would have been no matter for him to draw a weapon and end the battle-brother’s life before he came within arm’s reach. But something stopped him.

Perhaps it was hope, hope that Alotros would be the one to break the cycle and not do the same as those before; or perhaps it was guilt that stayed his hand, some measure of punishment inflicted on the self to see this horror up close, to know the dying moment of it.

Against all reason, against all possibility of survival, Alotros attacked his gene-father. He was screaming, babbling in fragments of the technomad dialect of Baal’s Low Mesa clans. The warrior wanted only one thing: to bite deep into living flesh and drink his fill of the rich crimson fluid within. He was truly lost.

Sanguinius held Alotros at bay, the warrior’s maddened blows ringing harmlessly off his battle armour, the fires of his rage not fading but burning brighter with every passing moment. The cocktail of blood-fumes on his breath clogged the primarch’s senses, and Sanguinius understood.

He knew where this crimson fury, this red thirst sprang from. He could sense it, coiled like a poisonous thread inside his own genetic helix. A dark bequest that he had passed on to his kin. A recessive death-mark.

‘I am sorry, my son,’ he told Alotros, in the last heartbeat before he broke the legionary’s neck.

Alotros’s snarls ended with a guttural hiss, and at the end there was some brief measure of peace in his eyes. His body fell into the shallow pool; the Blood Angel’s pain was at an end, a final mercy granted to him. But now the darkness in the gloomy alien church seemed shades deeper, heavy with the weight of what had been done there.

For the second time that day, Sanguinius sensed the presence of his brother.

He wheeled, turning to glare into the dimness as a massive shadow broke away from a slumped support column and stood stock-still before him. ‘Horus...?’

‘What did you do?’ His brother’s face caught the light and the ghost of shock was etched upon it. ‘What did you do?’ The sound of his own voice seemed to jolt the other primarch out of his stasis and he rushed towards the fallen warrior. ‘You… killed him.’

In a strangely protective gesture, Sanguinius stepped in front of the corpse, bringing Horus up short. ‘You followed me?’ His tone betrayed anger and surprise, shame and regret and a hundred other emotions. ‘Spied on me?’

It was taking all of Horus’s monumental self-control to stay where he stood, the confusion on his face shifting, changing. He was grasping to comprehend what he had just witnessed, and failing. A primarch executing one of his own sons… The thought of such a thing was terrible to contemplate.

‘You should not be here,’ Sanguinius told him, echoing Azkaellon’s reproach. ‘This was not for the eyes of outsiders.’ His words were dead, bled dry.

‘That seems so.’ Horus gave a glum nod. ‘But I am your brother. I am not an outsider.’ He raised his head and met the Angel’s gaze, challenging him. ‘And I do not understand why you have committed such a hateful deed.’

Sanguinius did not bother to ask how Horus had made it past Raldoron’s guards without raising any alarm; he was a primarch, after all, and the Emperor’s sons had always been adept at going where their will took them.

When Horus looked at him, it was not with anger and disappointment, but with a terrible kind of empathy. ‘I should not have come here, but your reaction when the First Captain spoke… Brother, what I saw in your eyes at that moment gave me cause for concern.’ He stepped around and knelt over Alotros’s body. ‘And now I see I was right to think so.’ Horus studied the dead legionary with a clinical eye, and raised his gauntlet to tap a finger upon his temple. ‘Tell me there was cause. What was wrong with him? Did the nephilim do this, did they cause some great damage to his mind?’

The lie caught in the Angel’s throat. Yes, he could say – A terrible tragedy. This is the work of the foul xenos. I was forced to take a regrettable action–

‘No.’ The falsehood crumbled before it was fully formed. He could no more lie to his sibling than he could chain Melchior’s sun and pull it from the sky. Horus and Sanguinius knew each other so well that to lie to one another would be a monumental undertaking, a pretence of ultimate artifice. He could not conscience such a thing. ‘No, Horus. This is my fault. The blame lies with me.’

For a long moment, there was only silence between them, and the Angel could see his brother’s train of thought there in his expression, the questions he was asking himself, the answers he found wanting.

At last, Horus stood and placed a hand on his brother’s shoulder, the stony lines of his face etched in disquiet. ‘If you wish it, I will leave this place now and never speak again of the matter. Your Legion is your concern, Sanguinius, and I would never question that.’ He paused. ‘But I am your brother and your friend, and it cuts me to see the sorrow in your eyes. I know you are a compassionate soul, that you would not do such a thing unless it was your only choice. But you have a great burden, and I would help you carry it, if only you will let me.’

The Blood Angel’s eyes narrowed. ‘You ask much.’

‘I always do,’ admitted Horus. ‘Speak to me. Make me understand.’ He was almost imploring. ‘I swear to you, on the honour of my Legion, any words spoken here will never pass beyond these walls. I will keep your confidence from all.’

Sanguinius met his gaze. ‘Even from our father?’

The other primarch said nothing for a moment; then at last, he nodded.

With great care, Sanguinius gathered up the body of his fallen warrior and carried him from the pool of shimmering dark to a stone pedestal. The platform had been home to a crystalline devotional statue of a nephilim, but now all that remained of it was a shallow drift of broken shards that crunched underfoot. The primarch arranged the body of the dead legionary in repose, restoring the dignity that his madness had stolen.

At length, Sanguinius turned to face Horus. ‘We were made to be perfect,’ he began. ‘Tools of war. The supreme princes of battle.’ He slowly spread his hands and the white wings curled at his back. ‘Do you think that father succeeded in his design?’

‘Perfection is not a state of being,’ Horus replied. ‘It is a state of striving. The journey is all that has meaning, not the goal.’

‘Did the Phoenician tell you that?’

His brother nodded once. ‘Fulgrim may be a peacock, but when he spoke those words he was right.’

Sanguinius laid a hand on Alotros’s stilled chest. ‘We give so much to our sons. Our aspect, our will, our fortitude. They are the best of us. But they carry our flaws as well.’

‘So they should,’ said Horus. ‘So we should. To be human is to be flawed – no matter what we are or where we came from, we are still human. We share the same ancestry as the people we defend.’

‘Indeed. If we lost that connection… If we truly were beyond humanity, then the Emperor’s sons and the Legiones Astartes would have more kinship to xenos like them–’ Sanguinius gestured towards the corpse of a nephilim blue-skin ‘–than to the children of Terra.’ He shook his head. ‘But for all that we are, we cannot escape what is within.’ The Angel pressed his fingers to his chest. ‘I have bequeathed something dark to my sons, brother.’

‘Speak plainly,’ Horus demanded. ‘I am not Russ who would judge you, or Dorn who would not listen. You and I, we have no need for pretence.’

‘I believe that there is a hidden flaw in the genetic matrix of the Blood Angels gene-seed. Something in my own bio-type. I have looked within myself and seen glimpses of it, brother. A murky core, a trait that lies buried and waits to be awakened.’

Horus’s gaze fell on the dead warrior. ‘This is… the fury that I saw in him?’

‘It cries out for blood. And there is never enough.’

The Luna Wolf turned away, thinking. ‘How many times?’

‘Alotros is one of several that I am certain of. There may have been others who perished in battle without note of it.’

‘A handful, in two hundred years, from a Legion of one hundred and twenty thousand?’ Horus folded his armoured gauntlets together. ‘How can you be sure of–’

Sanguinius held up his hand. ‘I am sure,’ he said gravely. ‘And the incidences are coming closer together. I fear that, in time, it will grow to encompass every one of my sons. In my meditation, I have seen such… possibilities.’

His brother waited for him to continue. Each of the primarchs were touched by their father’s preternatural gifts in a different way, and for Sanguinius, part of that legacy was a certain kind of sight. A hazy, indefinite sense of foreknowledge.

‘The story is always the same,’ he went on. ‘A warrior in the throes of battle succumbs to a rage that builds and builds until his reason is lost. His humanity is stripped away until only a feral core remains. He kills and kills, seeks blood and more blood.’ He paled as he spoke. ‘And at the end, at the very worst of it, he loses every last piece of himself.’

‘Until death is a kindness.’ Horus nodded again. ‘Brother… I understand now. How long have you known?’

Strangely, as Sanguinius had given voice to the words he felt the load upon him lighten, as if the act of confiding in Horus had indeed lessened his burden. ‘I have kept this from our father and brothers for several years. I am searching for a solution. Some among my sons have a measure of the truth. They are united with me in finding a way of undoing this flaw.’ His jaw stiffened. ‘My flaw.’

‘Brother…’ Horus began, framing his words.

Sanguinius shook his head. ‘Don’t say it. You think that I blame myself for something I have no control over, but I do not agree. This is my legacy and I must account for it. A primarch…’ He faltered over the words, his voice thick with emotion.

‘A primarch is father to his Legion,’ said Horus, completing the thought for him. ‘I will not disagree or try to convince you otherwise.’ He paused again. ‘Who else is aware of the full dimensions of this?’ Horus glanced towards the entrance of the fallen empath-chapel.

‘Azkaellon, Captain Raldoron, my Master Apothecary on Baal… and a few others.’

When Horus spoke again, his voice was low. ‘Why in Terra’s name did you not ask for help?’

Sanguinius met his gaze. ‘Tell me, Horus. What is it that you are most afraid of?’

The demand took the other primarch off-guard, and for a moment, the Luna Wolf was on the verge of dismissing the question; then his expression shifted and he gave the brutally truthful answer. ‘Falling short. Of failing my Legion, my Imperium… my Emperor.’

‘Something each of his sons shares, even if many of us would never have the courage to admit it.’ Sanguinius walked away, the shadows lengthening around him. ‘I could not speak of this to any of the others. You know as well as I do that it would diminish my Legion. Some of our brothers would see it as weakness and seek to turn this truth against me.’ He grimaced. ‘Alpharius, Lorgar… They would not be generous.’

‘But why have you kept this from father? If any living being could know the key to it, it would be him!’

Sanguinius rounded on Horus, his seraphic features hardening. ‘You know the reason!’ he answered with a snarl. ‘I will not be responsible for the erasure of the Blood Angels from Imperial history. I will not have a third empty plinth beneath the roof of the Hegemon as my Legion’s only memorial!’

Horus’s eyes widened. ‘It would not come to that.’

Sanguinius shook his head once more. ‘I cannot take the risk. The Emperor has concerns that go far beyond the needs of his individual sons. You know that is so.’ He frowned. ‘We all know that is so.’

Silence fell again, broken only by the hollow wind pulling at the ruined walls of the temple and the distant crash of metal as another nephilim praise-tower was cut down.

Then, with grim finality, Horus offered his hand to the Angel. ‘I swore to you I would say nothing of this. I will keep that promise for as long as you wish me to.’

Sanguinius accepted the gesture, their vambraces clanking together as they shook hands in the old pre-Unity fashion, palms grasping each other’s wrists. ‘I trust no one more than you, Horus,’ he said. ‘Your solidarity means more than I can express.’

‘I will do all I can to help you deal with this matter,’ said the Luna Wolf. ‘However long it takes.’

Raldoron barely covered his shock when not one, but two primarchs exited the ruined building. Without a word to any of the assembled warriors, Sanguinius and Horus walked away across the silver sands, each turning from the other to make for the lines of their Legions’ forces.

At his side, Azkaellon was as rigid as a statue, and the First Captain had no doubt that the leader of the Sanguinary Guard was silently furious. Horus’s appearance could only mean one thing. He knew.

Sensing his scrutiny, Azkaellon shot Raldoron a hard look. ‘Your warriors are ineffective.’

‘Watch your damned tone, bodyguard.’ The captain’s answer came back through gritted teeth. He pointed out beyond the ring of his troops. ‘Your second-in-command is slinking around out there, and he didn’t catch the primarch either.’

‘Zuriel will be reprimanded for his error, have no doubt of that.’

Raldoron didn’t. Azkaellon was so severe in his manner that sometimes it seemed he was utterly inflexible on anything. It was a frequent cause of friction between the warriors of the First Company and the Sanguinary Guard. Raldoron’s fluid, adaptable command style was at odds with Azkaellon’s aloof, rigid comportment, and the two of them reflected that down to the bone.

‘I have work to do,’ said the Guard Commander, striding away from the ruins. ‘I hope I can leave the rest of the details to you without fear of further error.’ Before Raldoron could retort, the flight pack on Azkaellon’s back spat flame and his sculpted wings unfurled. In a flash of gold, the warrior was gone.

The First Captain’s grimace deepened and he dismissed his warriors with a sharp gesture. He gave one of them a glare. ‘Where is the Apothecary? I called for a savant an hour ago!’

‘Here, lord,’ said a voice behind him.

Raldoron turned and found a legionary marching towards him across the rubble-strewn square, emerging from the smoke. The warrior’s crimson armour bore the white trim of a sanctioned Legion medicae, and from his battle plate hung narthecium packs, drug flasks and other flesh-cutter’s tools. His left gauntlet was heavily modified from the standard Mark II Crusade-pattern unit, bulky with the protruding barrel of a reductor. He wore the badge of the Prime Helix and there was a skull sigil on the brow of his helmet showing his status as an Apothecae Minoris, the most junior rank. A labour-servitor ambled after him, listing as it clumped over the uneven ground. The captain studied the Apothecary; he would have preferred a veteran to assist in this matter, but to re-task a more seasoned officer from their duties would have drawn undue attention.

The new arrival gave a salute. ‘Reporting as ordered.’ He gave no sign of having witnessed the departure of the two primarchs, which was just as well. Fewer questions for him to dwell upon, thought the captain.

‘You will follow me,’ ordered Raldoron, ‘and say nothing.’

They entered the fallen chapel and the Apothecary activated the illuminator mounted on his backpack. The cold ray of white light searched the chamber, picking out thousands of motes of rock dust suspended in the heavy air, before shimmering off the great liquid pool in the slumped spaces of the nave. Raldoron saw the beam venture towards the shadowed forms of the dead and he called out, dragging the young Apothecary’s attention and the light to the podium where Alotros’s body lay. The captain grimly stripped the dead battle-brother’s armour of all company marks and personal icons, until there was nothing to show who this warrior might have been or where he had served.

‘The progenoid glands,’ said the captain. ‘Remove them.’

There was a moment of hesitation on the part of the other Blood Angel, but the faceless helmet showed no expression, and soon he was at work. The reductor gave a high-pitched buzz as it bit through exposed flesh, the tip digging into the corpse before it splayed open and snipped out the gene-rich knots of meat. Each progenoid was a collection of DNA metadata expressed in organic form, the raw code of the Blood Angels physiognomy rendered as flesh; similar organs were implanted in every legionary, each tailored to the particular traits and quirks of their brotherhood. They were the most precious resource of a Space Marine Legion, for each progenoid recovered from a fallen warrior would find new life in the body of the next generation of recruits. In that way, they would maintain a genetic lineage with those who came before them and those who would come after, as the organs manifested within them.

The Apothecary reverently placed Alotros’s gene-seed in a hermetic capsule, but before he could drop it into a seal-pouch at his hip, Captain Raldoron reached out and took it from him.

‘What is your name, Apothecary?’ asked the officer, forestalling any reaction.

‘Meros, sir. Of the Ninth Company.’

‘Captain Furio’s command.’ He nodded. ‘A fine warrior. A company of regard.’

‘Thank you, sir. But–’

Raldoron went on as if Meros had not spoken. ‘The men of the Ninth know how to follow orders. So I have no doubt you will follow this one.’ He fixed the young warrior with a steady glare. ‘Never speak of this moment. You and I were never here.’ He held up the capsule. ‘This does not exist. Say it.’

Meros hesitated again, then spoke. ‘You and I were never here. That does not exist.’

‘This is our liege lord’s wish.’

The other Blood Angel saluted again. ‘So ordered.’ He backed away a step as Raldoron beckoned the servitor to come forwards, making ready to gather up the corpse.

But before the machine-slave moved in to do his bidding, the First Captain removed an object from his belt pack. It was a slab of inkstone from the night deserts of Baal Primus, and with quick motions, Raldoron passed it over the dead warrior’s armour, blotting out the crimson with a layer of glistening, smoky black. The action had a strange, ritual quality to it, a finality that deadened everything. However this battle-brother had met his end, it was in a manner that would be forever lost to the Legion’s chronicles.

The captain whispered something, and Meros barely heard him.

‘Rest, brother,’ he told the fallen warrior. ‘You are in the company of death. I hope you find peace there.’

ONE

Rocks and Shoals
Silent Weapon
A Favour

Kano watched the stones fall through the dark towards him, looming larger and larger through the armourglass of the viewport. Pinnacles of rock larger than mountains wheeled and turned in the vacuum, surrounded by shaggy clouds of smaller particles that varied from the size of starship hulls to specks of dust. Tiny flakes of grit rattled off the hull of the Pugio-class boarding transport as it rumbled its way closer to their target, and close by he could see other craft of the same design moving in loose formation. Trailing behind were a squadron of Caestus assault rams, the thrusters of the winged bludgeons flaring bright yellow as they manoeuvred for terminal approach.

Their crimson hulls caught the cold and distant light of the bloated blue supergiant many light-seconds away across the vast span of the Kayvas Belt. What had once been a system of several rocky planets was now nothing but a colossal aggregation of asteroids. Some great cosmic cataclysm had shattered the planets aeons ago, and strewn their remains in the plane of an accretion disc hundreds of millions of kilometres across. Knots of gravitation around the biggest, continent-sized planetoids struggled to gather enough mass to reform, eternally failing. Kayvas was doomed to never evolve beyond rubble and debris. Its chaotic, unmappable environs made it an ideal hiding place for those too foolish or too desperate to be discouraged by unpredictable gravitic tides and constant asteroidal collisions.

The orks had made this place their refuge. Many tribes of the greenskin xenos, scattered and leaderless after the hammerblow they suffered at Ullanor, had fled to the points of the etheric compass – and many had come to rest in the Kayvas Belt, where they carved new outposts out of the drifting, mineral-rich rocks, licked their wounds and re-armed.

The aliens had already begun to put their heads above the parapet, striking out at nearby Imperial systems and newly compliant daughter colonies, and it was the duty of the Legiones Astartes to reinforce the lesson of Ullanor again. Over and over if need be, to exterminate every last one of the marauding, verminous savages.

The Alpha Legion had tracked them to their lair and petitioned Horus for the reinforcements required to prosecute their plan of annihilation, but after the war at the world called Murder and the disastrous engagement with the civilisation known as the Interex, the Luna Wolves had been reluctant to commit ships to Alpharius’s campaign.

In the end, it was the Blood Angels who agreed to assist their cousins in the XX Legion, with Sanguinius himself marshalling a sizable intervention to support the ships of the 88th Expeditionary Fleet. The mission, Alpharius said, would be five years in execution. The Angel rejected that statement and promised it would be over in one, committing vessels from every active Blood Angels expedition to the cause.

Sanguinius had been right – more or less. Just over thirteen months after the commencement of the Kayvas initiative, the orks were almost totally annihilated, but like animals backed into a corner they were fighting harder than they ever had before, and the battles came thick and fast. Kano struggled to remember a day over the past few weeks when he had not heard the skirl of alert sirens and the rumble of massive guns through the deck of the Red Tear, the Legion’s flagship battle-barge.

But if he were to be truthful, he would admit that this campaign had been unsatisfactory from the very start. Indeed, many among his brothers lacked Kano’s circumspect nature and had said so openly, and often. The game was the Alpha Legion’s, so in deference to them the Blood Angels had followed their lead. But the promise of a glorious battle became a very different kind of engagement.

The 88th Expeditionary Fleet took their warships into the Kayvas Belt and vanished from sensors, leaving the Blood Angels flotilla at the edge of the system to wait; and soon it was clear that the mission Alpharius had been so eager to secure support for was little more than picket duty.

First one at a time, then in squadrons and finally in fleets, the orks began to flee from Kayvas. Each time they bolted for open space beyond the mass shadow of the supergiant sun and asteroid belt, the Blood Angels were waiting for them. Starships and ork cruisers engaged in deadly games of cat-and-mouse that lasted for weeks on end, threading in and out of the dense dust clouds at the periphery of the system, mercilessly hunting each other. Mighty vessels clashed again and again, but months of protracted ship-to-ship engagements and naval warfare made the sons of Baal restless. They were bred for battles where they could face their foes, not ranged conflicts conducted over huge spans of empty vacuum.

The chance to fight blade-to-blade did come, eventually. The behaviour patterns of the ork crews began to change. They eschewed what little animal cunning they had and made mistakes. Instead of showing the brutish slyness they were known for, the xenos exhibited conduct that more closely resembled panic. They would take chances, running the gauntlet of the Blood Angels blockade when the odds were stacked against them. It was almost as if there were something at their backs that they feared far more than the guns of Sanguinius’s Legion.

Over and over, the orks were driven into the teeth of the Blood Angels, like rats fleeing a sinking ship. They fought with great violence, even attempting doomed tactics such as direct assaults on Legion starships or the initiation of warp engines while still deep within the gravimetric danger zone. The outer edges of the belt were littered with the corpses of countless ork ships, many of them left to smoulder like burning rags as their dying power cores bled out volatile streams of plasmatic gas.

No one knew what the Alpha Legion had done to make the orks run. Kano was adjutant to Captain Raldoron, and so often in a position to hear fragments of the information that passed though the highest levels of the Blood Angels command structure, but even he knew little. All that was certain was that the Alpha Legion had gone dark, only rising to send regular communiqués out to the blockade fleet that contained little more than a message to ‘maintain the line’. The handful of orks that were captured alive gave incomprehensible answers under interrogation that muddied the waters still further. As the fleet stood and held the barricade, patrols scanning deep into the belt picked up all manner of hectic alien transmissions, and scry-sensors showed definite evidence of ork-versus-ork battles taking place closer to the blue sun. Then, several months into the campaign, ships in the spinward quadrant detected the destruction of a massive, moon-sized planetesimal by unknown means. Sanguinius himself sent queries to the 88th and the response was that the event was ‘of no concern’.

Finally, the primarch tired of Alpharius’s evasive manner and sent a frigate in past the outer marker, in defiance of the rules of engagement the two Legions had agreed upon. When the frigate returned weeks later, the crew reported that they had come across no signs of their allies, only the wrecks of ork vessels and the bodies of dead aliens. The 88th Expeditionary Fleet comprised hundreds of warships, and yet no trace of them was sighted.

Now the tempo of the Kayvas campaign was reaching a terminal pitch. The final remnants of the ork forces were taking flight from the belt in a disordered exodus, and perishing in the flashes of lance cannons and torpedo barrages as they crossed the sentry line. At last, Alpha Legion ships were appearing at the very edge of scanning range, apparently moving in a wall to herd the enemy towards the fringes of the system.

The last great capital ship the aliens could muster lay ahead of the Pugio and the other boarding craft. It was vaguely ovoid in shape, a gargantuan fist of brown rock that had been sheathed in patchwork plates of metal, its flanks festering with craters that sported gun turrets and the maws of missile tubes. A collage of engines was bolted crudely to one broad surface of the cannibalised asteroid, blaring out columns of thrust in a vain attempt to power the great hulk up and out of the plane of the ecliptic. As they approached, Kano picked out the tell-tale vanes of Geller field generators ringing the craft, like the spiked collar of a guardian dog. Weak violet light gathered around their tips, a sure sign that the crew of the craft were preparing to erect the protective energy membrane. Once that was done, the next stage would be to commit to translation into the warp.

Whatever shadow tactic the Alpha Legion employed had worked, and now the Blood Angels were going to strike the final blow, stopping this command ship dead before it could slip from real space and flee into the immaterium.

‘Gather and prepare,’ said a voice, and Kano turned to see that Captain Raldoron had entered the compartment from the upper flight deck. ‘We will make our breach in a few minutes.’

The Pugio’s troop bay was full, a handful of Tactical and Devastator squads lined up at the shock-frames mounted on the deck, ready to lock themselves in before the adamantine prow of the craft bit into the hull of the alien ship. All the men fell silent in respect for the captain. Kano had known Raldoron for decades and he seemed to have changed little in that time, the passage of the Great Crusade granting him only a few more scars, a shade more silver in his hair. He was still the strong, hard-faced veteran Kano had ever known; anything else that had altered about him was concealed like the flesh beneath his power armour.

He made a beckoning gesture to one of the other legionaries, who opened a metal box mag-locked to the deck plates. Inside was an old, familiar sight. They called it a chalice, but that was a misnomer, as it more closely resembled a tall, narrow tumbler. It was forged out of black, anodised metal and the outer surface of the cup was a forest of tiny, shallow spikes, each with a hollow tip.

Every warrior in the compartment was in the process of removing his right gauntlet, and Kano did the same without thinking about it. Raldoron had already done so, and he took the chalice with his bare hand and clasped it firmly, allowing the razor-sharp spikes to penetrate the dense flesh of his palm and draw blood. Then the captain handed the cup to the closest battle-brother to him – a veteran sergeant named Orexis – who in turn did the same. Orexis passed the chalice to the next warrior, and he to the next, so on and so on down the line of the Blood Angels. In a few moments the cup had circled the compartment and returned to Kano. He followed suit, noting that the spikes were now wet with the blood of a dozen battle-brothers, and the cup heavier with the fluid it had taken.

Finally, Raldoron took back the chalice and replaced his gauntlet. The others did the same, the ceramite locking in a chorus of tight snapping sounds. As his troops took their places in their support racks, the First Captain walked down the line of them, dipping his index finger into the mingled blood swirling in the cup. He gave each warrior a mark, a line of red across the right pinion of the alatus cadere, the Blood Angels Legion symbol of a winged droplet of ruby vitae.

Kano hesitated to call it a ‘ritual’; that smacked of a religious act, and in the secular harmony of the Emperor’s Imperium such things were not permitted. No, it was more truthful to call it a tradition, a pre-battle convention that had been a part of the culture of the planet Baal since before the War of the Burning. Even Terran-born legionaries like Orexis, joined with their Baalite brothers after the reuniting, had embraced the custom without issue. They understood the full meaning of it.

By sharing their blood before the fight began, by every battle-brother taking a measure of the mingled vitae upon his armour, the pact between them was remade. Symbolically, the warriors affirmed their unity and the core truth that they were, now and for eternity, of the same blood. Other Legions shared an oath of moment before they committed to an engagement, swearing a vow upon a weapon; for the Blood Angels, this served the same purpose.

When it was done, they spoke the words together. ‘For Sanguinius and the Emperor.’

The moment past, Kano gathered up his combat helmet and threw one last glance at the viewport. A wall of dun-coloured stone now filled the window, and he caught a brief glimpse of his own reflection in the armourglass. A serious face the colour of dark teak looked back at him, gaunt but not sallow.

Raldoron secured himself in the shock-frame next to his adjutant and lay back, closing his eyes for a moment. Strangely, the captain seemed almost peaceful, as if he were about to drop into a slumber.

Kano donned his helmet and his world changed, the emerald lenses of his helm activating with soft trills. Icons and display cues were transmitted directly into his cortex by neural interface, symbols blinking into being as the other warriors in the command squad sealed their armour and signalled readiness.

A countdown feed relayed from the Pugio’s pilot rolled steadily towards a zero point as the boarding craft closed on the ork ship. Kano felt the deck shift beneath him as the vessel banked sharply, probably to avoid a flash of laser fire from the alien point-defence batteries.

Raldoron took control of the vox-network as the clock began to blink red. ‘Brothers. We will breach the target at the foot of what appears to be a command tower. Our primary objective is to push through to the bridge of the vessel and render its control systems inactive. Once we stop them from running, we can purge the xenos…’ Kano heard the cold smile in his voice. ‘And then perhaps at last we will be done with this makeweight endeavour.’

A rumble of gruff agreement passed among the squads, and Kano could not help but join in.

Icons changed colour as the other warriors showed their ready status. ‘Prepare to deploy,’ said the captain.

Then the armoured bow of the Pugio struck the enemy ship and Kano’s head slammed forwards and back.

He heard the sound of metal tearing.

The boarding action destroyed the ship that had carried them. The canny orks, aware that the humans might try to bring the fight to them, had reinforced the hull plates of their command ship, and this had made the penetration a far more costly experience. The armoured troop compartment was proof against much, and it survived with its warriors intact; but the rest of the Pugio’s fuselage was torn apart by the conflicting forces of the impact. Systems all through the craft’s power train malfunctioned and fused. The pilot was already dead, his gravity web having strangled him in the collision, and the cogitators that acted as failsafes were ruptured beyond operable function.

If the boarding craft had been filled with common men, they all would have died; not in the impact, as the shock-frames did their jobs, but in the aftermath as the ship shut down and vented air to space. The legionaries, sealed in their armour and immune to such minor concerns, broke free. Under Raldoron’s guidance, they forced open the petal-shaped sections of the forward hatch.

A torrent of sensations assailed them at once. Air escaping through the gaps around the makeshift seal made by the vanes of the boarding pod, shrill like the cry of a widow; the brisk and throaty bray of ork guns in the distance; the heavy midden-stench of alien foetor; the sudden shift in gravity.

Raldoron was first onto the stony deck of the ship, raising his weapon to his shoulder and gesturing for the rest of them to follow. Kano was behind him, pausing barely a moment to ensure his bolter was cocked and ready to deal death.

The sturdy Umbra Ferrox-pattern gun was decorated with honour marks and an adequate kill tally. In his earlier years of service, Kano had used a very different weapon in defence of the Legion. In a way, it still felt like a novelty for him to be relying on something as basic as a ballistic firearm, the core design of which had not greatly altered since before the age of Old Night.

Mirroring the captain’s stance, Kano took his place among the second tier of the command squad and moved out into the long, low corridor where the Pugio had breached. The mag-locks in their boots thudded as the discharge of atmosphere tried to pull them off-balance. Further down the open space, other boarding craft knifed through the hull and settled in showers of twisted debris and fat yellow sparks. Ramps dropped and more warriors in crimson armour spilled out, engaging the first of the ork guards as they scrambled around a corner, heavy belt-fed cannons in their clawed hands.

Raldoron ignored the engagement and pointed forwards. ‘Keep moving! We can’t afford to slow down and engage. We have to press on.’

Kano nodded, still advancing. They had no way of knowing how long it would take the orks on the bridge to complete their pre-jump preparations. Based on observed behaviours gleaned from Imperial records, that interval could be anything from a few minutes to several hours. Ork technology was largely a random and inelegantly constructed thing, and no two greenskin ships were alike. It was all the more reason to move with alacrity. Kano didn’t relish the idea of being trapped on board the alien vessel if it made the translation into warp-space. There would be no way of knowing when or where they would emerge… or even if they would survive the journey. Other Blood Angels units were hitting the ork ship in other places – he knew there were squads attacking the engine core and navigational blisters – but they could not rely on only one force achieving their mission objective.

The corridor branched and widened, changing from a tube of jury-rigged metal plate and rusted mesh to a huge flue that reached up several hundred metres. The aliens had turned the massive tube into an accessway by building a corkscrew ramp into the wall. It rose up in tight curves, turning in on itself, and webs of singing, flexing cable criss-crossed the interior, holding the platforms in some semblance of stability.

‘A single rousing shout and that’ll come down on our heads,’ muttered one of Orexis’s men.

‘Then keep your voices down,’ retorted Raldoron, without turning. ‘Third and fourth squad, hold this level. Second and first on me, advance by tiers.’ He surged forwards at a jog. ‘Take the pace!’

Kano broke into a run and went after his battle-brothers, automatically falling into a two-by-two overwatch formation as they sprinted up the incline. The deck beneath them swayed alarmingly as they rose, resonating with each armoured footfall, but it held steady.

Automated gun turrets were waiting for them on the fourth circuit, little more than boxes welded together out of scrap and oil drums, hoppers full of ammunition feeding clusters of growling guns. Raldoron didn’t break stride, taking out the first with a hurled krak grenade and the second with a pinpoint pistol shot through the aiming slit that fouled the works inside. The others he left to the warriors of the second squad to kill – and they did, reducing the devices to smoking piles of wreckage.

But the auto-guns had been there more as early-warning devices than a concerted attempt to stop the advance of the legionaries, and the dull chatter of their attack brought orks swarming down the suspension cables from the upper levels of the access shaft.

Kano saw them coming, momentarily surprised by the agility the greenskins displayed as they swung like great simians, hand over hand across the yawning gap. Others actually abseiled in, hanging upside down with rapid-firing weapons in their hands. All of them were roaring in their own thuggish, mindless language.

The Blood Angels fired from the hip as they continued their ascent, meeting the orks head on. Aliens wearing curved panels of body armour landed in clumps on the lip of the ramp and made their attack, shooting or slashing with great bayonet-blades attached to the blackened muzzles of their guns.

One of them slammed down right next to Kano and bellowed at him, its yellow eyes misted with a kind of empty frenzy. In that split second he registered the necklace of bones and teeth about its neck, the rotting odour of its breath, the loutish swagger of its pose.

His lip curled behind his battle helm, antipathy rising for the brutal monstrosity. The ork was thickset, easily the same mass as Kano, but it wasn’t slow. It had a twin-barrelled long gun that had been mated to a double-bladed axe, and it discharged the weapon and slashed with it all at once.

Kano’s reactions were not conscious, but instinctive. He turned into the bolter at his hip with a twist of his torso and squeezed the trigger, allowing the weapon’s powerful recoil to pull the muzzle up in a three-round semi-automatic burst. The first round clipped the ork’s leg, blasting a fist-sized divot of flesh out of the green meat of its thigh; the second and third shots hit home in its stomach and sternum. The impact blew it back over the lip of the ramp and the creature spiralled away, bouncing off cables until its fall ended messily upon the deck far below.

His target eliminated, the warrior was already racing ahead, switching his bolter to single-shot mode and raising it to his chest. As he ran, he fired rounds into every ork that still had the temerity to remain standing. The mass-reactive shells became part of the same crashing chorus spilling from the weapons of his brothers. They cut through the alien defenders without pause and continued to rise, deck by deck, towards the top of the shaft.

‘Grenades,’ called Raldoron. ‘Impact setting.’

The forward squad all mimicked the First Captain’s action, drawing a drum-shaped munition from their belts, priming it.

‘Ready. Loose!’

Half a dozen grenades looped through the air and struck the heavy armoured door sealing off the upper level.

Kano put up the blade of his gauntleted hand to shield his eye-slits from the multiple magnesium-bright flashes of the explosions. A chain of thunder-rumbles sounded and the hatch sagged back on fractured hinges, dropping to the deck with a hollow boom.

Raldoron did not need to order them forwards. The Blood Angels shifted into a double wedge formation, the first entering the wide antechamber beyond the door and taking up overwatch positions, the second moving forwards to find the next place to hold. Each holding station for the other, the two squads moved down the tunnel, swapping between leading and trailing positions.

Ahead the passage widened, large enough that it could have accommodated a pair of Rhino troop transports moving side-by-side. What might have been storage compartments and equipment bays branched off at irregular intervals, while beneath their feet and over their heads, metal gantries concealed lines of piping and cables that puffed blue sparks. The fungal, earthy stench of the xenos was thicker in here, reaching through the filters of their breather grilles.

Kano saw Orexis pause at a mass of rags in an alcove; no, not rags. It was the remains of an ork gunner. ‘There was a firefight,’ he reported. ‘Very recent.’

The legionary glanced around, and made out more heaps of dead aliens, clearly delineated into two groups on either side of the corridor. ‘They killed each other…?’ Kano wondered aloud. The differing bands of orks didn’t seem to look any different to one another at first sight, all of them bearing the same tribal glyphs crudely rendered on their armour, the same tattoos and ritual scars. He shared a look with the sergeant and wondered if the veteran was thinking the same thing as himself: was this more evidence of the Alpha Legion’s hand at work?

But then something different crowded unbidden into Kano’s mind, and he tensed automatically, resisting it by reflex even as he felt his gorge rise. ‘Orexis–!’

The sergeant’s name slipped from his mouth in a shout, just as the body of the dead ork moved, revealing another lying beneath it. A saw-toothed blade flashed as the hidden alien stabbed upwards, aiming for the flexible joint between the veteran’s thigh-plates. The knife scraped across red ceramite, but the action was lost in the din of a renewed attack.

‘Ambush!’ shouted the captain, as other orks similarly concealed beneath the bodies of their dead exploded into life. There were more in the gantries overhead, their thermal signatures lost in the heat bloom from the poorly shielded power cables; they kicked out the mesh beneath them and dropped en masse into the middle of the Blood Angels formation, firing in all directions.

Kano was closest to Orexis and he stormed towards him, battering an ork gunner that tried to block him with the butt of his boltgun. The blow was of such force that it smashed the bones of the greenskin’s skull into its brain cavity, killing it instantly.

Fire blossomed at his back and Kano half-turned to see an ork with a massive shoulder-mounted flamer weapon spewing ropes of burning, pressurised fuel about the chamber in what seemed like random motions. He fell into a forward roll and came up firing. Other shots joined his and abruptly the ork with the flamer detonated like a bomb – doubtless from some random bolt-round finding the weak spot in the fuel tank.

Orexis was busy killing the alien that had attempted to stab him, the warriors with him engaging the emerging orks; but the aftermath of the exploded flamer did not end with the orange fire billowing down the corridor, over their helmets.

Suddenly, rounds were cooking off as the flames failed to die out, instead taking hold across the fallen corpses of the dead aliens. Too late, Kano saw the spreading inferno envelop the body of an ork that had died carrying a quiver full of heavy, armour-piercing rifle grenades on its back.

A second, more powerful detonation, confined in the stone flue of the carved asteroidal rock, sounded with such power that it blasted all the combatants off their feet. The noise of it was loud enough to top out Kano’s autosenses in the split-second before the protective blocks cut in to protect the neural interface. Stone ground on stone, and great chunks of rock and metal sheared off in planes, choking the corridor. The unlucky, Space Marine and ork alike, were buried. Suddenly, Raldoron’s assault force was cut in two, the majority of the legionaries on the wrong side of the debris with the ambushers.

Sergeant Orexis finished off the last of the aliens on their side of the rubble and took a shaky step forwards, reaching up to tap his helmet. It was only then that Kano saw that the veteran had not survived the engagement without a wound. Dark arterial blood shimmered, a river of it flowing down his thigh and pooling on the deck. The fact that the vitae wasn’t clotting immediately meant that the cut had not only been deep, but also envenomed.

Kano jerked a finger at the veteran and one of his warriors came to the sergeant’s aid. ‘Captain!’ he called into his vox, looking away. ‘Status?’

Through gaps in the wall of fallen stone he could see the flash of gunfire, hear the snarl of orks in their melee. Raldoron’s voice came back across his helmet speakers in tight chugs of breath. ‘Don’t wait for us, Kano! Get to the bridge!’

He nodded; it would take several minutes to shift enough of the fallen debris to get through to where they stood, and that was time they could ill-afford to spend.

Kano turned back to Orexis. ‘Sergeant, can you run?’

‘Yes,’ spat the veteran, but then he took a heavy step and faltered, hissing in deep pain. ‘Blood damn it! No.’

Kano looked at the legionary closest to Orexis. ‘Help him.’ Then he beckoned to the other pair of Space Marines who stood nearby, two Baalites named Cador and Racine. ‘Come, we must not tarry.’

More of the scrap-iron auto-turrets were waiting for the three Blood Angels at the terminus of the corridor, a line of them jerking the snouts of their guns back and forth on clockwork armatures. Cador bore a heavy bolter that made light work of them, sending a salvo of high-calibre rounds into the units that blew them apart in balls of red flame.

Racine, armed with a standard bolter like Kano, came with him to the hatch that led into the command ship’s bridge deck, and together they hauled the door open just enough to admit a handful of blind grenades. Kano slammed the hatch shut again with the flat of his back and listened for the discharge. Then he had it open again and the three Space Marines burst into the nerve centre of the massive ork warship.

They found it abandoned.

‘Throne’s sake…’ grimaced Cador, sweeping his big gun back and forth. ‘Where are the blighted things?’

Kano advanced, finding a few ork corpses slumped on the deck plates or fallen over their clanking consoles. ‘All dead,’ he began, pulling one up by a wiry topknot on its scalp. ‘But let’s not be fooled again.’ He had his combat blade out and he stabbed the dead ork in the eye. It slid off the cutting edge without reacting. ‘Check them all, to be sure.’

Racine was already doing the grisly deed, methodically knifing each corpse, scanning for booby-traps and the like. ‘Same as out in the passage. They killed each other.’

Kano frowned, looking around the bridge compartment. The question as to why the aliens had gone on a fratricidal rampage would have to wait; even with his limited technological acumen, Kano could tell from the flickering gauges and livid lights across the control panels that the ork ship was about to discharge a great amount of power. That could only mean that the warp gate would soon be created. He took that on, realising what it meant – the other units had not been able to neutralise the reactors or engines. It was up to the three of them to stop the escape of the alien vessel.

‘We’re the only ones to make it up here?’ Racine asked, his thoughts paralleling those of the adjutant. ‘What about the other squads?’

‘Might be bogged down,’ ventured Cador. Other units deposited on the opposite side of the tower structure by their boarding craft would have been making their way to the same target point, and if the orks had left sentry turrets and set ambushes for Raldoron’s troops, it stood to reason their battle-brothers would have run across the same obstacles elsewhere on the ship. ‘We made it here first. We’ll remind them of that back on the Tear when this sorry business is all behind us.’

Kano listened absently. The bridge was a circular, arena-like space with a podium in the centre, raised high so that any ork serving as its commander would be able to look down upon those ranked below it and bellow out orders as needed. Workstations ripped from human ships and other pieces of cobbled-together technology ringed the chamber, cables snaking back and forth underfoot like the taproots of an overgrown tree; there were a number of other hatches like the one they had entered through, but all were locked shut. Finally, Kano spotted what he guessed had to be a command input, a low podium with a hololithic projection orb suspended above it. The sphere of light was filled with vectors and dots of light that resembled star clusters.

He raised his bolter. The time for a subtle, nuanced approach to the mission had long passed. If in doubt, he assured himself, destroy it.

His finger was tightening on the trigger when it happened again. The same faint, sickly sensation deep in his gullet, like a sip of soiled water; the same unwanted presence slipping over the surface of his consciousness, even as he tried to forget how to feel such things.

Kano was so fixated on trying to banish the reaction that he was looking the wrong way when a sudden flare of emerald energy burst into life at the foot of the commander’s dais. The fouled air turned metallic and greasy with the discharge of warped energies, and from nothing came an ork that appeared to be a mutant cousin to those lying dead on the gore-streaked floor plates.

It matched Kano’s height in full armour and its fanged skull was oddly misshapen. Sickly skin was drawn tight over its bones, but its sunken eyes blazed like golden embers, so bright that Kano couldn’t look directly at them. In the moment of hesitation before all hell broke loose, Kano saw the familiar phenomenon of psychic lightning dancing around the ork’s head. Little commas of light made a coruscating halo, and more motes of colour gathered at the creature’s hands, one of which held a tall copper staff.

An orkish psyker; it seemed fanciful to conceive that the xenos brutes were anywhere near the mental complexity needed to engage with such extranormal powers, but the evidence was standing there before them. Through sheer force of mind, the alien had teleported itself into the bridge chamber. Perhaps it had been nearby in another compartment, telepathically scanning for an invader; it was of no importance. All that was required was to kill it.

Cador opened up with the heavy bolter and his fusillade roared, blasting into the commander’s podium – but the ork wasn’t there any more, blurring across the bridge in an oozing flicker of warp-glow, too fast for the gunner to traverse his weapon. Racine had been caught with his bolter slung, the combat blade still in his mailed fist, and he feinted backwards, making space to go for the gun; but the ork was upon him.

A fountainhead of green lightning erupted from the tip of the xeno-psyker’s metal staff, spilling out across the deck. The cascade rolled over the bodies of its dead comrades and the corpses twitched and writhed, almost as if the charge was trying to reanimate them. The wash of energy caught Racine and he snarled in agony, shocked rigid.

Kano fired at the alien but it moved again, a blur like amber light refracted through a window streaked with rain. Then he felt it inside his head.

What mental barriers he had were out of practice and slow to erect, and it wormed into him. Suddenly his nostrils were filled with a rancid stink and he became dizzy. The ork psyker scrambled towards him, but then as quick as it had come, the mental invasion vanished as more heavy bolt shells sang through the air. Cador had his range and was bracketing the alien.

Kano spun away, shaking his head to clear the ghost of the psychic assault, and he saw the ork answer Cador’s interruption with an attack of its own. A ray of bilious yellow fire burst from the ork’s eye sockets and swept the chamber like a searchlight, charring everything that fell beneath it. The psychic beam hit the Blood Angel and he was blasted backwards, the surface of his battle armour scorched from blood-red to soot-black.

The bolter was in Kano’s hands and he pulled the trigger, unleashing a salvo of shots into the creature’s side. It hooted in pain and turned on him, the glow of its eyes dimming for a moment before blazing anew. The gun’s breech cycled open and locked, and Kano cursed inwardly; in the fog of confusion that came after the mind-strike upon him, he had lost track of the dwindling ammunition in his bolter’s clip, and now the weapon was dry.

The alien raised the copper staff and gave a sing-song grunt, like a mantra, calling upon powers from the warp. Time slowed for Kano and he suddenly knew exactly, precisely, how the ork psyker was tapping into the mad telepathic churn of the immaterium. He could see it in his mind’s eye like a string of complex equations, or the stanzas of a poem. He knew how that power worked because he had experienced it himself, channelled it through his own fingers.

And although it seemed like a lifetime ago, Kano knew with absolute certainty that he could do so again. His hands came up in a clawed fighting pose, the action trained into his marrow, and the alien saw it. The creature paused, and it knew it faced a being that understood.

But then the air was shrieking with new bolter fire and the ork came apart under the force of a dozen guns. Kano spun about to see one of the other hatches hanging open and a squad of legionaries surging through it. Leading them was a figure in armour as dark as the void, face hidden behind a glowering skull-mask helm. He aimed with a short rod, the device tipped with a winged crest. ‘No trace!’ shouted a rough, rasping voice.

Kano fell out of the line of fire and threw himself at his original objective – the command console. As he reached it he became aware of a bass rumble shaking him through his boots. The entire vessel was vibrating wildly as its power systems reached the terminal phase for translation into warp space.

The Blood Angel didn’t hesitate, and he brought down his empty boltgun on the console, smashing the hololith projector, the controls, breaking it open to reveal crystalline circuitry within and an infinitely complex mesh of cross-connecting silver wires. Like a trip-hammer, Kano rained blow after blow on the machine until there was nothing but sparkling fragments and silence from the deck beneath his feet.

After what seemed like an age, he turned away from the panel and found the warrior in black looming over him.

The words that ground out of the skull-helm’s breather grille were not what Kano had expected.

‘Do you know who I am?’ The tone was accusatory.

He stiffened, defiance rising in his manner. ‘That black armour can only signify one thing. You are a Warden of the Legion.’

The skull moved in a shallow nod. ‘Such is my burden and my honour.’

Armoured fingers rose to remove the headgear, revealing a face like a block of carved marble, cold and pale. Hard eyes that knew little pity scanned Kano and the Blood Angel felt compelled to doff his helmet also. He resisted the urge to wipe the sheen of sweat from his dark skin. The other man’s comportment was already wearing on him.

‘I am Yason Annellus. Walk with me.’ It was a command, of that there was no doubt, and after a moment Kano obeyed, but he did so hesitantly. The post of ‘Warden’ was a relatively rare position among the Legion and the ranks of the men who held the office were open to interpretation. All that Kano could be sure of was that Annellus wore the laurels of a senior veteran embossed on his pauldrons and that, if nothing else, earned him a degree of respect.

But only a degree, he reminded himself.

Kano followed Annellus back through the second open hatch and into another wide corridor. He caught the odour of orkish blood and looked back, spotting the bodies of dozens of the dead aliens. The sorry remnants of another ambush, he guessed.

Annellus rounded on him. ‘You are Mkani Kano, Baalite born of the Far Sear, legionary of the First Company.’

‘You know me?’

‘I know all of you.’

Kano frowned at the strange emphasis on the Warden’s words, and a chill moved through him as he experienced the slow rise of understanding. ‘All of us?’ he echoed, working to maintain an even tone.

Annellus placed the ornamental rod he carried in a skeletal holster at his hip. The device had a two-fold purpose: not only was it a mace-like power weapon, lethal in close combat, but it also served a ceremonial function. In the old tongue of Terra, the weapon was known as a crozius arcanum. It was the Warden’s badge of office, like the black armour, that set him eternally aside from his battle-brothers.

The Wardens were the watchmen of the Blood Angels. In some ways they served as mentors for the younger legionaries, battlefield instructors and learned veterans who shared knowledge with the rest of their kindred; but they were also charged with sustaining coherence throughout the tens of thousands of warriors that filled the ranks of the IX Legiones Astartes. That could mean anything from offering suggestions to a captain on a point of combat doctrine, to leading a ceremony of remembrance to the fallen. They were lore-keepers, counsellors, teachers. In the deep past, men who had served in similar roles in other militaries had been known as diaconus, zampol, chaplain or a dozen other names – some political, some religious, some secular. They existed outside the chain of command but still within its ranks, maintaining that most Imperial of ideals throughout the Legion; unity.

And with that role came a sense of judgement.

‘How long has it been since the great conclave of Emperor and his sons on Nikaea?’ Annellus asked, and Kano knew his suspicions were correct.

‘Long enough,’ he replied, schooling his features. ‘I was not there to see the Angel and his brothers come before their father–’

‘But you know full well what was wrought in that place.’ It was not a question.

Kano’s patience thinned. ‘Don’t be obtuse, Warden. Of course I know. The decree absolute. The Edict of Nikaea.’

‘A command from the Emperor of Mankind himself,’ Annellus went on, his words taking on a lecturing tone. ‘A warning about the dark potential of the powers of the warp.’ The Warden turned back to face him. ‘A command Sanguinius echoed, to forbid the use of preternatural powers within the Legiones Astartes. A command the Blood Angels accepted without question.’

He said nothing, waiting for the indictment to surface. Despite his role as Captain Raldoron’s adjutant, in the strictest sense Kano was of no greater rank than that of a veteran Space Marine sharing the same number of duty studs in his brow. He was a warrior of the line, one among one hundred and twenty thousand such souls; but before the decision at Nikaea, Kano had been so much more.

Then he had been Librarius Minoris Kano, sanctioned psyker and warrior of the mind. Not an unregulated witchkin of the backwater worlds, but a finely-honed weapon in service to the Blood Angels and the Imperium. He had been proud to focus the turmoil of the warp’s great energies against his Legion’s enemies. Kano’s honour roll included many battles where he had helped turn the tide for his primarch.

But after Nikaea, all that had changed. He remembered the day as clearly as if it had happened only hours ago. Raldoron coming to him with word from Sanguinius, the captain standing there with another figure in black armour at his heel, arms outstretched to take Kano’s crystalline psychic hood as he removed it from the gorget of his battle plate.

Raldoron’s hand upon his shoulder. His words. ‘This does not lessen you, Kano, none of you. It is only a single facet of your arsenal that has been taken away. Like thousands of your brothers, you are still the greatest soldiers that mankind has ever mustered. And for now, that will be enough.’

‘The Emperor did not make his decision lightly, Kano,’ Annellus was saying. ‘But after the actions of Magnus the Red and his Thousand Sons, there was little choice. I know you understand that.’

Still Kano kept his silence. It would be anathema for him to ever consider turning against the will of the Emperor and Sanguinius, but he could not deny that a tiny kernel of doubt had lodged in his spirit on that day. Until the passing of the edict, there had never been a moment when Kano had felt distrusted by his battle-brothers. But now he wondered if that had only been naïveté on his part. There were always those who looked unkindly upon the powers of the mind and saw only the hazards that they encompassed. The great psyker-primarch Magnus had brought all that to a head with his reckless exploration into the deeper, darker places of the warp, drawing his father’s great displeasure and this draconian response.

Kano thought of his abilities as alike to a boltgun or a sword; a dangerous thing in the hands of fools and the undisciplined, but a fine weapon when wielded by one who had mastery of it. Perhaps, somewhere in the secret and unspoken places of his heart, he almost resented being told he was not capable of controlling his abilities. He dismissed the thought with a frown, watching Annellus and waiting.

‘Our Imperium is a place of united resolve and collaboration,’ the Warden insisted. ‘We will reach utopia under the Emperor’s guidance at the end of the Great Crusade, each human playing their part in the whole just as we serve the Legion and the Angel. But for that to be so, no one person can defy the greater will.’ He came closer. ‘Those who believe that the collective’s conventions do not apply to them, even if they are a being as great as Magnus the Red, are sorely mistaken. We all march together, Kano. We all must play our part.’

He held his silence no longer. ‘I have never done otherwise. I am a dutiful son of Sanguinius. Are you suggesting that is not so, Warden? I would prefer directness rather than a lecture more suited to a neophyte recruit.’

Annellus folded his ceramite-plated arms. ‘You have very good instincts, Kano.’ The Warden made the word sound somehow immoral. ‘It has been brought to my attention. And then I found myself arriving on the bridge of this alien monstrosity to see you engaged in battle with a xenos mind-witch. An interesting coincidence.’

‘Your help was appreciated in dispatching the ork.’

The other Blood Angel kept talking. ‘Your gun was empty, yes? Tell me, if I had not arrived with the other squad, how were you going to fight it?’ He gestured at Kano, mimicking his earlier attack pose. ‘I saw you raise your hands.’

‘With tooth and nail, if that is what I was left with.’

‘Is that all?’

Kano’s jaw set. ‘With all due respect,’ he began, his tone making it abundantly clear he meant none, ‘if you have an accusation to voice, then speak it. I’m in no mood for games.’

Annellus’s pale face darkened. ‘I don’t accuse,’ he snapped. ‘I uphold the will of the Legion!’

‘As do I!’ Kano shot back, his ire building. ‘And I do so by putting my life in harm’s way for Sanguinius and the Emperor, not by second-guessing the intentions of my brothers!’

The force of his words gave the Warden pause; when he spoke again, Annellus’s annoyance was burning cold. ‘I have only your best interests in mind.’

Kano knew he should turn away and end this conversation where it lay, but he found that he could not. ‘I don’t think you understand the interests of men, Warden. Our great Imperium? It is a collection of individuals, of different people coming together to build something incredible. And each of them has a different heart and soul, different wants and needs. I think perhaps you have spent too long looking at the great tower, and not the stones that form it.’ The last he said in a deliberate attempt to echo Annellus’s earlier hectoring manner, before finally turning to return to the bridge compartment.

‘The individual who does not conform risks censure,’ said the Warden, calling after him. ‘That is fact, whatever you may want or need, whatever your heart and your soul tell you.’

What little remained of Kano’s temper snapped and he spun back, raising his hand, jabbing an angry finger. ‘You–’

‘Adjutant!’ The shout came from behind him, hard and loud like the flat bang of a bolter discharge. Captain Raldoron strode through the open hatch and approached the two of them, his eyes narrowed. ‘Report!’

‘Kano was just explaining something to me–’ began Annellus, but the First Captain silenced him with a look.

‘I wasn’t addressing you, Warden,’ he snapped. ‘Whatever you were distracting my legionary with, you’re finished for now.’

Those words made it clear that Raldoron had heard some, if not all of their conversation. Kano did not dwell on that, and made his report. He explained quickly about the events of the ork psyker’s assault, and the destruction of the control unit. The captain listened stoically, offering no comment, and only when Kano was done did he speak again.

‘Regroup with the wounded men, fall back to the boarding craft. We have orders to deploy thermal charges aboard this hulk and obliterate it.’

‘And the other ork ships?’ said Annellus.

‘There are no other ork ships left,’ Raldoron told him, with a grimace. ‘Alpharius has finally communicated with our primarch. The Alpha Legion state they have fully exterminated the alien infestation in the Kayvas Belt, and are grateful to the Blood Angels for their co-operation. This blockade is over, and the death of this monolithic wreck will mark the end of it.’ He reached for his helmet, to raise it up and settle it over his head. ‘The Angel commands us to return to our warships and make ready for our next mission.’

‘Is there any hint as to where?’ Kano asked, his crossed words with Annellus forgotten for the moment.

Raldoron’s helm snapped into place. ‘A place where we can fight a proper war, I hope.’

On every deck of the warship Andronius, the Emperor’s Children prepared to make war. Under the direct authority of Fulgrim’s assigned representative, the Lord Commander Eidolon, the warriors of the III Legiones Astartes made ready their blades and their armour. Their ranks massed for the engagement to come; ahead lay the Isstvan system and the objective of the 63rd Expeditionary Fleet. Led by the Warmaster Horus Lupercal, the combined forces of legionaries from the Sons of Horus, the Death Guard, World Eaters and the Emperor’s Children were gathering to prosecute the dissident worlds of Isstvan.

That was one truth; another lurked below, swimming in shadows and conspiracy, but it would not be revealed for some time.

For now neither matter, of the coming battle or the larger plans of the Warmaster, impinged on the thoughts of the Apothecary Fabius. While others of his Legion would prepare themselves for the fight in their own ways – in the practice cages, by meditating or engaging in the ephemeral arts – he found peace of mind here, in his laboratorium.

The chamber was sparsely lit but not gloomy with it. The illumination cast by the cogitator screens and bio-capsules ranged around the compartment gave it a cool cerulean hue that Fabius found calming. Here he could work on the puzzles of flesh and genome that so fascinated him without fear of interruption, or the questions of the less inquisitive and more conservative of his brethren.

Others might have been irritated by the means and method open to him, to be forced to work here in this secret place, out of sight as if his experiments were something aberrant and wrong. But he knew what men of limited understanding would say if confronted by his endeavours. Sometimes it was necessary for genius to toil in the shadows, and if it took a thousand years or more for Fabius’s artistry to be acknowledged, then so be it. He was already enhancing himself to ensure he would live that long, and more.

The Apothecary paused and admired his work. A delicate patch of human flesh, carefully excised from a living donor, modified and altered using gene-engineering methods to more closely resemble the epidermis of an armoured serpent. Given time, this process might be transferable to a subject outside the laboratory environment, toughening their skin beyond even the fortitude bred into the original organic template of the Space Marines.

Fabius folded back the micro-optical lenses of the headset he wore and muttered a new log entry into the vox-thief holding the data for this experiment.

When he looked up, he was no longer alone. There, out of the glow of the screens, half-hidden in the shadows cast by the stasis pods along the far wall, stood a figure in power armour.

‘Lord Commander?’ Fabius’s first assumption was that it would be Eidolon.

‘No,’ came a voice. ‘Your commander is busy marshalling his forces and polishing his armour.’

Fabius put down the beam-scalpel in his hand and stood straight, alarm rushing through him. The laboratorium was deliberately secluded, a secret facility concealed beneath the great vestibule of the Andronius’s central apothecarion. Access was only granted to a select few, by means of a concealed trapdoor hidden in the vestibule’s ornamental mosaic.

‘Identify yourself,’ he demanded.

‘Do not be troubled, Fabius. The secrets of the Emperor’s Children have always been safe with me.’ The figure came slowly into the light, palms open in a gesture of sincerity, and the Apothecary immediately recognised the granite-grey armour of the Word Bearers Legion.

‘Erebus.’ At once he felt a conflict within him, an easement of concern at being discovered mingled with the uncertainty of the so-called First Chaplain’s insouciant approach. ‘How did you get in here?’

The Word Bearer nodded towards the spiral staircase leading back up to the vestibule. ‘I did knock. Perhaps you didn’t hear me?’ He kept walking, eyeing the contents of chemical baths as he passed them, and the organ matter arranged carefully on Fabius’s work station. ‘You did seem very engrossed.’

‘Who gave you permission to enter?’ he demanded.

‘Does that matter?’ Erebus halted in front of a series of tall stasis pods, each of them sealed behind plasteel shutters. ‘It’s true what I was told. The work you are doing here is quite incredible. Few men would have the courage to tamper with the Emperor’s great design.’

‘I do not tamper,’ Fabius retorted. ‘I enhance. I improve.’ He frowned; the Word Bearer was attempting to deflect him. ‘You should not be here. This is Legion business.’

Erebus shook his head. ‘Come, Fabius, don’t limit yourself. Your work has meaning far beyond the bounds of the Emperor’s Children, you must admit. Perhaps you haven’t dared to truly consider the full ramifications of that, but you know it to be true.’ When he didn’t answer, the Chaplain went on. ‘I know there are some who would consider your… unsanctioned research distasteful, but not I.’

Slowly, Fabius found himself coming around to the question that Erebus was waiting for him to ask. ‘What do you want?’

That earned him a thin smile. ‘Only a favour.’

Fabius grimaced, wondering what scope – and what cost – any such favour would encompass. ‘Why would I wish to assist you?’

Erebus’s false smile stiffened. ‘Because if you do, I would be in your debt. And I assure you, Apothecary, it would be better for you to have my obligation at hand, rather than my enmity.’ He held the silence for a moment. ‘I would count you as a friend among the Emperor’s Children, just as I have other friends among other Legions.’

‘Other friends,’ Fabius echoed.

‘Yes,’ Erebus said with a nod. ‘We are on the cusp of great change. Old rules and structures torn down, swept away. In the aftermath, the bonds between men of vision will be of great importance.’ The Word Bearer walked to one of the shuttered capsules and tapped it. ‘This is what I want. Something from your collection.’

He pulled the capsule’s lever, and the slats folded back to reveal the body of a legionary inside, floating in a thick, oleaginous fluid.

The warrior seemed dead at first glance. Pallid and corpse-grey, his naked body was a ragged mess of cuts and contusions. Down his right side, chunks of flesh had been ripped away with animal brutality; pieces of him torn out along his ribcage, hip and upper thigh. His right arm ended just below the elbow in rags of sinew and skin. More savage gouges were visible across his neck and sternum.

The warrior’s face was hidden from view behind a monitor mask clamped over his nostrils and lips like a suffocating hand, and unkempt blond hair formed a rough halo around his head. He bore service studs in his brow and several battle-tattoos across his chest and shoulders. Most prominent was the Legion sigil of a crimson blood drop borne on wings of white.

Erebus studied the Blood Angel in the tank with dispassion. ‘This was done on the planet called Murder,’ he pronounced. ‘I recognise the work of the megarachnid.’ He turned back to face Fabius. ‘Tell me, how did you manage to get him off the surface without alerting his Legion?’ When the Apothecary didn’t answer, he smiled again. ‘It doesn’t matter. The Blood Angels must believe him dead, or else they would not have stopped looking.’

The warrior was alive, of course. Not in the sense that Fabius and Erebus were alive, but buried deep in a comatose state that resembled the quietus of the grave. So severe had been the Blood Angel’s injuries that his body shut itself down, the bio-implants within him trying desperately to heal the damage.

‘Have you taken all you wanted from him?’ Erebus asked, without weight.

Fabius coloured. ‘I harvested what little was left of his gene-seed, but the majority was already destroyed. I have DNA and bio-templates.’

‘And yet you still let him live.’ The Chaplain studied the Apothecary. ‘Why? The stasis container holds him in a non-state, unable to either fully heal or succumb to his wounds. Some might consider that torture.’

It was Fabius’s turn to give a cold reply. ‘I never dispose of anything that might come in useful.’

‘And your wisdom has been proven right. I will take this one, and you will have my gratitude.’ He turned to summon a silent auto-servitor from a holding pen across the chamber, but Fabius interrupted him.

‘Why do you want this half-corpse? What use is it to you?’

‘That’s not your concern.’

‘Suppose I make it my concern.’ The Apothecary casually laid his hand upon a medicae needler resting on his work station. Employed as a weapon at close range, the device could be as deadly as an eldar shuriken gun.

Erebus’s tone did not change, and that made the threat that followed all the more chilling. ‘Then the full scope of what you are doing here would come to light. Not just the genetic modifications, the splicing of Emperor’s Children gene-code with that of xenos strains and other Legions… But also your systematic and clandestine seizure of injured warriors from the battlefields of the Great Crusade, for your own experimentation.’ He nodded at the other shuttered capsules. ‘Angron, Mortarion, even the Warmaster… Do you think they would overlook your abduction of their legionaries?’

Fabius sneered. ‘Take what you want and get out.’

‘Many thanks,’ Erebus replied, as the blind servitor detached the capsule and mounted it on a wheeled transport pallet. ‘And I promise that this gift you give me will help bring another Legion to the Warmaster’s banner.’ He smiled again. ‘At least, that is one option.’

TWO

Gathered in Question
Acolyte
The Face in the Smoke

Within and without, the Red Tear was a shipwright’s work of art. The vessel carried the flag of the Blood Angels whenever the primarch left the Legion home world, and like Sanguinius himself, his craft was a sight to behold.

Viewed from the bow, the battle-barge resembled an arrowhead ten kilometres from stem to stern, lined in bright copper, bronze and crimson steel. The maws of nova cannon, mega-lasers, mass-drivers and torpedo hives encrusted the forward quarter, presenting an arsenal comparable to that of a whole fleet of smaller vessels. Acres of towers ranged away down the length of the craft, extending out from the dorsal and ventral hulls. In the fashion of Imperial starships, modelled on the deck-by-deck design ethic laid down for the Red Tear’s ancient, ocean-going ancestors, a massive citadel rose from the aft quarter. This huge conning tower resembled a gigantic fortress, an outer keep of soaring adamantium walls and glassaic windows forming the base and a wide cylindrical donjon rising higher still. At its apex, among the saw-tooth battlements and point-defence batteries, a massive transparent dome looked out into the void like an unblinking eye.

Similarly, beneath the central plane of the main hull, a blade-like keel dropped away, thinning to a wicked point. Here were many of the battle-barge’s secondary cannons and the hangars for the warship’s auxiliary craft. Cavernous docking bays, large enough to house and maintain a brace of escort frigates, ran the width of the vertical structure.

But it was from above that the true martial glory of the Red Tear was revealed. If an observer could place themselves at a point high up over the centre of the warship’s hull, looking down they would see that the ship gave iron reality to its name. The battle-barge was built around the form of a great ruby teardrop, and from its port and starboard sides, winglets bearing engine clusters and troop bays reached outwards, mimicking the design of the Legion sigil of the Blood Angels. Against the black and infinite dark, the Red Tear was a sculpture that showed the proud defiance of humankind. It was at once monument, weapon and fortress of the sons of Sanguinius – and a worthy chariot for a primarch.

Other vessels, ranging in tonnage from gunboats to grand cruisers, moved in formation with their command ship. Around them, Hawkwing and Raven interceptors maintained a wide security cordon about the flotilla. There was a new energy in the fleet, a reinvigorated sense of purpose. After month upon month of standing post in a relatively unchallenging campaign, to a man the Blood Angels were eager to quit this sector of space and rejoin the fuller glories of the Great Crusade.

Word spread fast through the ships of the IX Legion, carried by the human crews and Legion serfs, even the contingent of civilian remembrancers assigned to document the fleet’s mission. Rumours were voiced, whispered in hushed tones over mid-meal or spoken out of earshot of senior officers. Even the legionaries themselves were not immune to the speculation that was rife. The combined Red Tear fleet was on the move, courses already being prepared to make space along the line of a distant warp beacon; out in the deeps, the eternal lighthouse of Terra’s Astronomican had become vague and hazy in recent weeks, requiring the use of the secondary waypoint markers commonly used by Imperial Navigators as points of rendezvous.

The question of their mission was on everyone’s lips.

Beneath the solar dome at the top of the great tower was a magnificent reception hall. Pillars of red marble mined from the fiery lands of Baal’s equatorial regions ranged from floor to ceiling, holding up veils of silk that were finely worked with intricate detail. The hanging banners were battle records, showing every engagement the Blood Angels had fought, from the final skirmishes on Terra during the twilight of the Unification Wars, through two centuries of the Great Crusade to the present day.

As he entered the chamber, Captain Raldoron searched the hangings and found the newest threading of words: Kayvas Belt. He smiled grimly. The servitors had wasted no time in committing the name of the mission to the cloth, almost as if they were just as impatient as he was to put it to rest, and move on to greater glories.

He skirted the pillars, crossing over the outer edge of the tiled floor. He glanced down and saw the familiar shapes of Terra and Baal, a relief of the two planets laid one atop the other. For now, Baal was in the ascendant, the photonic tiles showing the eastern hemisphere of his home world as if lit by a warm sun. The Chalice Mountains and the Great Sear passed beneath his boots as he walked, and in a small way he felt a sense of reconnection with his place of birth. Terra peered out over the shoulder of Baal, its scarred and city-bound surface visible as if it were an eclipsed moon. The mosaic seemed fixed and static, but that was an illusion. The closer the Red Tear came to Terra across the galactic plane, the more the planet would wax while Baal waned, and vice-versa. For now, they were nearer home, and that sat well with Raldoron.

In the centre of the chamber were the rest of the captains from the companies of the Three Hundred present in the fleet. Each of them met his gaze as he passed, greeting him with a respectful jut of the chin or a brisk salute. He returned each with the same nod. Raldoron was a veteran captain just as they were, but he was commander of the First, and his promotion to Chapter Master placed him in a special class of seniority that few other warriors of the Legion could claim. He wore the honour with pride and humility, as was the Blood Angels way, but the captain knew it forever set him apart from his fellows.

Perhaps that was just as well; Raldoron had never been an outgoing, gregarious spirit. He saw himself as a simple soul, a warrior with a calling to fight for his primarch and his Emperor. What was there to say or to doubt about that?

He slowed as he spotted three of his battle-brothers engaged in a spirited discussion, catching the edges of their conversation.

Captain Nakir, the commander of the 24th, was talking to Furio of the Ninth. The pair of them were stark contrasts, and both distant in their own ways from the typical model of a Blood Angel. Nakir was of technomad stock, his shoulder-length hair black and plaited, his swarthy face forever caught between a killer’s smile and a zealot’s grimace; meanwhile, Furio stood a little taller and wider than the other captain. Some joked that he would be better suited to wear the Cataphractii armour of the Terminator squads instead of the standard warplate that seemed hard-pressed to encompass his stature. Furio’s hairless head was pale, showing his origins as an iceborn from Baal’s northern polar zone.

Nakir and Furio were addressing a third officer, and even from the back Raldoron knew immediately that it was Amit, captain of the Fifth. Like Nakir and his comrade, Raldoron’s power armour was in good order and dressed in a manner befitting the summit that was about to take place. The First Captain had paused before ascending to the dome in order to gather up his power sword and ceremonial scabbard for such occasions. It seemed fitting; whatever the outcome, a campaign had just ended and that was cause for observance and adherence to protocol. They were not meeting in some rubble-strewn bunker in the midst of an all-out war; this was on their terms, in their domain.

Amit, however, did not consider that important. His armour was the same duty gear he had worn throughout the Kayvas conflict, the artificer-wrought superiority of it still visible, but layered with impact marks, blade scratches and other signifiers of battle-worn hardware. It mirrored the martial bluntness of the warrior who wore it.

‘Could you not have serviced your armour before arriving, brother?’ Nakir was asking.

Amit shrugged. His perpetual grimace peered through his sandy beard and close-cropped hair. ‘I came from the practice cages. Before that I was shooting orks off the hull of a frigate. I did not have the time.’ The last he said with sly relish.

‘You know what a polish cloth looks like, don’t you?’ Furio said, raising an eyebrow. ‘I could show you.’

The captain of the Fifth frowned and leaned in to look at Furio’s armour, feigning a look of confusion. ‘How strange…’ He pointed at the shining red ceramite cladding the other legionary. ‘For a moment there, your mail? I could have sworn the colours of it were purple and gold, not crimson.’

Nakir laughed. ‘As hard as he tries, Furio will never be as pretty as one of Fulgrim’s dandies.’

Furio snorted. ‘I agree that our primarch did not grant me the totality of his noble aspect, but he did reward me with the depth of his battle acumen.’ He looked up as Raldoron came closer. ‘And I am sure the First Captain will assert this truth with me; the plain fact is that the Blood Angels are the most handsome of the Legiones Astartes.’

‘Polished armour or not,’ added Amit, with a rare, brief smile.

‘I’m no judge of such things,’ Raldoron replied. ‘I’m just a simple soldier.’

Nakir cocked his head. ‘We are none of us simple soldiers, captain.’

‘Perhaps not,’ Raldoron allowed.

He turned to find Amit watching him. Of all the Legion captains, Amit’s reputation – and that of his company – was the most bloodthirsty. More than once, the Fifth had been called to censure for their zeal in pursuing enemy forces. It was not for nothing that the outspoken officer had earned the nickname ‘the Flesh Tearer’, and rather than deny the epithet, he had made it his own. The other officer had a predatory way about him, a sense of aggression barely held in check that Raldoron had seen unleashed in full many times on the field of battle. ‘Do you know?’ he said.

The First Captain did not need to ask what Amit meant. It was the question on all their minds. Where are we going next? Raldoron frowned. ‘I have not been told. That’s why we are here, so we may all learn that answer at once.’

‘The primarch is on his way,’ said Furio. ‘I saw Guard Sergeant Zuriel heading to his chambers to accompany him.’

‘If it was up to the Sanguinary Guard, the Angel would never be allowed to leave his quarters.’ Nakir snorted. ‘Azkaellon walks as if that gold armour of his makes him the better of the rest of us.’

Raldoron did not disagree with the sentiment, but it was not seemly to allow even the smallest seed of divisiveness to take root here. He gave Nakir a hard look. ‘Azkaellon, Zuriel and the others all have their duties to perform, just as we do. They deserve our respect.’

‘I say only what I see,’ Nakir replied, after a moment.

‘Not here,’ Raldoron told him. ‘Not today. We’ll have no cap-badge rivalry in our ranks.’

‘I have heard rumours about our new destination,’ Furio said, interceding to bring the conversation back to the matter at hand. ‘It is said that the Warmaster is planning a major new offensive several sectors distant.’

‘And you know this how?’ asked Amit, doubt clear in his tone.

‘The astropathic choirs,’ explained Furio. ‘Their communications are sometimes imprecise. Other signals bleed in. Data on other expeditionary fleets becomes known.’

Raldoron said nothing. He too had heard the same hearsay, spoken by crewmen when they believed that he was out of earshot. Ships from several Legions, by some reports as many as six, were being called to Horus’s side – and with them, their primarchs. The First Captain tried to imagine what kind of enemy would require that scale of task force. Two or three of the Emperor’s sons fighting side by side was a rarity. More meant a threat of great scale in the offing.

He glanced at the representation of the planets beneath his feet. ‘Perhaps it is not a matter of war at all. Perhaps we are being gathered for a different reason. To follow the Emperor’s path back to Terra.’

‘We are not going to the Sol system, captain.’ A woman’s voice, pitched and clear like the ring of fine crystal, came to his ears. Raldoron turned and gave a small bow as the Red Tear’s shipmistress came towards them. Her retinue – a pair of Imperial Army officers and a female remembrancer carrying a small picter – walked warily behind her, trying not to appear cowed by the numbers of hulking figures surrounding them.

For her part, Admiral Athene DuCade appeared unconcerned by the warrior host in the chamber. She was tiny in comparison to Raldoron, but he had once heard a veteran describe her as ‘a maid cast out of iron’. Any legionary could have gathered her up in his arms and broken her in two like a bundle of dry twigs, but she radiated a majesty that the First Captain had only encountered on rare occasions. Nothing, from the largest enemy battle force to the most brutal engagement, seemed to faze the woman. Behind cool, blue eyes there was a tactician’s intellect that he found challenging. When Admiral DuCade spoke, even the Angel would listen – and that alone granted her a rare level of respect not often shown to those outside the Legion. Sanguinius had personally selected her to command his flagship, and she had done so as long as Raldoron had been a legionary.

He studied her lined, poised face. It was difficult for him to estimate her age; she seemed never to alter, decade after decade, kept timeless by juvenat treatments. Raldoron had no image of his birth-mother, growing up an orphan after his family had perished in a razor-storm, but he wondered if she would have looked like DuCade.

‘Thank you for joining us, admiral,’ said Nakir. ‘How goes the fleet?’

‘Well, captain,’ she replied. ‘We are at optimal fighting strength. The campaign’s casualties have been addressed. I think we all agree that we are ready to move on to the next deployment.’

‘And not so much as a thank you from the Alpha Legion,’ Furio said mildly. ‘It’s like they never needed us at all…’

‘If not Terra, then where?’ Amit broke in, unwilling to see the subject of the conversation drift. ‘Will we join the Ignis task force at Nartaba?’

The admiral glanced at the other Blood Angel. ‘No. It is my understanding that the mission against the eldar reavers in the Nartaba system is at an end. The battleship Ignis and her flotilla will come to us. A rendezvous point is already being prepared.’

‘And then?’ said Nakir.

DuCade gave a wan smile. ‘Your guess is as good as mine, captain. The primarch has not yet chosen to share his plans beyond that point with me.’ She was going to say more, but then one of the men at her side stiffened.

The admiral’s aide had an augmetic implant on the right side of his face that stretched from the temple down to the jaw line, a device of brass and polished silver. Raldoron recognised the form of a wireless vox-mechanism within it, and his enhanced hearing picked up a faint whine from the implant – the vibration of an echo-communiqué transmitted into the officer’s mastoid by bone induction.

‘Major?’ DuCade saw the reaction and gave her man a level look.

‘A contact, ma’am,’ said the aide, looking blankly into the middle distance as he repeated what he was hearing. ‘Our scout ships at the head of the fleet report a single Imperial vessel of cruiser tonnage on an intercept vector. It was likely waiting for us beyond the mass shadow of the belt, at the Mandeville point.’

‘Such poor timing…’ muttered Nakir.

‘What pennants?’ she demanded. ‘Name and squadron?’

‘Interrogation signals show it is the Dark Page, in service with the XVII Legiones Astartes.’

Amit’s brow furrowed. ‘Lorgar’s Word Bearers? Who thought to invite them?’

Raldoron was already tapping the vox-bead in the neck-ring of his armour, switching to the intra-fleet communications frequency as the major spoke again.

‘We are now receiving a machine-call signal from the vessel. Code protocols concur.’

The First Captain listened in on the message and his expression grew grave. ‘They say they have come to speak to the Angel. They bring an emissary from the Warmaster.’

The Sanguinary Guard were waiting for Raldoron when he reached the primarch’s chambers. Zuriel, Guard Sergeant and second-in-command of the detachment, was giving orders to his battle-brother Lohgos.

‘You and Halkryn stand to sunward,’ he told the other Guardian. ‘Mendrion and I will cover the master at shadowline.’

Lohgos saluted with his fist to his chest, the gauntlet-mounted bolter affixed there clanking against his armour. He gave Raldoron a noncommittal glance and moved off.

Zuriel stepped into his path. ‘The matter is in hand, First Captain.’

‘No doubt,’ Raldoron replied. ‘But as Chapter Master, I should hear this Word Bearer’s utterances. I have a hundred battle captains who will need to know what the Warmaster’s orders are. Better they hear it from me.’

The Guard Sergeant nodded. ‘As you wish. The party from the Dark Page have docked in the secondary bay. They’ll be here shortly.’

The ornate doors of the primarch’s quarters opened and Raldoron stepped through, his eyes falling on Sanguinius before anything else.

His liege lord wore his duty armour, gold and white platinum with a bronze mail cloak that lay draped over his folded wings. It was not as ornate as the high artificer armour he would wear into combat, but still it seemed barely able to contain the full radiance of the primarch. Raldoron had once heard one of the remembrancers say that Sanguinius shone like a star carved into the shape of a man, and he could not fault that description.

The primarch saw the First Captain and nodded briefly, beckoning him. ‘Ral, good. You’ve saved me the trouble of summoning you.’ He crossed the chamber’s atrium, passing under the pools of soft light cast from floating lume-globes overhead. The glow spilled off his elaborate armour, illuminating paintings and other artworks arrayed across the walls with splashes of colour.

Raldoron and Zuriel dropped to one knee on the polished stone floor and bowed their heads. ‘Your will, my lord?’ said the captain.

The Angel gestured for them to stand, and as Zuriel and the other gold-armoured bodyguards took up their assigned positions, the captain came a few steps closer. Sanguinius was much taller than him, but he did not tower over the officer, not in a way that made him feel he was inferior. The Lord of the Blood Angels seemed able to stand on level ground with his sons, even though the reality was otherwise. ‘I dreamed of you, my friend,’ said Sanguinius. ‘Some nights ago, while I meditated on our crusade.’

‘I… am honoured,’ said Raldoron, meaning every word. The ways of the Emperor’s sons were complex and often far beyond the understanding of others – even men raised to transhuman power like those of the Legions – and it was known that some of them possessed abilities that appeared to defy logic. There were many stories: that Mortarion of the Death Guard was incapable of feeling pain, that Corax could cloud the minds of men with but a thought or that the Khan could talk to storms… These were a strange intertwining of living myth and cold truth, and when one was speaking of beings like the primarchs it was impossible to say where fact ended and fiction began. The Angel had the sight, so it was said, and nothing that Raldoron had ever seen or heard in his years as a legionary had ever made him doubt it. On rare occasions, at times of the greatest import, Sanguinius would intervene in the operations of the Legion, apparently without reason, but always with great effect. Lives would be saved, defeat avoided, traps found. And it was recorded that he would sometimes give a boon to a warrior – a glimpse of their own destiny revealed to him through the complex weave of fate.

As a young scout, Raldoron had heard this story from the old Master of Neophytes and wondered what such a thing would mean. Now, more than a century later, he was learning the answer.

Sanguinius nodded. ‘I saw you on Baal. You were in the caverns beneath the fortress-monastery. You were…’

For the briefest of instants, the primarch’s face clouded, but then the moment was gone and Raldoron wondered if he had imagined it. ‘You were filled with pride.’

The captain was at a loss for the right words. Finally, he found an answer. ‘I have always been proud to be a son of Sanguinius, lord.’

‘And I am pleased to count you among my Legion.’ The primarch gave him an easy grin. ‘You are my strong right arm, Ral.’

‘They come!’ Zuriel called out, forestalling any more conversation.

In the middle of the antechamber, a square of flagstones dropped into a recess and then came apart, each retracting away into the floor space below like the pieces of a tessellate puzzle. From the open shaft revealed beneath a platform rose up, floating on a heat-haze ripple of anti-grav force. The elevator drew level with the deck and halted; standing upon it were four Blood Angels wearing the gold heraldry of the Sanguinary Guard, at parade-ground attention with their bolters held at arms. As one, they went to their knees and repeated the same bow Raldoron had given moments before.

Three figures stood in the centre of the platform, and they too gave Sanguinius his due deference. Two of them were Space Marines, in dark armour heavily detailed with lines of text carved into the ceramite sheath, the sigil of a burning book upon their pauldrons. The Word Bearers went unhooded, and they bowed low from the waist. Both men had lengthy dreadlocks that tumbled down over their gorgets, the hair ringed with devotional clasps and twists of gold wire.

The last of the new arrivals was an unnaturally tall female clad from head to foot in robes of a strange, sheer material the colour of gunmetal. Raldoron’s first thought was that she might have been a descendant from one of the null-gee colonies where humans grew willowy and weak of bone in the microgravity; but such beings would be confined to support frames on board any ship with a Terran-normal environment. The sketch of her face was visible through the dark muslin-like cloth, as were the curves of her spindly body, her bony shoulders and small breasts. Raldoron raised an eyebrow as he realised that beneath the shapeless robes she wore nothing else.

One of the Word Bearers, a white-haired veteran wearing a banner of parchment over his arm like a half-cloak, took a step forwards. ‘Honoured Sanguinius,’ he began, his voice rough. ‘I am Chaplain Tanus Kreed, ranked Acolyte of Lorgar and commander of the Dark Page.’ He gestured to the warrior at his side. ‘My second, Captain Uan Harox.’

Harox bobbed his head. The captain’s armour also sported long strips of oath-paper falling from bright scarlet seals on his chest plate. His hair was rust-red and Raldoron saw that he had no organic eyes; instead a single mechanical vision slit had been surgically mounted in his skull.

‘The woman is Mamzel Corocoro Sahzë of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica.’

‘An astropath?’ said Sanguinius.

She performed a complex, balletic curtsey. ‘Glory to you and your Legion, Great Angel.’ Her voice had a peculiar, musical quality to it.

‘I welcome my brother’s cohorts to the Red Tear,’ said the primarch, dismissing the honour guards with a glance. ‘But I must say, you were not expected. A day later and you would have found us gone. My fleet is in the midst of preparing for travel into the warp.’

‘Fortune, then,’ said Kreed, stepping off the elevator platform with Harox and Sahzë trailing behind him. ‘The Warmaster dispatched us at the most opportune moment.’

‘Horus does have a good sense of timing, that’s always been so,’ Sanguinius allowed, sharing a look with Raldoron. ‘But I find it interesting that you are here within a heartbeat of our campaign ending at Kayvas. I wonder if Alpharius has been as quiet as he appears.’

Kreed cocked his head. ‘I know nothing of that, my lord. I was ceded to the Warmaster’s command by Lord Aurelian and I am here on his order.’

‘Horus has sent me a Chaplain?’ The Angel considered the thought. ‘What do you make of that, First Captain?’

‘With respect to our guests, the Blood Angels have no need of one,’ Raldoron said immediately. The acolytes of the Word Bearers had been sent to many fleets, placed in several of the Legions in the months that unfolded after the passing of the Nikaea edict. The suspension of psychic warfare and the abolition of the Librarius contingent had been dealt with differently in each Legion that maintained one, each according to their individual traditions and methods. In a service offered by Lorgar to his brethren, the master of the XVII Legion had sent his most pious and vigilant apostles to help with the re-integration of those gifted with psyker powers back into the rank and file of the Space Marine cohorts.

No help from the Word Bearers had been requested or required by the Blood Angels, however. The black-armoured Wardens, their roles already embedded in the Legion proper, took on the task of policing the reformation.

‘Ah, yes,’ said Harox, speaking for the first time. ‘Of course. You have your own.’ He glanced at Raldoron, as if he were attempting to intuit his thoughts.

‘My Wardens are not the same as Lorgar’s Chaplains,’ Sanguinius stated, matter-of-factly.

‘Indeed,’ said Kreed, ‘and the role of my granted office is not the issue at hand, my lord. I am here as the steward of a message for you, Lord Sanguinius.’ At that, the woman sauntered forwards.

‘Not that I would denigrate the powers of the mamzel,’ said the primarch, ‘but the Red Tear’s astropathic choir is the finest in this sector. Any communication Horus wishes to send to me they could pluck from the tides of the void and deliver in kind.’

Raldoron watched as Kreed slowly shook his head. ‘No, my lord. That is not so. Great Horus stipulated to me with no uncertainty that Sahzë alone will be the conduit of this message, and that his orders in this were ironclad.’

The Angel’s manner cooled. ‘Those were my brother’s exact words?’

‘No, lord,’ replied Kreed. ‘Those were your Warmaster’s words.’

Raldoron glanced at Zuriel and saw the same questions on the Sanguinary Guard’s face as were doubtless visible on his own.

‘Far be it from me to defy the Warmaster,’ said Sanguinius, without weight. ‘Lady? Come forwards, if you will.’

‘I cannot,’ she trilled. ‘For I too am under the strictest of the Warmaster’s instructions.’ Sahzë extended a long arm and cast around the antechamber, taking in Zuriel’s men, Raldoron and the Word Bearers. ‘They must leave us.’

Zuriel’s jaw set. ‘We are the Sanguinary Guard. We will not leave our lord alone with an unknown witch!’

Sahzë continued as if the Guard Sergeant had not spoken. ‘Horus Lupercal’s message is for his brother’s eyes only. The meme-blocks in my psyche and the telepathic codes holding my aura closed will only dissolve…’ She released a sigh, gazing dreamily at the primarch. ‘When we are alone.’

Sanguinius was like marble for the longest moment, his face unreadable. Then his expression shifted, returning to his easy aspect. ‘Do as she says, Zuriel. Take your warriors and wait outside.’ He turned to Raldoron. ‘Captain, please ensure our guests are accommodated while I deal with this matter.’

Raldoron came closer, lowering his voice. ‘My lord, are you–’

‘Certain,’ Sanguinius told him, in a tone that would brook no argument.

Reluctantly, the First Captain gave a bow and turned away. Kreed and Harox fell in step with him, and a few paces behind, Zuriel and the Sanguinary Guard followed suit.

‘This is against protocol,’ muttered Lohgos under his breath. ‘If he were here, Azkaellon would never allow it.’

‘You are fearful over nothing, brother,’ Raldoron heard Halkryn reply. ‘These are our allies. There’s no threat here, and that girl is just a wisp of a thing.’

Lohgos’s reply was frosty. ‘Is she?’

The antechamber’s doors closed with a low ring of metal on metal, and Sanguinius approached the astropath. She could not remain still, shifting on her feet as if being acted upon by a breath of wind that touched only her.

The primarch reached out and raised her chin with his fingertips, making her meet his gaze. ‘You’re a curious one,’ he offered. ‘What has made my brother send you to me, mamzel?’

‘I would not like to guess,’ she breathed, fingering a silver clasp upon her robes.

‘No?’

‘I am not privy to the thoughts of godlings.’

The Angel chuckled. ‘We are not gods, he and I. But in a poor light one might mistake us as so.’

‘Such contradiction in those words, great one,’ said Sahzë. ‘I am not divine, sayeth the angel.’ She reached out, daring to touch the trailing edge of his folded wings beneath the mail cloak.

Sanguinius allowed the imposition, but then stepped back to give her room. ‘I am, like Horus and all my kin, as my father made me. Born of science and learning, not of mythology.’

‘The Emperor made you an angel,’ said the astropath, her voice echoing in the empty room. ‘Why? Did he make a devil as well?’

‘Have you met my brother Magnus?’ he replied, with a wry smile.

Sahzë folded her arms to her chest, her hands playing at her thin, elegant neck. Her every motion seemed performed, as if it were a step in some long, expressive dance. ‘Did your father give you wings and fair aspect to show his mastery? To prove to the galaxy that he was superior to every dream of seraphs?’

The woman’s words had brought the primarch a moment of amusement, but that now faded. ‘You are here to give me a message,’ Sanguinius told her. ‘Deliver it.’

‘As you wish.’ Sahzë’s long fingers pulled at the folds of her robes and the cloth unwrapped itself from around her, falling from her thin shoulders to gather in a shimmering, silken pool at her feet. Her pale, hairless flesh was ivory and unblemished.

With exaggerated care, the astropath dropped to the floor and gathered herself into a crouching, hunched form. Sanguinius’s acute senses felt a sudden drop in temperature around her, and a rime of frost sparkled into being over Sahzë’s skin. She snorted, puffs of white vapour escaping her nostrils, and began to tremble. But not from the cold.

Above her, motes of strange light gathered, emitting out of the air itself. The primarch smelled a sulphurous, electric tang. His thoughts racing, he spoke quickly into his vox. ‘Priority,’ he said quietly. ‘Isolate the astropathic choir in their sanctum chamber immediately. Seal them in and do not open it again until I give the order.’

Sanguinius cut the link without waiting for a reply. He could perceive the sudden plume of energy collecting around the woman, feeling the pressure of it on the edges of his more ephemeral senses – and such a discharge of psychic power might easily wreak havoc with the delicate minds of the Red Tear’s astropaths.

Sahzë gave an agonised cry that drew him back to her, and the woman’s head snapped upwards with an audible click. In an explosive flood, streamers of thick, churning mist burst from her open mouth, her nostrils, ears and eyes.

The primarch’s hand dropped to the infernus pistol holstered at his waist and hesitated there. This was no manner of psychic communication he was familiar with.

A piercing psychic shriek cut through his thoughts and then melted away into silence. The mist resembled thick, milky fluid flowing through clear oil, but by turns it began to coalesce into a more solid, defined structure. Sanguinius’s eyes widened as the shape became the vaguest suggestion of a human. It grew more distinct with each passing second, gaining layers of detail and nuance.

The ectoplasmic cloud coagulated into a familiar form, and then it spoke. ‘Well met, brother.’ The timbre of the words was distorted, as if they were coming through water, the low tones resonating, but it was without doubt the voice of the Warmaster.

Sanguinius’s eyes flicked to Sahzë, who writhed silently in the throes of a psyker trance, then back to the apparition. ‘Horus?’ he asked, studying the smoke-shape. ‘What is this?’

‘The woman is extremely gifted,’ said his brother. ‘And her abilities have been… enhanced by those with unique knowledge.’

‘How is this done?’ The Angel slowly circled the trembling, naked woman. ‘She is a… a conduit? That is not possible…’

The Horus-image turned to follow him. ‘Clearly it is, Sanguinius. Hurling psychic shouts into the void and hoping they will be heard is but one method of contact over interstellar distances.’

‘The only method.’

‘Not so,’ Horus corrected. ‘Sahzë’s rare gift is what you see at work here. She can forge a direct line of contact through the warp, becoming the passage between us as easily as if we were speaking over a vox-channel. She is mind-bonded to another, who is before me now.’

‘Incredible,’ Sanguinius admitted. ‘This is of father’s creation?’

‘He is occupied with his great work on Terra.’ Horus gave a curt shake of the head. ‘I have learned a lot myself, brother, especially in these recent weeks. New possibilities are opening up before me.’ He nodded to himself. ‘For all of us.’

‘I am impressed,’ said the Angel. ‘But I would counsel caution with such things. Remember how the Emperor looked gravely upon the Thousand Sons for their experiments with the immaterium.’

Horus’s face rippled and shifted, making his expressions hard to read. ‘Magnus was foolish. He kept his aims concealed from father. I will never do that. The Emperor will always know what I intend.’ The Warmaster’s phantom loomed larger, the shapes of his battle armour becoming visible as he moved. Even this simulacrum served to carry his great presence across the light years without diminishing it. ‘A question occurs to me, Sanguinius. As I stand here upon the deck of the Vengeful Spirit with my warriors at my hand and the end of the Great Crusade on the horizon… I think of our doubts.’

‘I have none,’ the Angel answered without hesitation. ‘This cause is as just as it has ever been, my brother. We bring light to those in need of illumination, we are following in our father’s glorious footsteps. You know that.’

‘I know that,’ Horus echoed, and for a moment he almost seemed disappointed. ‘I do. I know our Emperor’s desire, for an ordered galaxy with his rule upon it.’

‘It is what we are born for.’ Sanguinius paused, concern etching his features. It was difficult to interpret the ghost-image of his brother, but he could sense a distance between them that was not just physical. ‘Horus, what troubles you? Is something amiss? Is that why you wished to speak to me alone?’

His answer came slowly, but with certainty. ‘I am untroubled, brother. Do not concern yourself for me.’ He gestured towards Sanguinius, wraith-like fingers reaching out. ‘I have new orders for the Blood Angels. An important mission that will require the full might of your armies.’

‘You wish me to commit my entire Legion to a single objective?’

Horus nodded, the image blurring. ‘Yes, and you will need the strength of every one of your sons. I have learned that a cluster of worlds in the Northern Cross, out on the Fringe, have severed all lines of contact with Terra and the Imperium. These worlds are key colonies in that region, a lynch-pin system vitally important to the protection of the outer sectors, and of critical strategic importance to the Great Crusade.’

‘Invasion?’ said Sanguinius. ‘Or insurrection?’

‘Both,’ the Warmaster replied. ‘My intelligencers believe that the planetary governors have willingly surrendered their authority and their military to the rule of a xenos trespasser.’ He fixed his brother with a hard eye. ‘You know them well, Sanguinius. We faced them together on the deserts of Melchior. The alien tyrants who call themselves the nephilim.’

For an instant, the primarch was struck silent. Then he shook his head, his brow furrowing. ‘The nephilim are extinct,’ he insisted. ‘We culled them by the million on Melchior! Their home world was razed by the White Scars. Jaghatai looked me in the eyes and told me it was done!’

‘It appears that the Khan and his warriors were too quick to mark the grave of these hateful creatures. Clearly, the Fifth Legion were not as thorough as we believed. Some survived, and now they have returned to plague the Imperium.’

‘I would not have thought the White Scars capable of such an error…’ Sanguinius’s frown deepened. It was difficult to conceive that Jaghatai Khan and his hordes would have left even one nephilim alive after their assault.

‘Go to the Eastern Fringe,’ Horus insisted, ‘and finish the deed once and for all. Take your Legion and exterminate whatever you find there.’

‘And the colonies?’

Horus became grave. ‘Do what you can. But it may already be too late for the colonies and their populations. If so, they are to be considered enemy combatants. Do not seek surrender or accept capitulation, Sanguinius. There can only be death… but with all your sons by your side, I am confident that these aliens and their lickspittle worshippers will be utterly destroyed.’

The Angel considered the Warmaster’s words. ‘That is your order?’

‘Aye,’ echoed the distant voice. ‘You will take Kreed and the Dark Page with you on this duty. They will observe, and when all is done, return to me with the final word of it.’

‘We have a delegation of remembrancers in the fleet… Perhaps they should be sent elsewhere.’

‘Keep them with you,’ Horus told him. ‘They will serve their purpose.’

Sanguinius turned over the command in his thoughts. Horus’s demand was that the Blood Angels serve as the edge of the axe, sweeping in across space to destroy all that lay before them. It was an act they were capable of, of that there was no doubt, but it seemed a crude use of their capability. ‘I will do as my Warmaster asks, if that is his wish,’ said the primarch. ‘My other fleets are close by and I can gather them to my side in short order. But I cannot proceed without a question.’

‘Ask it,’ Horus demanded.

‘Why have you chosen the Blood Angels for this endeavour?’ Sanguinius tried to search the face of the apparition for some degree of meaning, but the smoky image did not hold under his scrutiny. ‘Surely the Wolves of Russ or Angron’s World Eaters would be better suited to such a punitive campaign? My Legion are not executioners.’

‘You are what your Warmaster tells you to be,’ came the terse reply. Horus paused, then spoke again, moderating his tone. ‘You wish to know why I sent you the woman Sahzë, why I wanted to keep this conversation most secret?’

The odour of human sweat and seared flesh reached the primarch, and Sanguinius glanced at the astropath. She was rocking back and forth, vomiting up the thick strings of mist, buried in the depths of her trance. He saw strange traceries beneath the surface of her skin, bright lines like fire burning deep in the pale meat of her, crosses piled upon crosses, stars and circles. He saw this, and on some level he was disquieted.

‘It is because of a vow I made to you.’ Horus’s words drew his attention away. ‘On Melchior, in the sunken ruin of an alien chapel. I told you I would do all I could to help you deal with… your lost. No matter how long it took.’

Sanguinius became very still. ‘I remember.’

‘A secret truth was discovered in the ruins of the nephilim home world. The xenos control human minds, that we have always known. But they possess a technology capable of manipulating the structure of the brain. Something that can reach into the very depths of a man’s mind and excise the darkness bred into him. Do you understand, my brother? They have a key, these creatures. It may be the very solution you have been searching for. A way to undo the flaw.’ He nodded. ‘I know you have not halted in your private quest for a solution.’

‘Yes,’ Sanguinius said, feeling an echo of the terrible burden upon him once more. ‘And we have found nothing. Even now, my Guard Commander returns from Nartaba Octus after a fruitless hunt.’ He looked away for a moment. The primarch had sent Azkaellon to the planet beset by eldar pirates to seek out a lost bio-relical, but there had been nothing to find but ruins. It preyed on him to keep these matters from his sons, but there were always burdens a father had to carry alone.

‘Obey my command in this,’ Horus told him, ‘and I promise you that the Blood Angels will find a new freedom.’

At last, Sanguinius drew himself up and gave the salute of the aquila to the phantom image of his brother. ‘I obey, Warmaster,’ he said. ‘Where are we bound?’

The face in the smoke smiled. ‘A star system called Signus.’

THREE

Of the Bloodline
Wolves
Drowning in Ashes

The pace of the warrior’s bare feet slapping against the cold metal decking was a metronome, measuring out the passage of time as he circled the length of the Hermia’s gun gallery.

The Blood Angel ran at a pace that would have matched the cruise of an Mastodon troop carrier over even ground, his training fatigues snapping at his limbs. Across his back he carried a metal frame loaded with iron discs, counterbalance weights borrowed from the crews of the heavy ballistic launcher carriages arrayed far below the platform of the gallery. There were thick cowls around his wrists and ankles, filled with dense osmium powder. They dragged on him, simulating the load of a full suit of Mark II power armour, but with none of the strength-enhancing systems or internal temperature control mechanisms. Still, the warrior’s sheen of chem-engineered sweat kept him cool, allowing him to maintain his velocity as he approached the bow of the Hermia and the midpoint of the gun gallery.

Raised up high over the bow of the starship, the gallery was part of the pre-Crusade design of the vessel. Formerly a space where gunnery officers could take visual sight readings and sensor gear could be housed, advances in technology by the Mechanicum priesthood had made such uses obsolete – and after the cruiser’s most recent refit, the kilometres-long platform had been remade. Aside from the Hermia’s main spinal corridor, it was the longest passageway on the ship, and for the most part it was empty. One side of the gantry looked down into the hull spaces where the bow guns and Geller field arrays rested, the other out through panels of armourglass into deep space, the crimson flanks of the starship dropping away beneath.

The Blood Angel saw the turn coming and upped his speed into a sudden sprint. He wanted to finish his run before the Hermia completed its escape burn from the edges of the Nartaba System, before it moved into interstellar space and ventured into the warp. Elsewhere on the ship, his battle-brothers were already preparing their armour and weapons for the coming mission. His commander, Brother-Sergeant Cassiel, had ordered a mandatory equipment review, and the squad leader was notorious for his exacting attention to the smallest detail. The rest of the unit – Sarga, Leyteo, Xagan and the others – would be hard at work under his hawkish scrutiny, stripping their bolters down to the frame and working at their warplate with lapping powder. His armour was still in the hands of the Legion serfs, however, the repairs to its damaged chest plate taking longer than had been expected.

Thinking of the damage caused the wound to flare with pain once more. As he twisted into his run, turning across the bow, the rough-edged diamond of scar tissue on his belly tightened. It jabbed him with pain, enough to make him wince and, for a moment, drop off his pace.

At the same instant, he saw a figure in the lee of a curved support beam, a man leaning forwards on the battlement-like grids that had once housed macroscopes and laser-rangers. The warrior came to a halt, moderating his breathing, and his hand fell to his scar.

‘Still healing, is it?’ said the man. He smiled nervously and then pointed at the legionary. ‘The cut, I mean.’ His voice had a sing-song intonation to it, similar to the accents of the Keltian Colonials.

‘What do you know of it?’ demanded the Blood Angel. The man’s words seemed like an imposition; his face was unfamiliar, but the clothes he wore made it clear that he wasn’t any sort of naval crewman or Legion serf. The data-slate in his hand was an elaborate civilian model, with folding lenses on retractable arms and a stylus on a bronze chain. A remembrancer, then, he decided. There were a handful of them among the ships of the task force, although most remained in a billet on the fleet’s command ship, the Ignis.

‘I know who you are, my lord. Brother Meros, of the Ninth Company’s exalted bloodline. If you don’t mind me saying, you’re a subject of some interest.’

Meros took a step closer. ‘Whose interest?’

The remembrancer retreated in kind, his cheeks flushing red as he finally understood he was presuming too much. ‘I mean no disrespect. But the story about you on Nartaba Octus… Well, me and my fellow artists came to hear of it, and I being the one here on the Hermia…’ His voice trailed off and he swallowed hard. ‘You fought off a pack of eldar reavers alone. One lone Apothecary against a troop of them, all to save a dozen people at the Octus outpost.’

‘That was duty,’ Meros said, with a sniff. ‘Nothing to make a story out of.’

‘If you’ll pardon my presumption, my lord, but that’s for me to decide, not you.’ He gave a slight bow, flicking unkempt brown hair out of his pale eyes. ‘I’m Halerdyce Gerwyn, remembrancer-at-large by the Emperor’s decree. Recorder of tales and such.’ He retraced his steps, closing in on Meros once again. ‘And that duty you spoke of? Taking a fatal round in your gut there and living to talk about it, to run around these passages? Coming back from the very embrace of death? That’s a fine story indeed. Stirring, I’d even say.’

Something about the man’s manner amused Meros, but he kept that hidden. ‘Would you not rather be remembering tales of greater men than I? Primarchs and the like?’ He nodded at the walls. ‘Azkaellon, the Commander of the Sanguinary Guard, is aboard this ship. I would think posterity would rather know the deeds of a hero of his stature than a lowly legionary like me.’

Gerwyn snapped his fingers. ‘Ah, that’s where you’d be wrong. The Great Crusade is as much about the single soldier as it is about the exalted commander.’ He paused. ‘At least, I feel it to be so.’ He gestured with his data-slate. ‘And if I could confide a truth to you, my lord? Your man Azkaellon frightens me some. He prowls this ship like he’s hunting something.’

‘It’s not you,’ Meros told Gerwyn, ‘so be at ease.’ Still, the remembrancer’s words struck a chord with the Apothecary. The Guard Commander’s presence in the fleet was unusual and his actions during the Nartaba sortie had only done more to give question to what he was doing there. Meros had heard barrack-room hearsay of how the Sanguinary Guard had refused to become involved in the defence of the Octus science colony, instead disappearing into the wilds with no word of explanation. But then again, a warrior of Azkaellon’s rank did not need to explain himself to anyone but the primarch himself.

All this he kept to himself, seeing no reason to fuel the remembrancer’s need for more grist to his fiction’s mill. Another thought occurred to him. ‘You were up here watching me.’

‘No!’ Gerwyn insisted. ‘Well, yes. And no.’

‘Which is it?’ Meros folded his arms, eyeing the slim man coldly.

‘I’ve been coming up here since the start,’ he said. ‘It’s quiet, isn’t it? And a gorgeous view.’ Gerwyn nodded at the windows. Beyond the armourglass, the lines of the mighty battleship Ignis were visible, the vessel a huge hammerhead of crimson and obsidian a few kilometres off the starboard bow. ‘And when I heard you were running the corridor…’ He shrugged. ‘Look, my–’

The Blood Angel held up a hand. ‘Just Meros will do. Don’t saddle me with titles.’

‘Uh. Aye, Meros, then.’ Gerwyn swallowed once more. ‘I didn’t intend to intrude. Well, perhaps a little. But not so it would bother you. I wanted to write the story.’

‘Show me.’ Meros held out his hand, indicating the slate.

‘It’s not done yet,’ said the remembrancer, reluctant to hand over the device. Instead, he held it up to show the warrior a set of narrative panels, each a small picture accompanied by a block of text below it. The first was a fanciful representation of a Blood Angel in the white and red armour of a Legion Apothecary, a bolter in one hand and a chainaxe in the other, facing a wall of feral, night-clad eldar. ‘I’m a sequentialist,’ Gerwyn explained, the words spilling out of him. ‘A bit of a scribe, a bit of an artist, the best of the both. I know some look down their noses at my craft, think it’s not so grand as those who write operas or chip away at marble, but I’ll warrant more people read these serials across the Imperium than you’d know…’

The Apothecary kept his expression neutral, studying the pictures. Another panel was a close-up of the fictional warrior’s face and it was a passable rendition of Meros’s careworn aspect, but cast in a fanciful and overly heroic light. ‘I don’t disapprove,’ he said, ‘but keep your work on the right side of truth, remembrancer.’

‘Of course!’ Gerwyn nodded happily. ‘I’ll have a copy printed and bound for you when it is complete.’

‘No need,’ Meros told him, turning to walk away. ‘I was there. I remember.’ He paused, and tapped the place where the scar sat on his flesh. ‘I already have my own record of that day.’

When Gerwyn spoke again, the brisk manner he had shown before was gone. ‘Were you… afraid? They say the Emperor’s Angels are never troubled by such things, that there is nowhere you fear to tread.’

‘That is true and untrue,’ Meros told him. ‘The matter of which changes, dependent on the circumstance.’

‘I am. Afraid, I mean.’

The admission came out of nowhere, and Meros was uncertain as to how he should react. The Apothecary felt the sense of distance between the two of them very distinctly in that moment: he, the improved trans-human, engineered to be above such things; Gerwyn an ordinary soul, ill-prepared for the dangers of a lethal universe.

He went on. ‘Last time, when we translated space to Nartaba, I was up here. I wanted to see what the warp looked like, even if it was just a shadow of it.’

‘That’s not for men like you,’ Meros told him. ‘It’ll burn your eyes from your head. It pulls at your reason.’

‘Aren’t those just stories too?’ Gerwyn managed a weak grin.

‘You should go below,’ said the Apothecary. ‘Come–’

Meros never finished his words; without warning, out across the bow of the Hermia, a brilliant, shimmering aura folded out of the darkness. It peeled open, petals of spatial reality folding back like the layers of bloody skin around a wound. The remembrancer shouted wordlessly and stumbled back towards the bulkhead behind them, raising his hands to hide his face from the sudden plume of hellish light. Then the Hermia’s warning klaxons began a shrill chorus, the deck conducting a rumble as multiple autonomic gun batteries turned to face the still-forming warp gate.

The Apothecary saw the slit in space-time yawn open and eject an iron spar from its shimmering depths. It was a starship of Imperial design, similar in mass and structure to the Hermia. But where the cruiser was adorned with livery and symbols showing its allegiance to the IX Legiones Astartes, the new arrival was flying the stoic colours of Terra’s grand army. The ship’s engines were alive with full thrust, and it came uncomfortably close to the Hermia’s crimson hull as it fell back into normal space.

The cruiser’s deck tilted sharply and Meros gripped a guide rail to steady himself as the gravity plates in the deck struggled to keep up with the abrupt course change the Hermia’s helmsman was making. The massive ship veered off, making distance as best it could.

Out in the black, the warp rift irised shut with a puff of abnormal radiation and sickly, false-colour emissions. Gerwyn was shaking as he dared to look up. ‘Is it gone?’ he asked, his voice barely audible over the sirens.

‘The ship?’

‘The warp rift!’

‘Aye,’ nodded Meros. ‘The fool commanding that vessel must be desperate or stupid to exit the warp so close to a translation point…’ He frowned. Such tactics were sometimes used by privateers on well-travelled cargo lanes, or by shipmasters attempting to blockade a star system. The Blood Angel jogged to the portside range of the gallery and peered out, watching the new arrival bleed off forward velocity on massive, jagged spars of thruster flame.

Puffing out his breath, the remembrancer came stumbling after him, in time to witness a flicker of silver emerge from the flank of the Imperial Army cruiser.

‘Is that a shuttle?’ said Gerwyn. ‘It is. Coming this way.’

Meros said nothing, scrutinising the shape of the approaching craft. It resolved into the shape of a Thunderhawk, turning sharply as it made for the docking port of the nearest ship – which happened to be the Hermia. Already the big cruiser was applying thrust to its main drives once more, angling down and away, gathering speed as if it were eager to get away as fast as possible.

The Thunderhawk came around and dived past the gun gallery, giving Meros and the remembrancer a clear look at the brazen sigil painted on its wings; the silhouette of a snarling Fenrisian wolf-head, set against a steel-grey diamond.

‘The… the sons of Russ?’ Gerwyn turned to the Blood Angel, brimming with new questions; but the look in Meros’s eyes killed them before they could be uttered.

‘Return to your quarters and stay there,’ the Apothecary told him, breaking into a full sprint once more.

The Sanguinary Guard’s face hardened as he strode across the deck of the Hermia’s tertiary shuttle bay, his flinty eyes narrowing to slits. A semi-circle of legionaries were already taking up stations around the edge of the vacant landing pad, bolters at the ready, but he ignored them and marched forwards, watching the silver-steel Thunderhawk float in through the glittering membrane of the protective atmos-field. Chilled by the touch of space, the ship’s fuselage instantly grew a thin sheen of frost from the moisture in the air, dissipating anew in faint wisps of vapour.

Azkaellon defied safety protocols and stood directly beneath the prow of the Thunderhawk as it turned in place, hovering on the thrust from flaring exhaust nozzles. He glimpsed a hazy shape moving behind the armourglass of the cockpit canopy, and then the craft was coming down, kicking up fumes across the pad. He glared at the ship as if he were staring down a great animal, watching it settle on its landing skids as the downdraft buffeted him, whipping at his dark, shoulder-length hair.

The keening whine of the engines had barely faded before the drop-ramp in the Thunderhawk’s belly fell open with a grunt of hydraulics, and as the Guard Commander had expected, a party of warriors in full armour and battle pelts rode it down to the deck. They looked ready for deployment into any war that might want them, even though this was a place of equals and allies.

But do the Space Wolves count any Legion as their equal? Azkaellon resisted the temptation to fold his arms over the barrel chest of his ornate artificer armour, instead giving full scrutiny to the sons of Russ as they scanned the bay from the end of the ramp. He noted that not one of them had yet stepped off and onto the deck of the Blood Angels starship.

The Wolf at the head of the pack spoke first. ‘Who is in charge here?’ The warrior bore the rank marks of a captain, and complex tribal runes about his breastplate that hinted at many battles in his past. A black-furred pelt hung from his shoulders and he was armed with a thickset bolter of unfamiliar pattern in a fast-draw holster at his hip. Across the captain’s chest was a short scabbard, angled downwards so that the combat blade it held could be quickly unsheathed; the cover was studded with flecks of quartz and the weapon’s grip was covered in crimson leather.

The legionary stepped off the ramp and advanced, glancing around as if he were entering a combat zone, and Azkaellon knew full well that the Wolf captain was perfectly aware of who had seniority of command. The significance of the Sanguinary Guard’s golden armour was unmistakable, yet the visitor chose not to acknowledge it.

His lips thinned. It was typical of the VI Legion to indulge in such little gestures of insolence, like dogs snarling and barking at first meeting in order to ascertain who was the alpha. For now, he would play along. ‘I am Azkaellon, Chosen of Sanguinius. You may address me.’

‘Of course,’ said the captain, reaching up to remove his helmet. Beneath the ceramite, the warrior had a heavy, ice-scarred face. His scalp was shorn, but he made up for it with a shaggy, unkempt beard braided with silver. ‘Well met, Guard Commander. I am Helik Redknife.’ He offered no other information about himself, no record of great company or honorific, as if his name alone were enough to mark him.

Azkaellon glanced around, noting that the Blood Angels surrounding him had not relaxed, each of them picking up on his posture and manner. Out beyond the edges of the landing pad, he saw too that some of the Hermia’s crew serfs were pausing in their duties to watch the exchange, and on one of the upper gantries, the Sanguinary Guard spotted a lone legionary in duty robes observing him.

He looked away. ‘Captain Redknife. You should consider yourself fortunate that you were not burned from the sky. Such an arrival without warning is reckless. The gun crews of this task force remain on high alert, their weapons primed.’

‘Fortune has little to do with it,’ Redknife replied briskly. ‘And I have no time for matters of etiquette.’ As he spoke, the remainder of his Space Wolves followed him down onto the landing deck, falling into a rough formation that the untrained eye might have considered careless, almost random.

For the first time, Azkaellon noted the presence of a Rune Priest standing in Redknife’s shadow. The Wolf cleric’s armour was dressed with scrimshawed bones, his open-faced helm apparently carved out of a great canine’s skull. He was careful to stay at his commander’s shoulder, his hand forever on the hilt of a serrated force sword. The Sanguinary Guard unconsciously mirrored the priest’s gesture, his gauntlet falling to the pommel of his glaive encarmine. ‘I see that is so,’ he said. ‘Not only do you break the simple rules of fleet protocol, but you also defy the Emperor’s edict.’ He jutted his chin towards the Rune Priest. ‘You know that psykers are no longer permitted within the Legiones Astartes.’

The cleric answered in a tongue that Azkaellon could not understand, but he knew enough to recognise a Fenrisian dialect when he heard it. Redknife gave a brief nod. ‘My battle-brother Stiel is not a witch-mind, Blood Angel, and he forgives you for your error. It is a common misconception.’

‘Can he not tell me that himself, in Imperial Gothic?’

‘No,’ said the captain. ‘My skald speaks in our ancient way. It is a tradition, you understand?’

‘I don’t.’ Azkaellon’s tone grew colder. ‘And I say again: the Decree of Nikaea has forbidden the use of psychic powers. Your… priest… should be returned to the rank and file, not allowed to treat with the warp.’

Stiel made a hissing noise, but Redknife silenced him with a look. ‘His power is pure. It comes from Fenris, as does mine. That is the explanation I will give you, the only explanation.’ He gestured at the air. ‘Now, we may continue on in this vein or we may cut to the meat of this. Which do you choose, Guard Commander?’

For a moment, Azkaellon entertained the notion of placing the arrogant Wolves in the Hermia’s brig, or ejecting them and their Thunderhawk back into the void. ‘A question, then, Space Wolf. Why have you interrupted our journey? There is a vital summons that this flotilla must answer and your unexpected arrival hinders us.’

‘I am well aware of your agenda,’ Redknife told him. ‘It is why we made such haste to reach the Nartaba system before you departed. The immaterium grows restless and yours was the only Blood Angels contingent in close proximity that we could be certain of reaching.’ He settled his helmet on a clip at his belt. ‘My unit and I have been given a new posting, an attachment to the command of your primarch Sanguinius.’ The captain held out his hand and one of his squad produced a message tube from a drawstring pouch of cured animal skin, passing it to his commander. Redknife twisted the tube to open it and a leaf of photic parchment issued out.

Azkaellon took the proffered document and looked it over. His eyes were drawn to a thermal seal branded into the translucent paper. The design resembled a strange mathematical symbol, with an upward-turned eye at its centre.

‘This order comes directly from Lord Malcador, the Sigillite and Regent of Terra. My master Lord Russ endorses it,’ explained the Wolf captain. ‘And it cannot be countermanded.’

‘You brought this all the way from Terra…’ Azkaellon said without looking up, absorbing every word on the page.

‘No. We were given this tasking as we were the closest to your location. We will come with you to the Red Tear and the Angel’s court. As you can see from the Sigillite’s wording, time is deemed to be of the essence.’

However, the text Redknife referred to was clouded with vagaries and it said little that could be firmly grasped beyond the core of the order. That this document and these commands were authentic was beyond all doubt – the photic parchment would have been tele-kinetically transcribed by a bound astropathic savant and all relevant codes and cipher-phrases were in place – but there was almost nothing to explain precisely why Malcador had suddenly chosen to send a party of Space Wolves to accompany the Great Angel. At last, Azkaellon looked up and met Redknife’s cool gaze. ‘And what is your mission, captain?’

‘It is what it has always been, to serve the Emperor of Mankind and defend the Imperium from all that threatens it.’

Azkaellon’s noble mien creased into a scowl. ‘A more specific description would be appreciated.’

‘I have no doubt.’

His tolerance fading with each passing moment, the Sanguinary Guard came closer and lowered his voice so that it would not carry. ‘Am I expected to accept that such a thing is beyond my need to know? I am the commander of the Angel’s chosen. There is no rank above mine in this Legion, save for the primarch himself.’

Redknife nodded, showing no reaction to the Blood Angel’s growing annoyance. ‘This is known to me. All I can tell you is that we are here…’ The Space Wolf paused, searching for the right words. ‘We are here to keep watch.’

‘You are observers?’ The idea of it seemed unrealistic; the sons of Russ had never been known to stand sentinel when there was a fight to be had. The very idea of it went against everything Azkaellon knew about their character.

‘We will agree to call it that,’ Redknife replied. ‘I have no wish to further lengthen the delay of the flotilla’s departure. If you will provide us with temporary quarters, my squad and I will… stay out of your way.’

Azkaellon studied the captain’s stoic expression for any sign of subterfuge, but found nothing he could interpret; and as much as he wanted to interrogate the Space Wolf further, out at the rendezvous the Angel’s grand fleet would be waiting for the Hermia and the rest of the Ignis task force to join them. Further delay would not be tolerated.

‘See to Captain Redknife’s needs,’ said the Sanguinary Guard at length, summoning a Legion serf with a terse gesture. He turned his back on the Space Wolves and walked away. ‘Secure the ship!’ he snapped. ‘Contact the Ignis and pass on the order to enter the immaterium.’

He looked up and found the Blood Angels legionary still watching from the gantry above. Meros. The one who was injured. The warrior’s expression was filled with questions, and Azkaellon grimaced, sharing his uncertainty.

‘He’s here! He’s here!’ Marshal Zauber’s aide crashed in through the door of his office in a state that was somewhere between panic and elation. Her name was Rozin, and he’d picked her for the job because she was both competent and pleasant to look at. In a marshal’s career, the latter was a rarity, for the colony’s complex political matrix was largely made up of aged types or scarred war veterans. They were people who seemed to make an art of being unattractive despite all the finery they draped over themselves, despite all the high office and ranks that they bestowed upon one another.

Most of them were dead now. He shook off that thought and scrambled up from behind his desk, ignoring the accumulated piles of data-slates he dislodged in passing. He made for the door and the wide staircase that curved down the length of the council hall to the ground floor.

The dense, ruddy light that made everything look like old blood seeped over the walls and the carpet, turning the familiar corridors and steps into something dreamlike and unreal.

No. Not dreamlike, that was the wrong word. Nightmarish.

It was all that way, everything. The light, the walls and the floor, all of it wrong. Rozin was at his heels as he ran, and he realised that she was wrong too. Her voice was high and brittle in a way it hadn’t been before. As if she was constantly on the edge of hysteria.

Did Zauber’s voice sound like that to her? He wanted to ask, but also he was afraid to. In case she told him, yes, you do sound as if you’re losing your mind. He wanted to ask her if she were hearing the same noises at the edge of her awareness, like whispers or the rustle of pages being turned. Did Rozin see the odd blinks out of the corner of her eye too? The ghosts of shapes in mirrors or anything reflective?

Did she find it hard not to think about stabbing people to death? Did she have nightmares all the time? Did Rozin want to scream and scream and scream until her throat filled with blood, and–

He shook it off, with a literal gesture and a small ‘no’ sound that perhaps the girl noticed but didn’t comment on. They crossed the atrium and Zauber looked up at the skylights. Shafts of twisted luminosity were here, rods of haze reaching down though the holes in the powdery drifts that covered the crystalflex panes. The ash kept falling, and after days of it, the strange phenomenon showed no signs of abating.

It was everywhere, like hot snow, embers of it smouldering and never going out, collecting in heaps or wandering the streets propelled by sudden, searing gusts of wind. If there had been a volcano nearby, that would have made sense. If there had been a vent in the earth spitting fumes into the sky, that would have been something Zauber could grasp. But nowhere on the colony was there anything like that. The endless rain of cinders spilling out of the low, menacing clouds did nothing to obey the strictures of meteorology.

Other planets in the cluster were talking about the same things – or they were in between declarations of alarm and demands that the capital do something. At first, Zauber and everyone else on the council had dismissed the early events as pranks or reporting errors, finally upgrading them in grudging manner to the suggestion of some kind of organised demonstration by activists. Foolish, though, he thought. It’s nature turning against us, not men.

Alderman Yee, in the hours before he had placed a laspistol between his thin, papery lips and burned out his skull with it, had suggested a different source. Yee was of rogue trader stock, once a well-travelled shipmaster before love and marriage had enticed him to set to surface and live a colonist’s life, and it was to him that they had turned when the first person suggested the question of xenos involvement. The old spacer had said something about the warp, but Zauber had not understood the things he spoke of. Born and raised within the bounds of the colony worlds, the marshal had never crossed into the immaterium, never even set foot aboard an interstellar vessel. He tried now to remember exactly what Yee had said, but Zauber’s thoughts were snagged on the last memory he had of the alderman: the sordid image of him curled around the long shape of the duelling gun, suckling on the barrel of it like a newborn at a mother’s chest.

The list of what the science commissioners had termed ‘anomalous events’ grew by the day. A five hundred per cent rise in birth defect mutations in the farm communities that was now spreading from livestock to human babies in the hive city medical centres. Entire settlements going silent, some fortifying themselves and cutting off all outside contact, others just... becoming empty. Mysterious broadcasts on the watch-wire that induced vomiting and irrational fear in all those who heard them. A spike in the rates of suicide and murder. Dead birds. A rash of inexplicable graffiti – peculiar geometric shapes – appearing on the sides of hab-towers, on roadways, even cut into hills.

No single world was immune to it. The strangeness was spreading like a wave, building in magnitude, and Marshal Zauber had no idea how to deal with it. The responsibility had fallen to him only through line of succession. The other members of the council had either taken their own lives or died in the inexplicable arson attack that burned down the parliament building; only a quirk of fate had ensured that Zauber was elsewhere when it happened, waylaid by a ground-traffic accident on the mainway. At first he thought this had been good luck, but now he was wondering if it was the exact opposite. The burden of duty had come to rest upon him and he was floundering beneath it.

The colonists called for help, first from their neighbours and then from the Imperial Administratum, the Army, the Legiones Astartes, from any agency that was listening. But none of the courier ships dispatched towards the segmentum core had reported in, and all astropathic messages went unanswered. There had been a moment when they believed a reply was coming in, but the signal had turned out to be a deformed echo of the first distress call, somehow reflected back at them.

No more signals were sent after that. No more sendings were possible. The astropaths began to die, one at a time, from a wasting malaise that non-psykers were immune to. The last Zauber had heard, the medicae on one of the orbital platforms had the few remaining telepaths in deep isolation. He imagined they had followed their kindred into slow decay.

The doors opened automatically as Zauber came up to them, Rozin’s shoes clacking over the tiled floor behind him. Two garrison troopers, men with the hollow-eyed look of soldiers who had not rested in days, fell in either side of them and brought up their lasrifles, wary of the swirling haze outside and what it might conceal.

The hot air tasted like sulphur, and it immediately stole away all moisture in Zauber’s throat and nostrils. Across the great courtyard, the ornamental fountain was caked in dust and the pool beneath it had become a slurry of grey mud. The gardens bordering the square were brown and rotting, grasses and flowers smothered by the ash, choked of sunlight. On a normal day, the marshal would have been able to look out of the courtyard’s great arch and down along the Planetfall Road, the colony’s first highway; but the hab-blocks that lined the wide boulevard were lost to him, with only the suggestions of their carved majesty visible through the ceaseless ash-storm.

He heard the throaty noise of heavy military engines. Rozin was pointing. ‘There!’ She jabbed a finger at the road, and Zauber saw the flicker of headlights growing brighter as vehicles approached. They were coming from the direction of the spaceport, but they were very definitely not the light half-track rovers of the planetary garrison force stationed out there. Absently, Zauber remembered that the men he had sent to guard the port had not reported in for more than a day.

The obscured vehicles resolved into shadows, then defined as hard-sided shapes that rolled swiftly towards them, shoving abandoned groundcars out of their way with broad metal bumpers. Dense caterpillar tracks crunched over the rockcrete as the convoy of armoured machines slowed and folded into a V-formation as they halted. They were armoured personnel carriers of a design that Zauber had not seen before, great bricks of metal adorned with weapon sponsons, plated turrets and whip antennae that snapped in the wind.

Hatches clanked open and soldiers in purple-black uniforms and atmosphere gear disembarked, casting around with the porcine snouts of their breather masks. Zauber made an attempt to smooth back his hair and straighten his brocade jacket, but did little more than smear the ash flakes that had settled upon him.

From the back of the largest transport came the arrival they had been waiting for. He was tall and thin, and Zauber was put off by the first thought that came to mind as the man approached: he was reminded of something sinuous and reptilian.

‘I am Marshal Zauber,’ he announced, pushing the image aside. ‘This is my aide, Rozin.’ It was impossible to pause. ‘Sir, you have no idea how pleased we are to see you.’

The man gave a languid nod, the broad preacher hat on his head bobbing. ‘My name is Bruja. Emissary of the Imperium.’ His eyes were hidden behind a pair of mirrored glare-shields that seemed redundant in the flat, sunless daylight. ‘Your call has been heeded.’ He wore robes that went from his neck to the ground, hanging off him in a flowing cone of material. The robes were lined with silver and gold threads in a design that suggested either a bending river or a snake.

‘You have ships?’ Rozin blurted out the question, her excitement peaking.

‘A small vessel brought me here.’ Bruja’s voice had a rough-smooth quality to it, like that of a habitual tabac smoker. ‘Other ships are on the way. A fleet.’

From inside the folds of the robe came a pale, long-fingered hand. Bruja held up a circular medallion made of bright, mirrored silver, and when he spoke again it was with a ritual formality. ‘You have called for help and I have come as representative of those who heard you.’

The medallion turned in Bruja’s hand and Zauber found he couldn’t look away from it. He saw the distinct designs on the surfaces of the disc: on one side, the symbol of a wolf and a crescent moon, the other showing a baleful eye. The Eye of Horus.

‘The Warmaster?’ The question slipped from him.

Bruja’s head bobbed. ‘I carry the seal of Horus Lupercal and by extension the authority of the Warmaster himself. He has heard the cries of distress from this world and her neighbours, and dispatched me to take charge in the interim. I will guide you through this emergency.’

Zauber felt a tremendous flood of relief wash over him. He was a caretaker politician, he always had been. A gentleman of good conduct and slight ambition, but not a leader of men, not a soul with the strength to weather the kind of disaster that was overwhelming his colony. More than anything, he wanted someone to step in and take the weight of that from him – and Bruja was that person. He pushed away the nagging sense of unease the emissary instilled in him and concentrated on that.

At his side, Rozin was nodding, wiping tears from her eyes. She doubtless felt the same way. ‘Such terrible, inexplicable things have been occurring,’ said the woman, as they made their way back towards the council hall. ‘Order has broken down, Lord Bruja.’

The emissary’s manner was calm and metered, as if they were taking a walk on a pleasant summer’s day. ‘Balance will be restored,’ he assured them. ‘I swear it to you.’

‘Is it... Is it an alien invasion?’ Zauber leaned close, becoming conspiratorial. ‘These anomalies, they seem like attempts to use psychological warfare against us.’

Bruja studied him for a long moment, then nodded once. ‘Marshal, your insight is great. You are correct. But we must not speak widely of this truth. There would be mass panic.’

‘Yes. Yes, indeed.’ There was panic already, of course, but in an isolated fashion, in pockets that could be put down and dealt with. The emissary’s words made sense, didn’t they? Zauber was grasping at them, desperate to find agreement with the new arrival.

Some of Bruja’s troops were working at the rear of a broad transporter vehicle, and with a sudden clatter, shifting hull plates folded up like gull’s wings to reveal the interior. Rozin caught sight of the activity and slowed, squinting into the dust to watch.

The emissary cleared his throat with a rasp. ‘I will need to claim this facility for my operations, Marshal, you understand? My men will need a billet and I require a place where I can begin my work.’

‘It will be done.’ Zauber nodded. ‘Our resources are yours to command.’

Rozin was pointing again. ‘What is that?’

Zauber turned to look. The troopers were guiding a capsule out of the transport. It was the size of a large groundcar, and the flanks of the rectangular object were made of what looked like dense crystal. The marshal thought he saw lines of curious glyphs etched in the panels, and small puffs of red smoke spat from the base of the container to dissipate into the ash-filled air. Suddenly, there was the sting of ozone in his nostrils, and something else along with it. The faint odour of old meat.

‘The Warmaster has several… uncommon technologies at his fingertips. That is one of them. The seed of it, at any rate.’ Bruja kept walking, forcing them to turn away and keep up.

‘I don’t follow you,’ said Zauber. ‘Is it a weapon?’

‘A technology,’ Bruja repeated. ‘You need not concern yourself about its function.’ The emissary reached the doors of the council hall and looked up for the first time, into the clouded sky.

Zauber wasn’t certain, but he thought he saw the man smile slightly.

Rozin gave a fragile, nervous laugh. ‘Lord Bruja, forgive me, but you seem so composed in the face of our crisis. You have heard our mayday messages, you know the scope of the phenomena we have been experiencing…’ She swallowed a breath and waved at the heavens. ‘Does this not unsettle you?’

Bruja stopped on the threshold of the hall and gave her his attention. ‘No. On the world where I was born, such a sky would not seem out of place.’

‘Terra?’ Zauber wondered aloud.

The emissary shook his head. ‘A distant colony planet, but I doubt you would have heard its name. Few in this sector know of Davin.’

It meant nothing to Zauber, that was true. ‘Still,’ he began, ‘that you have come so far to aid us speaks greatly to your–’

The marshal’s reply was broken by the sullen slap of a thick, fluid droplet striking the ground near his feet. By reflex, he looked up as more fell, dappling his black jacket. A bead exploded against his face and he flinched, reaching up to wipe off the liquid.

Zauber’s hand came away crimson, and he smelled wet copper. The ash fall had transformed. Now, instead of the flakes of grey ember, a torrent of dark drops came from the sullen clouds, hissing as they kissed the stonework all about them.

Rozin released a piercing shriek and fled into the building, rivulets of red streaking her face and clothing. Zauber staggered after her, feeling his gorge rise. Blood. The rain had become blood, as warm as if it were freshly shed. ‘Wh-what is happening?’ he piped.

Bruja walked slowly, unperturbed by the horrific rains. ‘Don’t fear it,’ he said. ‘You will be saved. All these worlds will be saved.’

‘Saved?’ Zauber forced out the word. He was afraid now, more afraid than he had ever been in his life.

The emissary nodded, a sliver of black tongue appearing at his lips. ‘Signus Prime will be reborn. And you will all be a part of it.’

FOUR

Well Met
Light-Bringers
Angel of Pain

The hull of the Storm Eagle resonated with the pulse of its engines, and reflected shards of alien starlight flickered across the viewports as the craft threaded its way through the Blood Angels warfleet. Standing free in the troop compartment, Brother Meros walked cautiously along the length of the gunship’s loading racks, listening carefully to the motivators in his power armour, to the low whine of the artificial musculature beneath the ceramite sheath. He was pleased to be clad in his battle plate once more; the repair work of the Legion’s Techmarines had fully restored his armour to combat readiness, and there was no trace of the point-blank impact of the eldar soulseeker round that had almost cost him his life. For the first time in weeks, Meros felt correct, his spirits lifted.

The view through the portal did much to enhance his mood. Out in the blackness, as far as his augmented vision could see, there were starships. The majestic sight of them stirred emotion deep in his twin hearts.

An armada of crimson steel and black iron hung in the void, floating there like the vast sculptures of a martial artisan. Huge battle-barges, bespoke creations built in the massive orbital manufactories of Foss, drifted past with stately menace. The size of cities, they bristled with galleries of weapons powerful enough to scour the surface of a planet, and their launch bays were packed with squadrons of attack fighters, bombers and landers. Towers covered their dorsal and ventral hulls, thousands of lights glittering on their flanks, and even at this distance Meros could make out the artistic flourishes of their grand designs – the metal statuary and ornamental forgings that decorated their wide hammerhead bows.

Smaller capital ships moved in the shadow of the bigger craft, but their scale against the barges was deceptive. Many of the other vessels were three or four times the length of the Hermia – grand cruisers and battleships that were more than enough to project the fearsome power of the Imperium. Some were built around the spines of megaweapons, engines and crew compartments clustered about nucleonic lasers, particle bombardment arrays and lance cannon clusters. These in turn were flanked by their own companion ships, riding with escorts, gunboats or destroyers in close formation.

The Storm Eagle banked as it passed over a group of Nova-class frigates in a staggered line-abreast formation, and Meros looked down on the red prows of the warships, the Legion’s sigil emblazoned proudly on their flanks. There were hundreds of ships out here, brought together under the glow of a lonely pulsar, in a region largely devoid of colonial systems – or indeed anything at all. The rendezvous was on the edge of one of the galaxy’s spiral arms, and if one faced in the right direction, the near-lightless infinity of intergalactic space filled the sky. Some might have felt humbled by that, but not Meros. All around him, he saw the living exemplars of the power of the Blood Angels Legion, and by that mark the power of humankind to hold back the night.

These ships and the warriors aboard them were the scions of Baal and Terra, forever challenging the stars. To be part of that great endeavour was to be one among millions; and yet Meros never felt he was diminished because of it. Rather, the grand mission, this Great Crusade, elevated them all.

With the arrival of the Ignis and her task force, the gathering of the Blood Angels host was now complete, and the grand fleet was in preparation to make space for their ultimate destination. The anticipation of the battle they were next to fight gathered in Meros as if it were a tangible energy, like a static charge across his skin. He knew that his brothers felt the same way.

The Storm Eagle’s blunt nose was turning, and suddenly there was a wall of adamantium ahead of them. The heart of the fleet lay ahead: the Red Tear, flagship and chariot of the Angel himself.

Meros took a breath. It was an effort to turn away from the spectacle of the mighty starship, but he did so. His eyes fell on a group of legionaries at the far end of the cargo compartment, their grey armour blending into the metallic hues of the decking.

None of the Space Wolves reacted to his scrutiny, even though they must have noticed it. The sons of Russ spoke quietly amongst themselves, their captain busying himself with the sharpening of the combat knife he wore in a chest-scabbard. The weapon whispered along a whetstone, catching the light as it moved.

Meros was unsure what to expect from the Fenrisians; he had never fought alongside them in battle, and what the Blood Angel knew of the Space Wolves’ reputation came from a mix of tales that painted them as barbarians and brutal lords of war. He was intrigued, though; the Apothecary believed that the measure of a man was best learned directly, not through the experiences of others. He wondered if he would have an opportunity to speak to the Wolf-kindred.

‘They say Russ’s Legion kill and eat their wounded.’ Meros’s squadmate Sarga appeared at his side, his narrow face and tight cowl of blond hair drained of colour by the harsh glow of the cargo bay illuminators. ‘I could believe it.’

Meros eyed him. ‘What do you think they say about us?’ He showed his teeth, the hard light flashing off his canines. ‘That we drink the blood of our enemies? Which is true?’

Sarga’s familiar crooked smile pulled at his lips. ‘Spend some time with Captain Amit’s company and you’ll have that answer, eh?’

The Apothecary’s attention was drawn to the one called Stiel, the Rune Priest. His head was bowed and he was hard at work with a small, thin tool, busy with what appeared to be a length of jawbone. Stiel was carving tiny lines in the bleached surface of the bone, drawing runes and symbols. Clasped in the thick fingers of his battle gauntlet, the etching rod was a tiny thing, yet he moved it back and forth with great dexterity. Other, similarly carved fetishes and trinkets hung from leather cords draped around the Space Wolf’s neck, and Meros found himself wondering after the meanings of them. The Blood Angel’s armour had its own decorative items – campaign studs, the red device of the Prime Helix – but nothing so apparently fragile or impermanent as the bone.

‘Perhaps I should ask the Wolf,’ said Meros. ‘We are all brothers under the Emperor, after all. Legion badge makes no difference.’

Sarga snorted softly, affecting the lightly mocking tone that seemed to be his default manner. ‘Azkaellon would not agree with that. You were there. You saw how Redknife refused to bend the knee to him. I think it true to say that the Guard Commander would have left the Wolves down on the bilge decks if he could have.’ He turned away. ‘Let them be, Meros. If they won’t be drawn on their reasons for joining us, so be it. They can watch us win this coming fight and then take that story back to the Fang. Perhaps we’ll teach the barbarians something.’

Meros frowned, thinking of Stiel’s careful carving. ‘They’re not barbarians. One could use that word for the junkhunters and desert tribes on Baal, and be just as mistaken. If Azkaellon thinks that, he should reconsider.’

‘Tell him yourself, then.’ Sarga jerked a thumb at the bow. ‘He’s in the cockpit right now. I’m sure he’d appreciate your input.’

‘I’ll keep my own counsel,’ Meros replied, following him back down the length of the craft. ‘If the illustrious commander wants to hear from one as far down the ranks as me, I’m sure he knows where to look.’

‘No doubt,’ Sarga said wryly.

Red lights flashed into life over their heads and a hooting klaxon sounded twice.

From the acceleration frames, Sergeant Cassiel gave a shout that carried the length of the troop bay. ‘We’re landing! Take your places, make ready and be on your watch! This is the primarch’s flagship, and we will show it respect!’

The Storm Eagle’s nose dipped and the smooth passage through vacuum became the shudder of atmospheric flight as the ship crossed through the Red Tear’s atmospheric envelope.

Meros took a last look out of the viewport, and saw red iron flash past him, swallowed moments later by the brilliant glare of service lamps.

The crimson Storm Eagle was just one among many, flights of them hanging from maintenance racks overhead or nestled in arming pits where Legion serfs were loading rocket pods and missiles onto under-wing hardpoints. Its entrance would have gone unnoticed but for the high rank of one of its passengers and the delay in its arrival. Brother Kano was observing from the main gantry as Azkaellon marched down the boarding ramp to be met by Sergeant Zuriel, and the two Sanguinary Guard shared a terse greeting. Their gold armour stood out starkly against the steel of the landing platform. Azkaellon did not wait for the rest of the party on board to disembark, setting off swiftly with Zuriel, leaving the contingent of warriors from the Ninth Company to find their own way.

Kano watched Azkaellon go, sensing the dark mood that trailed him like a shadow; but then he dismissed the thought as a smile crossed his lips. A familiar face appeared among the Blood Angels emerging from beneath the Storm Eagle’s fuselage, and he strode down to meet him. ‘Meros!’

The Apothecary looked up and returned the same grin. ‘Kano! Well met, brother.’ They shook hands warmly, and Meros nodded. ‘I might have known I would see you here, in the heart of it all.’

‘The First Company,’ he replied. ‘We are ever the tip of the lance.’

One of Meros’s squadmates eyed him. ‘Just tell your honoured captain to remember to save us some foes to smite, eh?’

‘This is Sarga,’ said Meros. ‘He saved my life on Nartaba Octus, and that’s made him hungry to be a hero again.’

Kano raised an eyebrow. ‘I’m sure Raldoron will have work enough for Captain Furio and the rest of you.’

Meros laughed. ‘You don’t change, brother.’

His friend’s off-hand comment had an unexpected bite that the former Librarian didn’t expect, but he shrugged it off. ‘I’ve been known to. But that’s not the issue… Mark me, but I expected to see nothing but your gene-seed return from Nartaba. The eldar…’ He paused as he saw Meros’s expression darken. ‘We were told it was hard fought back there.’

The squad sergeant came within earshot, nodding grimly. ‘Aye, that’s the fact.’ He gave him a look. ‘You’re Kano, then? I am Cassiel. I understand Meros would have been dead five years back if not for you?’

‘A minor incident on Brecht IX. I was just in the right place at the right time, sergeant,’ Kano said, dismissing the comment. ‘And I owe Meros as much as he owes me.’

Sarga smirked. ‘For a medicae, our errant battle-brother has a marked tendency to put himself in harm’s way, don’t you think?’

‘I have no wish for death,’ Meros retorted. ‘Glory, though…’ He grinned. ‘In the Angel’s name, I’ll take all of that.’

The good humour of the meeting waned a little as Kano considered his friend’s words. ‘There will be opportunity for both in equal measure, brothers, if the rumours through the fleet are to be believed.’

‘Never been one for shipboard gossip,’ Cassiel said with a grimace.

Sarga cocked his head. ‘I could stand to hear it. Or has it escaped everyone’s notice that we are amongst a gathering of heroes so large that it blots out suns? How many of us are there here in this place? The entire Legion?’

‘There will be a small caretaker force back on the home world,’ said Meros. ‘But aye, Sarga is correct. I’ve never seen so many of our starships in one location before.’

‘It is happening,’ Kano agreed, ‘by the direct order of the Warmaster. He sent a cohort of Word Bearers to carry the command and accompany us.’

Cassiel’s lip curled. ‘More outsiders?’

‘More?’ repeated Kano.

Meros inclined his head towards the Storm Eagle, where a second group of legionaries were disembarking. Kano raised an eyebrow at the figures in grey, watching the Space Wolves as they were formally greeted by a black-armoured Warden. For an instant his glance caught the blank gaze of a warrior in a skull-helm at the back of the group. An old, recognisable sensation began to build behind his eyes, but he cut it dead before it could fully form, breaking away and bringing his attention back to Meros and the others. ‘Why are they here?’

‘Your guess is as good as ours,’ said Sarga. ‘Came out of nowhere, they did. With orders from the Sigillite to join the grand fleet.’

Kano frowned. ‘The workings of the minds of the Council of Terra are not revealed in their deeds. I can’t help but wonder what decisions are made in the halls of the Imperial Palace that we are not privy to.’

‘We are Legion,’ said Cassiel. ‘Ours is to obey and trust in men elevated above us.’

‘We are, yes.’ Sarga glanced at the sergeant. ‘I’ll follow my primarch into the maw of a black hole if he wishes it. But Kano’s right – the Regent and his ilk? They are not of the Legion. Not like us, or them.’ He nodded at the Space Wolves, as they moved away towards one of the elevator platforms. ‘Or even the Word Bearers. Can politicians and legislators understand what it is we have done out here? That’s a long, long view from the halls of Terra.’

‘Their words are good enough for the Angel.’ Cassiel gave him a cold stare. ‘They are good enough for you, legionary.’

‘The question that occupies my thoughts remains closer at hand,’ said Meros. He glanced towards Kano. ‘How many of our battle-brothers are at this rendezvous? A hundred thousand?’

‘More,’ he replied, without hesitation. ‘Every one of the companies is represented here, aboard the barges and the command carriers.’

‘A considerable assembly, and one that I would warrant has seldom been repeated in the history of our Legion.’ The Apothecary nodded to himself. ‘Brothers, if we are gathered in such numbers, the question must be asked: what kind of foe are we to be ranged against?’

‘Aye,’ agreed Sarga. ‘We could mount an entire crusade of our own with this army! Meros is right. What’s out there of such threat it needs a hammer this large to break it?’

‘That answer will become clear soon enough,’ said a stern voice. As one, the Blood Angels turned to see the black-armoured Warden approaching them, the bleak visage of his helmet sweeping across their faces. ‘You concern yourself with things beyond your remit.’

Kano frowned. ‘You cannot expect a warrior to meet war and not wish to know why, Annellus.’ From the back, he hadn’t recognised the acerbic Warden’s armour. Now he wondered how much of the conversation Annellus had heard. ‘We are not automata.’

‘You are weapons,’ the Warden retorted. ‘We all are. Blades in the hand of the Angel, sworn to his commands.’

‘I never said otherwise,’ Meros challenged the Warden’s caustic tone. ‘And if I am to fight and die for Sanguinius, I will do so. But all I ask is to know what I face.’

Kano watched as Annellus came up to study Meros, the ruby-tinted lenses of his helmet reflecting his battle-brother’s dark eyes. ‘Are you afraid of what you do not know?’ he demanded.

Sarga let out a low snort. Meros glared back at the Warden. ‘Don’t doubt my resolve.’

‘I am a Warden of the Legion,’ Annellus told him. ‘Matters of resolve are my concern.’ Before anyone else could answer, the warrior turned away from Meros, his gaze dwelling on Kano for a moment before moving on. ‘If we question where we need not, we undermine, and in that the seeds of defeat are sown even before the first shot rings out.’ His hand fell to the crozius chained at his hip. ‘Trust your commanders. Know that their orders are true. All else is of secondary concern...’ He trailed off, cocking his head. Kano knew the gesture; he was listening to a vox-signal on a closed channel.

‘If it’s all the same to you, Warden,’ said Sarga, ‘I’ll wait to hear it from the Angel’s lips.’

Annellus looked up. ‘You won’t need to wait, brother.’ He pointed upwards. ‘See.’

All across the Blood Angels battlefleet, golden vox-horns mounted in every wall sounded in a triumphant chorus. The first few bars of the Anthem Sanguinatus played down corridors and across decks; every being aboard the ships from Legion serf to company commander knew what those tones signified. The primarch was about to address them.

For a moment, all activity came to a halt. Only mindless servitors and mechanical cogitator units went on about their tasks, oblivious to the great import of the lines of machine-call data reaching out invisibly from the Red Tear, lines of data bidding the other vessels in the fleet to pay heed. Pict-screens on billet deck bulkheads and in the open refectories became active. Intercoms went online automatically. Legionaries sealed in their armour found their vox-channels redirected and commandeered, and in spaces where hololithic projector heads were mounted, ghostly shimmers of light faded into being.

One of the Red Tear’s many hololithic modules was fitted into the roof of the landing bay where Meros and the others now stood, hundreds of metres up above them. With a gleam of captured photons, the ghost of a great figure appeared, dwarfing the warriors who raised their faces to look up.

Resplendent in glittering armour, shrouded in white wings that vanished as they passed beyond the sphere of the image projector’s radius, the Primarch Sanguinius appeared to his Legion with his expression set in a steady, watchful aspect. ‘My sons,’ he began, his voice echoing down kilometres of now silent corridors, ‘well met. My heart swells with pride to see such splendour in your numbers. The Great Crusade has never seen the like.’

Proud and resolute, even in this virtual form he radiated a confidence so vital that any shadows of doubt among his sons were, for the moment, banished beneath his light. The detail of the primarch’s intricately-worked power armour was rendered perfectly, the sculpted edges of the golden plate visible along with the fine etching across the brassarts, shoulder guards and breastplate. On his chest was a heavy ornamental roundel carved from huge Megladari rubies. The central jewel was cut into the shape of a heart and set on a mount of gold flames, and it signified the burning spirit of the Blood Angels as expressed through their primarch. Atop it were four more ruby discs, each dedicated to one of the worlds where the Legion had drawn its numbers – Terra, in the first instance, then Baal and her two moons. Across one shoulder he wore a ceremonial war cloak, the black-dappled pelt of a carnodon; similar in form to the extinct snow leopards of old Earth but much, much larger, the ice stalker had been Sanguinius’s first kill during the pacification of Teghar Pentarus, his initial battle after reuniting with his father.

‘We have a mission,’ he told them. ‘One that only our Legion can follow to its completion. My brother, the Warmaster, has entrusted us with a duty vital to the future of the Imperium.’

He relayed the orders that Horus had given him, grimly revealing the return of the old xenos adversary, the facts of the nephilim’s invasion and likely conversion of a densely-populated Imperial dominion. ‘In the Signus Cluster, the light of illumination has dwindled to the smallest of embers. Those among those worlds that still hold true to Imperial Truth and their federation with Terra most likely think themselves abandoned or without hope. This cannot stand, my sons.’ His noble aspect became stern and uncompromising. ‘Once before we faced the nephilim and fought them unto death. We believed that they were cast down and destroyed, but like a canker, they survived and have grown to plague humanity again. This is not a universe of mythology and false truth!’ The primarch’s hand rose and closed into a fist. ‘We do not cower in the darkness in fear of ghostly powers and metaphysical phantoms! We do not give worship to false gods! There is only reason and enlightenment, and we are the light-bringers.’

Throughout the fleet, legionaries raised their mailed fists and slammed them against their breastplates in salute, giving voice to their assent with a roar. Aboard the Red Tear, Meros and the others joined in; the clamour was so loud it carried up through the halls of the battle-barge.

Sanguinius heard them, the sound of so many upraised voices resonating across the decks, and he gave a smile of acknowledgment. All around him on the flagship’s command deck, the human crew serfs stood by their stations at steady attention, while Commander Azkaellon and his Sanguinary Guards bowed their heads. At the master’s throne, Admiral DuCade mirrored the stance of her men, as rigid as if she were carved out of marble.

The primarch appraised them with a look, gauging them for the battle to come. Just as he expected, he did not find them wanting. The hololithic plate holding him in its glow rendered every tiny movement of his wings, his face, his armoured form. Sanguinius looked forwards and spoke as if he were talking to each warrior of his Legion as an individual.

‘My sons. This will be a hard-fought campaign, have no question in your hearts. The nature of this foul alien enemy is well known to us, and we will not claim victory with ease. The nephilim are cornered and they will fight to the bitter end to resist extinction. Some of us may never see the sands of Baal again, but we will all fight knowing that this mission cannot fail. Horus has called upon our Legion to carry out this battle and we will answer him with victory! For the future of mankind, the nephilim must be ended… and as we defeated them once before, we shall defeat them again. These creatures cannot be allowed to live on. Their horrors must be put to the sword, their slaves liberated.’ He trailed off and drew his wings close to him. ‘We will do these things. We are the Blood Angels, and we fear not. We are proud sons of the Imperium and the protectors of mankind. We are the Angels of Death and the Emperor’s Wrath!’

The shouts came again, and this time it was almost as if the Red Tear were shaking with the force of so many warriors joined in martial zeal.

The primarch nodded and turned away from the hololith, the relay fading out. Raldoron was there at his side, the First Captain’s face set in a severe mask.

Sanguinius stepped closer to his trusted officer. ‘You do not join your voice to the affirmation, captain? Should I ask why?’

When Raldoron spoke, it was in a low tone that was shared only between the warrior and his warlord. ‘I affirm,’ he said. ‘But these orders – and the deeper truth beneath them – trouble me.’

The Angel’s smile faded away. He had revealed some of the message sent by Horus to his closest confidants, to those who knew the sorrowful matter of the lost. Now, for a moment, he wondered if he had been wrong to do so. ‘Speak your mind, Ral,’ he told him.

‘I would not presume to go against your orders, my lord,’ said the officer. ‘But this mission, and the… the resolution that may await us in the Signus Cluster. Must we still conceal this from your sons?’ Raldoron looked away. ‘Master, you may think less of me, but I swear to you the burden of this knowledge weighs heavy upon me. It always has.’

‘I know.’ Sanguinius nodded once. ‘So too it does for all who share it, and none more than I. But this is not the time, my friend.’

‘Perhaps,’ Raldoron demurred. ‘But that time will come, my lord. And it will not be at a moment of your choosing, unless you make it so.’

He nodded again. ‘This too is clear to me. You have my gratitude, Ral, that you are here to remind me. Trust me when I tell you, we will defeat our adversaries.’ He smiled again. ‘All of them, without and within.’

The primarch turned back to the central operations dais to meet Admiral DuCade’s waiting gaze. ‘What is your command, my lord?’ she asked. ‘All ships report ready to translate to the immaterium. We await your word.’

‘The word is given,’ Sanguinius told her. ‘Light the drives and take us in.’ He pointed out through the armourglass windows that stretched across the length of the flying bridge as Raldoron stepped up to his side. ‘All speed to Signus.’

The gates of reality broke open and the fleet surged into the immaterium. Hundreds of Navigators, chaining their thoughts together into a web of subsumed egos, guided the Blood Angels starships out of the darkness of the void and into a very different kind of abyss. The screaming madness of non-space embraced them. Some among the Navigators, the most experienced of their number, sensed a shift in the transit. Something subtle, something so vague it barely registered.

Warp travel was never a thing of ease, and given the recent rise of storms and psychic turbulence in the immaterium, the forecast for the deployment was guarded. It was not unknown for ships to be torn apart simply by the act of translation; punching a hole in space-time was not just a matter of opening a doorway, but an event of great violence and power. In dimensional transition these tragedies happened, and it was an accepted part of the voyage, a necessary risk. The greater the skill of the Navigator, the less likely it would be, but in a fleet as large as this one, in a mass translation event, there was a good chance that some craft would be damaged or even destroyed.

There were none. Not one vessel of the Blood Angels fleet suffered even the smallest iota of warp-effect harm. It was as if the immaterium had welcomed them with the ease of a blade slipped into water.

Aboard the Dark Page, the Acolyte Kreed felt the brief whisper of communion as the Word Bearers ship translated with the Blood Angels fleet, and he chuckled. The touch of the immaterium upon his soul was like nectar, and the loss of it immediately brought a ripple of sorrow as it passed on, fading.

One day he would feel that touch and it would stay with him, Kreed told himself. One day, he would be blessed beyond all measure.

The Acolyte turned away from the churning crimson sky beyond the windows of the wide sacellum chamber, and moved back into the centre of the chapel-like room, glancing at Captain Harox. While Kreed had removed his armour and returned to robes of office, Harox, resplendent in his ascended livery, the etchings of text upon his battle plate corrupted and broken, forming new words and symbols that spelt out a blasphemous litany. And if the light shone upon Harox just so, one could see what appeared to be a complex net of octal stars buried in the sheen of the plate.

The Acolyte’s smile deepened and he pulled back the hood of his robes. As he approached the figure lying in a heap across the middle of the chamber floor, Kreed allowed himself to think about his future, and the promises he had been given.

Kreed licked his lips and dared to wonder what it would be like to live with the touch of the warp within his flesh every second of every day. The thought of it aroused sensations in him that he could not quantify, but did not wish to cease.

The woman Sahzë looked up at the Acolyte from beneath the crook of her arm and whimpered. She was crying black tears and shivering beneath the gossamer shift she wore. Absently, Kreed remembered that humans found temperatures such as those in the sacellum chamber discomforting, but he was not inclined to address the matter.

‘Up,’ he told her, beckoning Sahzë to her feet. ‘Quickly now. You must make the connection before the transit is complete, or else the other astropaths in the fleet may sense it.’

Sahzë climbed unsteadily to her full height, listing as if she were drunk. The woman touched her belly. ‘It burns me,’ she told him. ‘How much longer must I carry this burden, Kreed?’ The astropath sounded out his name, turning it into a keening, feline yowl.

He studied her. The warp flask implanted in her flesh was eating her from the inside, and the agony was intense; but she had much yet to do and he told her so, ignoring Sahzë as her weeping began anew. ‘Let me speak to him,’ Kreed commanded.

The astropath shuddered as the flask opened inside her. Without the need to pretend in front of the Word Bearers, the woman shrieked in pain and vomited up ectoplasm in puffs of white vapour and the pink mist of spittle and blood. Sahzë stumbled back down to her knees, her cries becoming growling and guttural, and Kreed listened to the crackle of her joints as her bones locked against one another in spasm.

A face formed in the smoke, and it resembled Horus Lupercal. A mouth opened, cloudy lips moving. ‘Report,’ it demanded.

‘We are underway,’ Kreed said, bowing low. ‘The assemblage is great, Warmaster. Almost all of the Ninth Legion heeded their primarch’s call.’

‘The rest we will cull when this is done,’ offered the face. ‘Baal will burn again, and this time for good.’

‘Sanguinius has accepted your words as the truth,’ continued the Acolyte. ‘He has committed his sons to the battle and they follow him without question.’

‘Of course.’ The smoke-face shifted, becoming hard-edged and planar. ‘He trusts me. The greatest weapon, given freely.’ A curl of cold amusement appeared and disappeared. ‘The ease of this… Once one moves past the horror of betrayal, it is so very potent.’ Suddenly, the face turned and Kreed was beneath the full power of its scrutiny, undimmed by the great distances between them. ‘You understand, Word Bearer, Sanguinius is loyal but he is not a fool. If… when he suspects, he will become the most dangerous enemy to our endeavours.’

Kreed stiffened. ‘He has no reason to do so. The Blood Angels believe to a man that they go to face the xenos. By the time they understand that the reality facing their Legion is quite different, it will be too late.’

‘See to it,’ the face told him, dissipating into icy haze.

Kano’s cell was roomy, as such chambers went, easily large enough for a pair of neophytes to call it home. It was a hold-over from his previous duties in the Librarius, a compact and spare cabin on the ventral decks of the Red Tear with walls of heavy iron, a good pallet and an arming rack erected in the far corner. Before the Decree of Nikaea had prohibited psychic warfare among the ranks of the Blood Angels, men like Kano – the Lexicania, Epistolaries and Codiciers – had been granted the use of cells like this one. Inside, they could meditate and hone their gifts in a place of relative serenity. Such a sanctum, as small as it was, had great value and while others without Kano’s gifts could use them as well, they did not connect to the peace they instilled in quite the same way. After the edict, many of the former psykers now shared the same dormatoria as their non-operant battle-brothers, but the use of the meditation cells was still open to them.

Kano had no doubt that the Wardens watched closely whenever a former member of his select kindred came to the cells. As he sat there, moderating his breathing, part of him wondered if even now Annellus or one of his kind was being alerted as to Kano’s appearance. He dismissed the idea; the opinions of Yason Annellus were not his concern.

He disconnected from the events of the past few days. Kano closed his eyes, allowing his implanted catalepsean node to negate any need for sleep. He entered an alpha state, and there in the halls of his calmed mind, he reached for a zone of tranquillity.

In the days ahead, he told himself, he would need to remember such a moment of calm, so he might focus and bring the full power of his warrior’s wrath to the xenos.

This was the mantra circling through his thoughts when the deck beneath his boots broke apart like brittle ice and he fell through into a footless hall of black air.

Gravity claimed Kano and dragged on him with invisible chains, while stinking winds buffeted his body. The air currents reeked of slaughterhouse odour, pulling violently at his robes as if they wished to strip him naked and then to the bone.

He was falling forever, and the crack in the deck that had swallowed him up was gone. Now there was nothing but the yawning, howling darkness and a torrent of ashen flecks that hung suspended like snowflakes in an updraft.

A fragment of Kano’s mind – a faraway piece of him, as distant to this experience as his body was to the far-flung deserts of his birth on Baal – knew that he was dreaming this. He was in the throes of a vision, wrenched out of his flesh and projected into a realm of spirits and symbols; but one no less real, no less lethal.

It was the warp. Inside the starship, despite acres of adamantium and the power of protective Geller fields, regardless of his own innate mental barriers, the sheer psychic force of the immaterium was dragging Kano back into himself. The touch of it forced his mind into places he had denied, made him re-ignite fires that had burned out and become cold embers.

He struggled, desperate to disengage and revert to the meat-and-blood reality of the waking world. The dream would not let him go.

The ash-flecks melted into drops of scarlet and Kano continued to fall, faster and faster now, beyond all true velocity, becoming a comet of flesh through the dark. Instinctively he knew that somewhere below there was an ending to this, an immeasurable surface upon which he would smash like a doll made of porcelain. He would be shattered.

But he could arrest the fall with a thought. All he needed to do was break the edict. Let the fires of his mind burn again. Kano could hear that thought coming from outside his head, so powerful it was. It echoed through the darkness, offering him hope and escape.

And if he did… what then? He swore an oath to deny his preternatural powers, and the echo of that vow was still strong, buried just below the surface of his thoughts. He could not betray it, he would not allow himself to show weakness.

The rumble of air around Kano shifted in tone, becoming louder, deafening. The fall was ending. He was very close now. It would be over soon, and he would die there, trembling on the floor of the iron cell, dashed against the walls of his own mind. To die in the dream was to perish in the real.

In those last moments, he saw a shape. A human figure, or something that attempted to be so. It was coming up out of the darkness, straight towards him, and it was screaming.

The figure was a man, a warrior in heavy armour that glistened with wet crimson and hellish red radiance. Blackened hair trailed from his head, and he was surrounded by a halo of giddy, coruscating lightning that threw off sparks of sickening false-colour radiation. He was buoyed on the poisonous windstorm, raised aloft by a pair of massive wings unfolding from his back, and they were drenched in vitae. Every feather was dripping with purple fluids, and Kano knew it was tainted blood, spilling from the veins of the screaming, red-stained angel.

The shrieking cadence from his lips pierced Kano’s soul, reached inside his mind and hammered at his reason. They were spiralling towards one another, heartbeats away from collision; and in that instant, their gazes met. He saw fear in those eyes, fear and hate and other, darker things.

Then the screams became his own and his hands came up to shield his face as the blurred figure filled his vision–

Kano awoke.

He rolled over, sweat slick across his dark skin, the aftershock of adrenaline coursing through his trans-human form. The walls of the meditation cell came into sharp focus and he blinked, regaining some sense of where he was.

‘Brother Kano,’ said a languid, flat voice. He turned and found a hunchbacked servitor standing in the doorway, one of the maintenance helots that worked the chambers on this tier. It regarded him with idiot eyes. ‘I was alerted by sounds of distress. Are you unwell? Do you require a medicae?’

‘Get out,’ he barked at it.

‘Compliance,’ said the machine-slave, with no variance in tone. It ambled around in a circle and wandered away.

With care, Kano got to his feet and moved to the refresher unit, taking some water to wash his face and then cup to his mouth to drink.

He found it curiously hard to look up into the mirror, and when he did, he saw nothing untoward; but the vivid dream-vision he had seen lurked behind his eyes and was not easily dismissed.

A red-stained angel of pain. What was the meaning of this image? Was his mind trying to process some fragment of warp echo that had crossed into his thoughts? Had he experienced some omen of ill-fate?

Kano snorted and tried to reject the image. Omens and portents were the remit of primitives and religionists, not a rational warrior of the secular Imperium. They were…

They were…

He blinked and looked at his reflection again, as something returned to him from the dream-vision.

The eyes. The eyes were known to him.

‘Stiel,’ called the battle captain. ‘To me! Or do my words have little merit to you?’ The words were harsh and full of broken fricatives, the combative tongue of Fenris lacking the glossy rhythm of standard Imperial Gothic.

The seer looked away from the patch of dull metal bulkhead that had been occupying his sight and met Redknife’s gaze. ‘Forgiveness, jarl,’ he said. ‘My thoughts were disturbed by our passing into the ghost-realm.’

‘Be sure our angelic hosts are not aware of that,’ Redknife warned. ‘The black-armoured one watches you for witchery.’

Stiel gave a thin smile, pulling at the ink-vine scar that crossed the length of his face. ‘My deeds are as opaque as my words. They can see through neither unless I wish it.’

The captain did not return his amusement. ‘You underestimate our cousins, skald. Their gold and jewels mask a killer’s soul, and we would do well to remember that.’

The Rune Priest stood and began a slow orbit of the dormitory chambers. Unlike the spartan spaces aboard Space Wolves vessels, the quarters aboard the Blood Angels ship were fabricated with a degree of artistry that Stiel found interesting but ultimately needless. He picked up a water goblet from a nearby table; even that seemed detailed with decoration beyond the need for such a common object.

‘We know what must be done, brothers. From this moment onwards, a Space Wolf must be within reach of the Angel at all times.’ Redknife continued his address to the rest of his squad, each of them collected in a close group around the captain. Only one other stood away from them, at a guardian stance near the door that led into the corridors beyond.

The legionary gave Stiel a nod. So far, no Blood Angel or Legion serf had come within earshot of their conversation. Even though they spoke in the near-impenetrable words of the old tongue, it was important they not be overheard; one of Redknife’s Techmarines had swept the chamber for monitoring devices the moment they had arrived there.

‘Those were Malcador’s orders,’ said Stiel. ‘Until he countermands them.’

‘If he countermands them,’ Redknife replied.

The Rune Priest halted, and the question that had been pressing at him since the moment they set off for the Nartaba system pushed to the front of his thoughts. ‘Have we considered… if we enact our orders to the full letter… What will become of us?’

‘That is obvious, skald,’ said one of the other Wolves, a young blade named Valdin. ‘We will die. They will kill us all. Did you think there would be any other outcome?’

Stiel ignored the comment. ‘He will want to see us. The Angel. He will ask us the same questions as the Guard Commander.’

‘I will give Sanguinius the same answers,’ Redknife told him.

‘You will lie to the brother of Russ?’ said the psyker. ‘To his face?’

Redknife’s eyes became flinty. ‘I did not say there would be honour in it. I said I would do it. Malcador ordered this, by the Emperor’s fiat and the Great Wolf’s agreement.’ He stood and crossed to Stiel. ‘Do you understand, brother? I know what I have accepted in this duty. I know what it means. If the runes fall poorly, I know it will be dishonourable and marked with bloodshed. But I do it just the same, for the Allfather.’ He sighed. ‘Our deaths are assured. But we must do this. We must be ready to enact the ultimate sanction upon Sanguinius, if the moment comes.’

Stiel shook his head. ‘I hear you say the words and I obey. But I cannot accept that we might attempt to kill a…’ He faltered, unable to say the words.

The import of what remained unspoken hung heavy in the air. Slowly, the captain reached out his hand and placed it on the skald’s shoulder. ‘We are the only ones who can carry this duty,’ said Redknife, and suddenly there was sorrow in his tone. ‘This is the burden of the Space Wolves, the reason we were made in Russ’s image. We are the executioner’s sons, bred to do the unthinkable, to fight the impossible battles. It is why we are here.’ He looked away, grimly taking in the faces of his men. ‘It is why our battle-brothers followed the Great Wolf against the Crimson King to censure him for his sorcery.’

Stiel found a sudden jolt of understanding in his commander’s words. ‘The witch-lord Magnus disobeyed, and we are here to make sure that Sanguinius does not do the same.’

‘If one son can defy his father…’ Redknife gave a nod, his hand dropping away. ‘That is the matter of it, skald. And know too that we are not the only ones. Other jarls are on other ships, or else in transit, seeking to place themselves in line-of-sight to all of the Emperor’s sons. To be ready. To watch.’

The thought of such a thing, of such further betrayal, sickened the Rune Priest, but he pushed the sensation away. ‘The Blood Angels would slit our throats for even daring to voice such a possibility.’

‘True. So we will remain silent and stand sentinel.’

‘And what of Magnus the Red?’ said Valdin. ‘We were far from Prospero when these orders came to us. We have no word of what followed the Wolf King’s reprimand of the magician.’

‘Aye,’ muttered Stiel. ‘Are we to mention nothing of the Thousand Sons and their misdeeds?’

‘What could we say?’ Redknife asked him. ‘That the Sigillite keeps this truth silent on Terra? If that were common knowledge, there would be mayhem. No, Valdin is right. We do not know the full scope of what has transpired, either to incur the Emperor’s displeasure or the punishment of Prospero.’ He nodded once again. ‘For now, the matter of Magnus’s disobedience will not be revealed to the Blood Angels. We will stand to, and we will wait.’ The captain looked away. ‘And in the name of Fenris, I beg the fates that we will not have to do anything at all.’

FIVE

Sight
Something Like a Name
Remnants

He was falling forever.

That had never happened before, not in centuries of war. On myriad worlds, in a thousand different skies, he had never fallen. It was not possible, it defied reality.

I cannot fall, he told himself, but even as the words formed in his mind, he tasted the sour untruth of them. Gravity, heavy as regret, had him in its thrall, pulling him down and down into an abyss beyond reckoning. There was a blackness surrounding him that had no depth to it, so stygian and formless that even his superhuman senses could register nothing of its scope or scale. The raging, shrieking torrents of air ripping past him beat hard against his face, his limbs, his torso. The generous cut of the robes he wore had turned them into flails, the heavy cloth snapping at him, beating his flesh. Ornate medallions, honours and battle tokens were ripped from their mountings, and they tumbled away in blinks of gold, pearl and red jade, parchment tapers flapping behind them. The impossible fall was trying to tear him out of his adornment, pare him down to what he was at his core. Skin, bone and spirit.

His senses filled with the hurricane noise of the winds and the foul, clogging stink of the air. A portion of his mind sifted the scent by reflex, breaking the streams of it into levels and sub-components. An overpowering odour of old blood, clotting and polluted like fouled oil, the sour midden-pit bass of faeces and decaying meats, a warzone’s cordite-stew of fyceline and spent promethium, dead flowers and burned sand. Each polluted breath sickened him, forcing him to isolate his gag reflex with a muscle-twitch.

Particles of wet ash – or were they? – rained past, floating as if suspended in the foetid air. They blossomed into speckles of liquid as he struck them. When he spun about, trying to wipe the stinging little impacts from his bare skin, bright crimson blood, rich with the colour and warm to his touch, streaked across his long-fingered hands.

And still he was turning, wheeling, falling.

I cannot fall, he told himself.

The refrain grew into a sound – not words, but an angered snarl of defiance. He tore at the robes around his chest and his back, balling bunches of the material in his fists, ripping at it. The fabric parted with a sound like shredding muscle and the hungry updraft took it away; a flicker of motion swallowed by the dark.

He knew it was a dream, and yet he did not. These two conflicting truths existed in his mind at once, each pulling against the other, but neither so strong as to shatter the reality that was unfolding. The pathway back towards the real was high up above, within reach if only… if only…

He clawed at his back and with shock, he found only broken stubs of bone protruding from beneath the planes of his shoulder blades. Where two magnificent wings had once risen to cleave the sky, pitiful stubs of cracked white drooled slick trails of spilled marrow. He touched raw, exposed nerves and torn arteries, and a scream boiled in his chest, trying to escape his lips.

He swallowed it and his vision fogged, the sudden sickening truth filling him with icy certainty. Struggling, he turned inwards, trying to find the way to break his mind free of the torment it had created. The dream would not let him go.

Faster and faster, until the speed became immeasurable, he cannoned through the yawning, endless chasm towards the ending that had to be hiding far below.

I cannot fall. Now the words sounded foolish and misguided, like the insistence of a primitive who believed that sunrise would not come unless he offered a sacrifice to make it so.

Without his wings, he was… what?

The same as all the rest of them? A hobbled parody of his former self, a spectre, a pale warning?

Rage flared in his chest, detonating like a bomb-blast. A red haze of instantaneous fury boiled through him, and he saw it in his veins, invisible threads of intent churning and intertwining with the spirals of his gene-matter. Anger unlocking something dark and monstrous inside his spirit; two great shadows lurching forwards.

One rising fast, growing large, red as hell and screaming its thirst for blood.

Another, coiling in the distance, yet to truly form, as black as space and blinding in the terrifying madness of its rage.

‘No!’ The shout echoed without ending. He held up his hands to stop them, deny them. ‘I… cannot… fall!’

The echoes rebounded off a shape in the gloom below, a thing of speed and sinuous curves, flashing slick darkness, coming towards him on sails that cut the stinking air. Rising towards him. Screaming. Bleeding.

A warrior, ironclad and daubed head-to-toe in crimson vitae, the glow of dead singularities and murdered stars enveloping him, nauseating light leaking from the joints and cracks in his sundered armour. Ashen tresses stark about his howling, unknowable face; and against the surging current of poison air, the skeletal wings of a carrion eater reaching from his back.

Each feather of the pinion was soaked to the core with polluted blood, trails of it streaming away behind into a new storm. The screaming, red-stained angel was reaching for him, coming up to meet him. Brimming with hateful reproach and accusation.

He knew that this hate was deserved. In his hearts, he knew it without hesitation or compromise. The shrieks of abject pain were razors over his spirit, stoking growth of the black and red shadows.

He could not stop the fall. They spiralled close, the impact impossible to escape; and in that instant, their gazes met.

He saw fear and hate and other, darker things.

He saw a Red Angel–

The primarch’s eyes snapped open, and if Azkaellon or any of the other Sanguinary Guard had been looking at him at that precise moment, they might have captured the sight of a micro-expression upon his face that broke the beatific lines of his countenance.

He looked inwards, and his perfect sense of the passage of time told him that only instants had passed between the moment he closed his eyes and then opened them again. A few seconds at the most; but then linear time meant nothing in dreams, or in the warp. In that way, both places were the same, and not for the first time, Sanguinius wondered how close the connections between the sea of sleep and the immaterium really were.

The dream; it could not be a coincidence that it had come to him, here and now, outside the bounds of his usual regimen of meditation and inner reflection. They were deep in warp-space, surrounded on all sides by growing storm fronts of wraithlike energy. The Legion’s Navigators had been pushed hard to steer the fleet across such a great transgalactic distance, and the unstable topography of the ethereal realm had not been with them.

The Angel’s flash of emotion – perhaps sorrow, perhaps fury – passed in the blink of an eye and his hands relaxed from the fists they had made. At last the Guard Commander sensed something and cocked his head, a quizzical expression forming on his face. ‘My lord?’

‘How long?’ Sanguinius leaned forwards in his control throne and indicated the viewing portal across his chambers, heading off any further questions. The far wall was part of the great dorsal hull tower of the Red Tear, an angled plane open to space through a massive dome of armourglass and ribbed plasteel. On the other side of the thick transparent barrier, out past the shining membrane of the battle-barge’s Geller fields, a boiling sea of madness forever churned and spat, lashing at the human starships as the grand fleet passed through its domain.

‘Any moment now, sir.’ Azkaellon peered discreetly at a monitor panel built into the vambrace of his battle armour.

Sanguinius did not acknowledge the reply, his focus momentarily elsewhere. The dream-instance had been broken, but the sense of it clung on to him, as if he had brought a measure of the experience back with him into the waking world. Sense memory of the winds and their foetor dwelled in his thoughts, and worse still was the horrible echo of the emptiness that he had felt for his lost wings.

The Angel did not dismiss the dream as some might, as a random collection of harmless images created by the repose of an active mind. There was always more, lurking in the symbology and portents.

The sight of the Red Angel troubled Sanguinius, and he wondered after his brother Angron, for that name had, on occasion, been hung upon the warlord of the World Eaters. But even as the thought formed, he knew it was erroneous. Angron’s vital, elemental rage was not what he had felt in the vision; it was something different, something personal. That he did not know what it was troubled him greatly.

Sanguinius looked up and gazed through the armourglass dome, out into the warp. It seemed to swirl around the triangular bow of the Red Tear, forming a rippling tunnel down which the Blood Angels fleet raced; but no, not a tunnel. A pit.

The image swam and the primarch’s jaw set as his perception altered. The fleet was suddenly spiralling into an abyssal deep, diving into the yawning nothingness.

‘I cannot fall.’ He was unsure if the words had actually left his lips in a low whisper, or merely played out in his mind; then it became a moot point as a chime sounded from the speaker grilles hidden in the corners of the primarch’s chamber, the devices disguised by the sculpted faces of silver cherubim.

‘All hands, this is the Admiral.’ DuCade’s voice was strong and clear, but the stressor harmonics buried within – indicators of a deep fatigue – were not lost on the Angel. ‘Prepare to translate. Brace for return to real space.’

Azkaellon glanced at his wrist-auspex once more. ‘All ships are reporting ready. Our objective lies before us.’ The Guard Commander looked up as a sheet of brilliant emerald-green lightning washed over the bow of the Red Tear. A massive, planet-sized torus of smoky non-matter puckered and opened ahead of the flotilla to reveal black sky and the distant stars beyond.

Then the warp was gone, a fast-fading memory, and the ships of the massed Blood Angels warfleet thundered back into realspace. Shedding great bow-waves of exotic particles and extreme energies, the flagship and her sister vessels deployed in good order, expanding out into a huge conical formation.

Sanguinius left the command throne and walked to the dome to watch the intricate dance of his starships, each captain performing flawlessly as the fleet became a great dagger poised and ready in the night. He bid Lohgos to hold the ship-to-ship vox-channels open, so that he might listen to the crosstalk between the vessels. In his mind’s eye, the Angel saw the motion of the fleet elements like a dozen games of regicide, one atop another, as each craft found its place for the coming battle. The complexity and the art of it soothed him like the music of a fine symphony. There was such beauty in all things, if only one knew where to look.

A crimson star hung high against the velvet dark, shining hard. Signus Alpha was a red giant of no marked abnormality, a vector at the end of many a colonist’s journey out here to the galactic rim. Rendered smaller by distance was the far blue sun Signus Gamma, and barely visible with it the white dwarf Signus Beta. As before at the rendezvous point, this was a system at the edge of a spiral arm, but further up the curve. From the approach angle chosen by the Blood Angels, the stars and their planetary cluster seemed to lie against a bed of pure, seamless black. The ghost halo of an Oort cloud glistened far above and below, and there were shimmers of strong albedo here and there where the glow of the trinary suns reflected off the planets turning in their long orbital paths.

‘The Signus Cluster,’ announced Zuriel, speaking it aloud for the record of the vox-thieves and hololithic recorders that documented the Red Tear’s missions. ‘Combined Expeditionary Fleet Group, insertion begins. This record made in the name of the Imperium and the Ninth Legiones Astartes.’

Sanguinius spoke to a vox-bead concealed in the gorget of his armour. ‘Admiral, begin standard communications protocols. Scan deep for ship-sign or perimeter drones.’

‘Your will,’ she replied.

‘Imager,’ ordered the primarch, and from above a slender brass rod unfolded like a spider-leg, reaching down from the ceiling to present the glassy head of a holograph emitter. With a mutter of microscopic lenses, the device projected a globe of ghostly blue light several metres across; a tactical map of the Signus system, mimicking in miniature the current positions of the planetary bodies in the cluster.

‘Seven worlds, fifteen moons…’ Azkaellon mused, approaching his master from behind. ‘Most likely all of them in enemy hands.’ As he spoke, the hololith cycled through a series of attack profiles, showing the optimum transit vectors for the Expeditionary Fleet.

‘My compliments to the Navigators,’ Sanguinius noted. ‘Our exit point is exactly as predicted.’ He reached into the image and it rippled slightly, as if he were touching the surface of a still pool. The Angel’s index finger traced the orbit of the outermost planet. ‘If we continue on this heading, we will cross inside the trajectory of Phorus within the day.’

Uttering the name of the colony world caused the imager to unfold a virtual scroll of text above the ghostly orb marking Phorus’s current location. Data on the geology of the rocky, airless outpost, census reports and more information streamed past.

Azkaellon studied the tactical plot. ‘If the flotilla remains gathered, we can pass close to one, perhaps two of the other planets before we close on the capital.’

‘I won’t break up the fleet, not yet,’ said the primarch. ‘But circulate alternate deployment plans to the squadron leaders and command wing officers. If it becomes necessary to split the approach or throw a ring of steel around the cluster, I want my warships ready to execute the order at a moment’s notice.’

‘Admiral DuCade has prepared some options.’

Sanguinius nodded, still studying the image. ‘I’m sure she has.’

Past the orbit of Phorus, there was a wide gap of several light-minutes until the frigid sphere of Holst. Unlike the barren, cratered surface of the most distant planet, Holst had been fully colonised by the Imperium. The ringed, blue-white world was rich in gas ice, and beneath the mantle of a thin nitrogen atmosphere, chemical refineries dotted the surface alongside massive hive-cities to house the workers that toiled to harvest the metallic slush for the engines of empire. The remains of a third planet, believed by the Mechanicum’s own scouts to be the heavy core and broken moons of a collapsed gas giant, formed an asteroid belt breaking the plane of the Signus ecliptic in two. The locals had a colloquial name for the belt; they called it the ‘White River’, on account of the high solar reflectivity of the asteroids that comprised it.

The cluster’s inner region of planets, those that fell within the acceptable parameters for null- or low-exertion atmospheric modification, were a trio of Terran-sized worlds. Two were bread-basket colonies – the windswept agricultural settlement of Scoltrum and Ta-Loc, a stormy ocean world – and the third was the densely populated capital planet of Signus Prime, the fleet’s ultimate destination.

Past the life zone, closer in towards the red sun, lay Signus Tertiary and the innermost planet, Kol. Both worlds had some human population, but they were radiation-soaked stones home only to small outposts and ore mines.

Sanguinius and his commanders had spent days poring over the maps and data from the Signus Cluster in the wake of the Warmaster’s orders, considering how an enemy like the nephilim might annex each planet and turn it to their use. The Angel theorised that they would flock to the temperate worlds first, taking the capital and the harvest-planets, bedding in there until every human voice on the surface was either silenced or crying for them behind one of their obscene flesh-masks.

‘The magnetic field of Signus Gamma will partially mask our approach,’ Azkaellon was saying. ‘If the xenos have ships on picket duty, there’s a good chance we will be able to close to kill range before they are aware of us.’

‘Have the forward scout elements progress to attack range of the outer planet,’ Sanguinius replied. ‘All non-fleet vessels are to be considered enemy combatants until indicated otherwise. I want to be informed the moment any contact is encountered.’

The chime sounded again. ‘My lord?’

Sanguinius immediately heard the alteration in the timbre of Admiral DuCade’s voice, and he shot a look at Azkaellon, who had picked up the shift in nuance as well. The analysis of the words was reflexive, as instant as breathing to them. The primarch wasted no time on preamble. ‘What’s wrong?’

DuCade didn’t ask how he knew; she had been in his service long enough to understand that the Blood Angels simply sensed things faster than a normal human being. ‘Initial scans of local space read no drive plumes or energy displacement congruent to that of Imperial ship classes or known nephilim power signatures.’

The primarch raised an eyebrow. He knew there was more. ‘Go on.’

‘Extreme range sensors are reading metallic objects adrift off the port beam, closer to Phorus. At my discretion, I have diverted a scout to investigate.’

‘Your hypothesis?’

‘They are most likely derelict ships, Lord Sanguinius. No power or life signs. We’re reading the by-products of multiple weapons barrages in that zone and…’ DuCade paused, as if she were struggling to find the right words. ‘Some anomalous energy readings.’

‘What about machine-call signals?’ said Azkaellon, as his master walked through the shimmering hololith and to the bowed windows of the observation dome.

‘No detections.’ There was something else underlying the admiral’s speech pattern, and it was unfamiliar to both the primarch and his Guard Commander. They shared a look as they processed her statement.

In any colonised star system, even one under strict military control, there would be a sphere of vox-communications passing back and forth between starships and orbital stations, bleed-through from commercial data networks, even the low frequency traffic of civilian broadcasts. It was virtually impossible to silence the voices of a single planet, let alone seven of them.

‘I would suggest the astropaths commune and seek for their kindred,’ offered Azkaellon. ‘The invaders may have enforced a system-wide vox-blackout.’

When DuCade spoke again, the primarch realised he was detecting something in her tone he had not heard her express; she was afraid. ‘Agreed. The communications channels are… They are active, but there is nothing there.’ She gave an exasperated sound. ‘Forgive me, lords. I’ve never encountered this before.’

‘Let me hear it,’ said Sanguinius.

‘One moment.’

There was a dull crackle as the audio channels switched, and then a wash of noise, slow and sullen, emerged from the lips of the silver-faced cherubs. The sound was the static of dead space, the neutral mutter of background radiation projected into the void by the Signusi stars and the countless trillions of other radioactive sources that made up the noise of the universe.

And yet, it wasn’t. ‘The tone is all wrong.’

The words came from Mendrion, who stood off to one side. He had been silent and stoic in his position at the command throne’s side for hours, and yet the sound through the speakers drew him to speak his thoughts aloud without pause.

Sanguinius nodded. ‘Yes.’ The static surf had a component to it that was ghostly and intangible. The primarch listened hard, his keen mind and improved senses extending into the noise in a way that a non-augmented human like DuCade would never have been capable of. There was something in there, buried so deep in the sound that even he could not fully grasp it. No one in the chamber dared to breathe as the Angel strained to truly hear.

It slipped from him, fading and retreating each time he tried to focus on it. Was that a whisper he heard, a name? A paracusic sibilant, as distant as if it were a shout on the far side of the world. His lips thinned in frustration, and finally he relented, making a throat-cutting gesture.

‘That’s enough, admiral,’ said Azkaellon, and the signal died abruptly.

‘What do you make of that, gentlemen?’ said DuCade, her cool demeanour returning.

‘I want a detail of vox-monitors to maintain a full watch rotation, until otherwise noted,’ Sanguinius told her. ‘If this is some xenos trick, we would do well to keep a weather eye on it. In the meantime, proceed as planned.’

‘So ordered. DuCade out.’

‘What in Baal’s name was that sound?’ Lohgos said quietly. ‘Mark me, my skin crawled to hear it...’

‘Some form of communications countermeasure, nothing more,’ Azkaellon insisted, his tone firm.

Sanguinius looked to each of his honour guard in turn, searching their faces for a reaction to what they had just heard. His gaze held on Mendrion’s frown. ‘Do you concur?’

The Sanguinary Guard stiffened, his moment of introspection vanishing. ‘Aye, lord. It must be as the Guard Commander says, a denial tactic of the nephilim.’

The primarch turned away, although it was unclear if he was satisfied with the answer. ‘Azkaellon, contact all wing commanders and Legion captains. I want a full status report from all fleet elements before we pass inside the limit of Phorus’s orbit, and tactical evaluations from the scout ships.’

Azkaellon saluted crisply and the rest of the Sanguinary Guard mirrored his actions. Mendrion’s mailed fist rose to his chest only a fraction of a second slower than those of his squadmates and his expression hardened.

The vox-noise was difficult to forget; even now, the memory of it was there at the back of his thoughts, lodged in his mind like a splinter. He dismissed it with a small effort, blotting it out with the recollection of a martial symphonic piece he had heard at a recital many years ago, at a muster on Vanaheim.

Foolish, he thought, to attribute patterns where there were none. For a moment, Mendrion had believed that he heard a voice swimming deep in that ocean of white noise, a crack-throated murmur or a snake-hiss. Something with the shape of a name, but not real, not actual. He dismissed the moment, letting the memory of the music smother it.

Marching after his commander, Mendrion let the word slip away and within moments the name had been forgotten.

The portside cruiser bay in the Red Tear’s ventral sail was cleared to allow the frigate Numitor to have the docking cylinder to itself, and as a precaution all auxiliaries and non-combatant crew were dismissed to other duties. The scout ship hung in the middle of the vast space, bright beams of light bathing its flanks in splashes of stark illumination. The Numitor’s crew had agreed to remain embarked while a party of medicae servitors led by Warden Berus moved through the craft in sealed armour, examining every one of them and taking detailed reports of what they had discovered in the wreck zone.

Meros paused at the wide airgate and donned his helmet, locking it to the neck seal of his armour. He heard a high-pitched squeak of air pressure as the ring bit tight, and a string of active icons flashed in his peripheral vision. The atmosphere inside the chamber drained away, deadening sound until there was only the faint hum of the armour’s internal systems and the rasp of the Apothecary’s own breathing.

He glanced at the other Blood Angels standing around him. Across the airlock, his company commander Captain Furio was in silent conversation with one of the Red Tear’s complement of Apothecaries, their words being carried on a frequency that only they shared. A handful of Space Marines from Brother-Sergeant Madidus’s squad were there, but most of the group were medicae, drawn from dozens of units by a brisk summons with little explanation as to the reason. Meros wondered why armed battle-brothers were needed to escort a medical party on the deck of the primarch’s own flagship, but he kept his question to himself. Already, barrack-room hearsay had spread among the Legion that Numitor and the other scouts had discovered something unusual among the wrecked ships drifting beyond the edges of the Signus Cluster.

The airgate’s far hatch inched silently open, and Furio’s voice clicked on over the general channel. ‘Void action protocols are in effect. Gravity systems are active on the docks but don’t stray too close to the frigate.’

Meros looked out and saw the Numitor drifting in the null zone in the middle of the wide open bay, like a vast red and silver dagger at rest on an arming rack. Tethers and gantries held it in place before a yawning maw that opened into space. At this angle, he could just see the point of the Red Tear’s bow far overhead. But his attention was immediately taken by the lines of black polyplas containers arranged in careful rows across the service deck. Meros recognised the familiar shape of the collapsible coffin pods; many times he had been called upon to seal the bodies of the recently dead inside similar containers.

‘Our brothers–?’ For an instant, one of the other Apothecaries forgot protocol and spoke out over the general vox.

The expressionless mask of Captain Furio’s helm shook once. ‘These casualties are not of our number. No lives were lost.’ He let that sink in and then went on. ‘Each of you has an assigned number of bodies. You will examine them and then pool your findings. Observe all biohazard procedures, report anything anomalous immediately. Begin.’

Meros followed his comrades out on to the service deck and found the four coffins set aside for him to examine. Pausing to re-check the seals on his armour, he activated the medicae gauntlet around his right forearm and brought its scanner heads to an active state. The Apothecary Minoris who had spoken out of turn was nearby, with his own group of dead to scrutinise. He glanced at Meros, and there was a click in his ears as the younger legionary voxed him on a discreet channel.

‘Why are they doing this?’ he asked. ‘Why have they brought these corpses back here, if they fear there is some sort of contagion?’

‘Standard operating procedure. The Red Tear has the most advanced medicae labs and technical facilities of any ship in the fleet,’ said Meros.

The other Apothecary said nothing and cracked open one of the coffins with a puff of displaced air. Meros heard the thin hiss of an indrawn breath over the open channel.

Cautiously, he did the same. The lid of the container slid back and Meros found himself looking down on what seemed like a heap of clothing, curiously laid out in the shape of a person. The illuminator on his backpack flicked on and banished the shadows inside the coffin. It revealed first a lumpy mask of pinkish-grey that mocked the form of a human face, glittering slightly with a patina of oxygen ice.

Meros panned down the length of the coffin, his eyes narrowing behind his helmet optics as he attempted to fathom what he was looking at.

His first thought was of the eldar, and in sympathetic resonance, the healed wound in his gut tensed. The flesh-mask reminded him of the xenos reavers and the murderous play they indulged in with their victims. Meros had seen them cut off the faces of their prey and sew them into cloaks, as trophies.

But this was not the same thing. The mass of flesh before him was whole and full. He reached in and snipped open the clothing shrouding the body, discovering that the corpse was actually a female; the state of it had made that less than obvious.

The medicae gauntlet’s auspex ticked and whirred through its scan program, and the device’s internal reservoirs of knowledge were equally unfamiliar with the manner of this death. The body lacked any kind of rigidity, it was sunken and shrivelled in a way that suggested a peculiar form of decay – and yet the auspex insisted that the body had been well preserved by the vacuum of space. He wondered if he had been given a corpse that had been flattened by some kind of great impact.

‘I was told that the scouts found the wreckage of more than a dozen different craft drifting in Phorus’s gravity shadow,’ said the other Blood Angel. ‘Civilian haulers, defence force monitors, shuttles. Many of them not even warp-capable. Trajectory suggested they were fleeing the inner worlds.’

Meros listened as he reached into the coffin, to take the hand of the dead woman.

‘The ships had been torn apart.’

He nodded. ‘The nephilim use displacement weapons. Very effective at close range.’ Meros’s hand touched the corpse and the woman’s fingers were like streamers of rag, limp and wilted.

‘No,’ said the other Blood Angel. ‘I mean literally torn apart. As if by some kind of shearing force.’

Meros was only half-listening as he kneaded the skin of the corpse’s arm. It bent back and forth, without rigor or great resistance. A strange thought occurred to him, and with care, he drew his battle knife and cut into the dead woman’s forearm, directly above the wrist. The blade passed easily through the meat of her, never changing in resistance. He peered at the strangely bloodless stump. He saw nerves, veins and arteries, muscles…

The Apothecary looked back at the body, at its strangely deflated, sagging shape. ‘She has no bones.’ He poked the flesh, feeling it give beneath his touch. He had to say it again to fix it in his thoughts. ‘There are no bones in this corpse.’

He replaced the limb he had cut and went to the next coffin, then the next and the one after that. The others were all males, all garbed in ship-suits that identified them as crewmen from a fuel tender. Once more, the bodies had the same shrunken dimensions as the woman’s corpse, the same flaccid limbs, collapsed torsos and heads. They were little more than bags of skin and meat in the shape of a human being, misshapen under the weight of their own mass.

He looked around and saw that his brothers were coming to the same conclusion. Every one of the dozens of bodies on the service deck was identical in the manner of death.

‘Their blood has been altered,’ said the junior Apothecary. He had drawn off a vial of the vitae, and he held it up to the light. Instead of a crimson fluid, the matter within the crystal tube was thick and sluggish, an oily paste almost purple in colour.

Meros stood up. ‘How is this possible?’

‘That is my question to you and your brothers.’ A new voice came over the vox-channel as another warrior-commander approached them, Captain Furio at his side.

Meros recognised Captain Raldoron’s laurels and insignia, and he bowed to the two veterans. ‘My lords.’

‘Answer him, Meros,’ ordered Furio. ‘That’s why you are here.’

‘I’ll need to make a deeper analysis.’ He hesitated. ‘I confess I have never come across this manner of injury.’

‘Later,’ Raldoron insisted. ‘For now, I want your first impressions.’

‘There are no entry wounds,’ offered the other Apothecary. ‘It’s not as if someone opened them, removed their skeletons and sewed them closed again.’

‘Could it be the result of a viral effect, or bio-weapon?’ said Furio. ‘Something that disintegrates human bone and cartilage.’

‘No, sir.’ Meros shook his head, thinking it through. ‘That would leave waste matter inside the corpse. There would be bloating, the expression of toxic materials.’ He paused for a moment. ‘In theory, a freak teleportation effect might create something like this. But not so uniform, not over so many victims.’ Meros gestured at the lines of coffins.

‘These are just the ones the Numitor brought back.’ Raldoron was grim. ‘The frigate’s commander informed me that they found hundreds scattered across a dozen derelicts, just like these poor souls.’

Meros felt a twist of revulsion in his gut. It was unimaginable to contemplate what kind of death these men and women had endured. Had they been… aware when it happened to them?

Furio glanced at Raldoron. ‘We are clearly dealing with a new kind of xenos weapon, First Captain.’

Raldoron nodded once. ‘I’ve seen enough. The primarch must be informed.’ The cold, flinty lenses of his helmet scanned them. ‘Word of what you have seen here is not to be discussed without permission from your commanding officer, is that clear?’

‘Clear,’ said the other Apothecary.

Meros took a moment longer to answer; he was remembering a moment many years before, another similar order from the First Captain after he had been in battle against the nephilim.

‘So ordered,’ he replied.

SIX

Fear
Phorus
The Stars Go Out

There was no place for Sanguinius on the bridge of his flagship. He had made it so; his command throne remained in his private sanctum in the upper reaches of the Red Tear’s dorsal tower, but for all intents and purposes there was no formal seat of power here for him. It was a small humility that had been enforced across the Blood Angels warfleet from the very beginning of his reign. The primarch refused to take the captain’s chair of any craft in his fleet, lest it be seen as a diminishment of the authority of that vessel’s commanding officer. He stood with one hand upon the high back of Admiral DuCade’s station as the shipmistress governed her crew. He remained statue-still and silent; as did the members of his honour guard, who waited in recesses draped with crimson curtains to the port and starboard sides of the bridge deck.

The Red Tear’s command-and-control nexus resembled a small combat arena or a theatre in the round. At its lowest level, there were the primary operations consoles manned by DuCade and her prime cadre of naval officers. Then, raised up in three tiers like the stands for an audience, there were semi-circles of secondary and tertiary workstations for the rest of the command crew, the gunnery and engineering officers, the sensor specialists and more. Rather than raise the captain of the ship high above all things to look down on her men in the manner of some haughty queen at court, the admiral was at the centre of everything, the fulcrum of the starship and the fleet it led.

Only one being was allowed the honour of being placed above all. In the ceiling over their heads, a shallow bowl of silver metal worked with constellations and star-device etchings showed the lowermost surface of a habitat sphere, where the Red Tear’s Navigators lived in zero gravity. Locked away behind thick walls of sense-deadening baffles, with the ship in normal space the psykers were at rest, in a kind of dormant coma-state.

Their distaff cousins, the astropaths, were not so lucky. Their hab-module was deeper inside the warship’s hull, protected by layers of heavy armour and energy barriers. Arcane technologies connected them to mechanisms for psychic thought-projection, infinitely byzantine systems that fascinated the primarch with their intricate complexity.

The word from the astropathic sanctum was not promising. Sanguinius had bid them to reach into the Signus Cluster with their minds and listen for the whisper of communiqués from others of their kind. The vox-dead static picked up by the fleet’s machine-call transceivers troubled him more than he had revealed, and he had hoped that the telepaths might find some trace deeper into the star system – something to indicate that the Blood Angels had not arrived too late to save these worlds.

When he asked them what they heard, the psykers wept and spoke in synesthesic riddles, becoming so agitated that he became concerned they might harm themselves. In the end, without answers, Sanguinius left them under guard and returned to the bridge. Whatever tricks his enemy had used to silence Signus seemed to extend into the ethereal as much as the real.

‘I do not know what to make of this, my lord.’ DuCade’s voice brought him back from his moment of reverie. The admiral was offering him the pict-slate he had given to her a few minutes earlier. On its glassy surface, captures from the gun cameras of a Raven scrolled slowly past, showing frozen images of a field of wreckage and plasma spills against the void. ‘The damage patterns resemble the effect of an explosive detonation deep inside the ship-frame.’ She craned her neck to look up at him, the tiny woman surrounded by the broad metal cradle of her chair.

He nodded, threads of his blond hair falling over his face. ‘My thoughts too,’ agreed the Angel. ‘But the scans show no signs of thermal damage, no traces common to a chemical or nuclear detonation.’

She nodded, frowning. ‘No exotic particles either, which means it couldn’t be an esoteric weapon, like a graviton shear or a conversion beamer.’ DuCade looked away, silently giving an order to a junior officer with the tip of her head, without breaking the conversation. ‘Those wrecks look like they were torn apart from the inside.’

‘Like cages ripped open by a vicious animal.’ Azkaellon hove closer, catching the edges of the conversation. He bowed slightly to his liege lord. ‘I cannot understand how or why these craft were even in this zone of space. Most of them had no warp motors and were incapable of speeds beyond one-half light velocity, and yet they appeared to be making for interstellar space. It would have taken them centuries to reach the nearest star system, a millennium more to the closest Imperial world.’

‘To answer that question, Guard Commander,’ said DuCade, ‘requires something the Legiones Astartes do not possess.’

‘And that is?’

‘Fear.’ Sanguinius detected the shift in her pulse rate through a microscopic colour change in her pale cheeks and the motion of her thin hands. She went on. ‘Consider this. The people on those ships were so afraid that they willingly sought out the embrace of the deep black. A prospect for slow starvation as their food supplies dwindled, suffocation or freezing at the failure of life-support.’

‘Perhaps they held on to the hope of finding a rescuer out here,’ said the primarch, for a moment trying to place himself in that mindset. ‘But there was no one to aid them. No one to forestall the fate that ultimately claimed them.’

‘They feared this death less than the terror that chased them from their homes,’ offered Azkaellon, with a grimace. ‘That notion is as alien to me as any xenos.’

‘Admiral?’ DuCade’s augmented aide approached the commander. ‘Bow observers report we are coming into visual range of the planet Phorus. Fleet speed is reducing as per your posted orders. We will cross the outer perimeter of the Signus system in approximately two minutes.’

‘Sound battle stations throughout the flotilla,’ she responded. ‘Show me the planet.’

The officer saluted and turned to face the front of the command deck. ‘Lens the eye!’ At his order, the open bow of the semi-circular amphitheatre widened and the wide armourglass portals looking out into the dark shifted. The molecules of the clear material were stroked by electromagnetic charges that shifted the density and structure of the largest portal, a flawless disc set in an elliptical framework that resembled a human eye. The view outside sharpened, bringing the bow of the Red Tear into hard detail along with her escorts. The battleships Ignis and Covenant of Baal moved off the great barge’s beam, and past them the light of Signus Alpha bent around the sphere of Phorus. Red-lit, it was a hazy shadow becoming more defined with each passing moment.

It was the primarch who first sensed that something was amiss. ‘Azkaellon,’ he said, beckoning the Guard Commander. ‘Do you see? The colour?’

The Sanguinary Guard shot a look at a nearby systems console, where one of the sub-light navigational crewmen was working. On the woman’s gas-lens screen there was a cogitator-generated image dredged up from the depths of the Red Tear’s commodious data mines; a picture assembled from probe readings and the logs of the Imperial colonial census office, the standard planetary catalogue entry for Signus VII, local designation Phorus.

The image showed an unremarkable ball of rock and ice, scarred by asteroid impact craters. It resembled a sphere made of porcelain webbed with jagged lines, as if dropped from a great height and then reassembled.

‘The reflectivity of it is wrong,’ Sanguinius told him.

Phorus’s dirty white colouration should have made it stand out starkly against the bloody light of the star, but instead the planet was drinking in all the illumination it was given, absorbing it.

‘All ships within lead element,’ called DuCade. ‘Target Phorus with sensing gear and report.’

Immediately, information began to stream into the Red Tear’s data buffers. Azkaellon saw dozens of support screens light up along the upper tiers as cogitators laboured to interpret the new readings.

‘Phorus was home to ninety thousand colonists,’ the primarch offered, his eyes on the forward portal. ‘But I fear no longer. Look at the surface.’

The Guard Commander’s perception caught up with what he was seeing and the image shifted in his mind’s eye. Phorus was not, as he had thought, caught in an partial eclipse of a star and so rendered dark by shadow.

The planet appeared burned, seared black from pole to pole. No features were visible, and all other colour was utterly absent.

‘Report from the Ignis,’ said DuCade’s aide. ‘They shot a probe into the planet’s gravity well. The drone shows no trace of atmospherics or ambient energy output.’

‘They were in the process of terraforming Phorus,’ insisted the Angel. ‘There will be signifiers.’

‘Yes, my lord.’ The major bowed slightly. ‘I mean, no, my lord. There’s nothing there. The probe’s telemetry shows a world that is completely dead. Lifeless. Right down to the microscopic level.’

Azkaellon watched his master become very still, the slight movement of his great wings folded against his armour the only motion from him.

‘Lord Sanguinius,’ said the admiral. ‘How do you wish to proceed? We’ll be crossing Phorus orbit in one minute.’

‘There’s nothing for us here,’ said the primarch, after a moment. ‘Maintain course and heading in towards the core of the system.’

The Guard Commander found he could not turn his gaze away from the corpse of a planet as it drifted past the bow of the Red Tear, falling level with the flagship as it passed into the system proper.

And then, like the eye of an ocean predator rolling slowly to follow the movement of a prey animal, Phorus moved.

Shifting in place, the black orb began to change aspect, turning against its normal rotation, the scorched surface rippling. Alarms sounded on a dozen consoles as sensor-servitors detected events that did not tally with any planetary motion known or predicted by their programmers.

Sanguinius surged forwards, coming to the armourglass of the portal, his hands pressing on the clear barrier. ‘Admiral! Order the fleet to extend the distance from Phorus, now!’

‘What…’ Azkaellon struggled for a moment to frame his question, as DuCade snapped out the order behind him. ‘What is happening down there?’

‘I don’t know,’ his master replied, the answer sending a ripple of ice through him.

In plain sight of every starship of the Blood Angels fleet, Phorus turned and turned, passing through an impossibly fast day-night cycle, moving as if its connection to the laws of nature had been severed. The dark sphere finally found a kind of equilibrium, presenting what had been its southern polar regions to the Red Tear and all those who watched through viewports and screen-relays.

New colour, a violent flame-orange among the dead black, emerged in points of burning light across the curvature of Phorus’s ruined surface. If a being could have stood upon the planet and lived, they would have witnessed decapitated mountains painted soot-dark sinking into abyssal sinkholes, and great chasms opening up from horizon to horizon. Magma flame jetted high into the air, ejected from the deep core of the planet, hot enough that the hellish glow was visible from orbital space.

And from above – only from above – the full dimension of what was being wrought upon Phorus was slowly becoming clear. At first it seemed that the planet was suffering a sudden and inexplicable geological catastrophe. The gravity of the outpost world went into wild flux as cracks wider than the reach of oceans spread across the surface.

Planets died this way, collapsing under their own mass and breaking apart; it was a common occurrence if one thought in astronomical terms. But never like this, without warning or precursor, seemingly triggered by the arrival of an audience to witness it.

Phorus was not dying; this was something else entirely.

Following lines of circumference, the monstrous fissures spread about the planet, and against all reason they propagated in perfect rows, one crossing over the other, each of them slicing through layers of blackened rock and burned ice. Landmasses splintered in a mathematical symmetry that was too precise, too flawless to be the action of tortured nature. It seemed as if an invisible artisan of godlike scope cradled Phorus in claws of force, cutting lines into the ruined surface as a man might delicately slice into the skin of a ripe fruit.

It ended as swiftly as it had begun, the planet briefly possessing and then losing a new atmosphere as a huge volume of toxic gases escaped from the flaming rocky mantle, boiling into space. Phorus’s landscape had been grotesquely altered, sculpted into a web of magma-choked canyons, each broad enough to drown a hive-city. A grand design emerged from it all, at once seamless and horrific.

From the bridge of the Red Tear the sigil was clearly visible, burning like a brand upon the darkness. The lines of flame passed together and crossed over, one after another, so that they formed a brazen star with eight points.

The primarch broke the stunned silence that had fallen across the command deck, turning away from the smouldering corpse of the planet. ‘It’s a message.’

‘What does it mean?’ The major’s voice trembled.

‘Mark me,’ said Sanguinius, showing his teeth, ‘I will have the answer to that question, even if I must rip it from the throats of our enemies.’ He delivered the words with cold, feral intent. ‘If this is meant to unman us, the xenos have underestimated the will of the–’

‘My lord.’ Admiral DuCade rose from her command throne, and with one hand she pressed a vox-pod to her right ear. ‘A priority message from the heavy cruiser Chalice.’

Azkaellon recalled the ship’s name; it was part of the fleet’s sternguard force, trailing a few hundred kilometres back along the line of the formation. The primarch shot her a look as DuCade went on.

‘And the same report from several others now…’ The tinny mutter of overlapping communications signals was audible from the brassy pod. She held it away, trying to compose herself as best a woman could when she had such news to impart. ‘Primarch, the captain of the Chalice and several picket ships around the edges of the flotilla are reporting the occurrence of an unusual astronomical phenomenon.’

Sanguinius turned back to the great portal and peered out, past the fires of ruined Phorus. Azkaellon came closer, and as he did he heard the Angel release a gasp.

Sanguinius pointed, raising his gauntlet to the void. ‘There. Do you see it?’

The Guard Commander grimaced as he looked; then he too felt his breath catch in his throat. ‘The stars…’

Beyond the baleful red glow of Signus Alpha and the shimmers of its sister suns, the scattering of stars and nebulae that lay within sight of the Red Tear were changing. Azkaellon had the sudden impression of a colossal curtain falling across a stage the size of a galaxy. A great veil, impenetrable and stygian, blotting out everything.

Struck silent, he stood at the Angel’s side and watched the stars go out.

Some say that the Triumph at Ullanor began with the echo of the first shot fired against the greenskin hordes of the Overlord Urlakk Urg, others that it was marked by the blood shed when Horus Lupercal pitched the monstrous alien from the balcony of the great keep, to die broken against the flagstones far below. In the end, it was only the victory that mattered, and the hard-fought road that millions of soldiers and hundreds of thousands of legionaries had cut into the heart of the ork onslaught.

The great mass of the xenos had threatened to break open the new bonds forged by the Great Crusade, and so a cohort of warriors from across the noble Legions came together to shatter this threat before it could spread beyond the sector, where the green tide rose with each passing day.

Under the command of Horus, the Luna Wolves took the fight to the heart of Urg’s war machine, blinding the alien army with a massive feint. Even as his father, the Emperor, led the common soldiery and phalanxes of Titan battle walkers across Ullanor Majoris, it was Horus who struck the killing blow.

With Urg’s termination the nascent ork empire self-destructed, and the xenos that were not hounded into the mud of Ullanor’s vast battlegrounds would be hunted down across hundreds of star systems, all the way to Chondax, the Kayvas Belt and beyond.

The victory was sealed in blood and iron, and the call to Triumph was sounded. By the Emperor’s command, Ullanor was remade as a trophy world, designated Mundus Tropaeum on all galactic maps and records of tithe. It would be a site of glory and spectacle to cement not only this single conquest over the forces ranged against humankind, but a greater symbol of the Crusade itself. For two hundred Terran years the Emperor’s mighty endeavour had moved across the face of the galaxy to bring unity and illumination to the lost daughter-worlds of Old Earth. It had pushed back the night, re-forged old links between civilisations, battled alien threats – and with regret, it had often given punishment. A change was coming, though, a change that found its fulcrum on Ullanor.

None who walked upon that world knew that the echo of that Triumph would sound for decades, for centuries, for millennia.

Geoformer platoons from the Mechanicum brought world engines and mobile stone-burners to cut a massive swath across the broken landscape left in the battle’s wake. Orkish dead were buried in their millions with their savage ruins, interred beneath transplanted rocks and the heads of crushed mountains. The Mechanicum eradicated every last remaining trace of the enemy and paved over them with a giant boulevard, a parade stage as wide as the footprint of some cities.

They built a highway and allowed only one structure to stand proud of the great platform – an ornamental pavilion of black marble and heavy granite that had been built piecemeal on Terra and then shipped across the void by special envoy. Marker posts decorated with the skulls of ork commanders paced out the length of the road, and behind them great bowls of smokeless promethium burned brightly, endlessly lighting the highway with their blue-white fire.

When the Mechanicum were finished, the honoured came to pay homage to the battle won, the Crusade’s ideal and the one who was father to them all. The Imperial Army and the Titan Legions bracketed the gathering. Human troops were ranked in uncountable numbers, their host so wide they became a sea of battle armour and dress uniforms. Every common man and woman who stood on Ullanor’s soil that day had been selected for their valour and conduct, and until the day they died each would have the singular honour of wearing the onyx-and-gold Triumph Bar upon their uniforms. The award was forged from bolt shells recovered from the field and melted down. Ranged around them, the great war machines of the Collegia Titanica towered towards a sky cut to ribbons by the contrails of a thousand aerospace fighters; and above those, high over the thin white cirrus clouds of Ullanor’s day, warships moved as slow as they dared through the upper atmosphere, washes of interface heat rolling off their void shields as they showed their flanks in a gesture of renewed fealty.

Then the legionaries. Of all the Emperor’s genhanced brigades, a full fourteen of the Legions stood represented at Ullanor, and with them came nine beings of inimitable power and majesty.

Nine gods and angels made flesh, the primarchs of the greatest armies ever created by human hands. Mortarion, the reaper of men and master of the Death Guard, cowled and lethal in aspect, matched by the warrior-guardians of his Deathshroud. The Phoenician, Fulgrim, resplendent in his finery and handsome in aspect, lit by the reflection of gold and platinum. Magnus the Red, the Crimson King, the lord of the unknown, his soul as much a mystery to the common world as the workings of the warp and the ghosts within it. Lorgar Aurelian, the quiet and brooding zealot who burned with such intensity and buried it all deep in his heart, saying little and standing watchful. His polar opposite was Angron, the gladiator-lord and son of grief, never able to settle or moderate his seething, endless fury, always on the verge of outburst and violence. Dorn, the stalwart man of stone, the Imperial Fist with his unswerving manner and unbreakable focus, the one who would always obey, always ready for duty. The Khan, his fur-trimmed robes and ornate armour detailed with a thousand narratives of the White Scars Legion, his every step across the land a challenge to the galaxy. Then Sanguinius of the Blood Angels, flanked by the gold-armoured honour detail of the Sanguinary Guard, his mighty wings folded back across his battle plate, his face turned to the sky to welcome the impossible, majestic sight before them.

Horus Lupercal, of course. Horus of the Luna Wolves, the Hero of Ullanor, liberator and first among equals. Horus, who was to be given the new honour of a title above and beyond any that had been bestowed before; a title, it could be said, that would forever carry the echo of his name.

There was no memory of the self beyond the command, the deed and the completion of the action. If memory had once existed, then it had been excised by deft application of scalpel blades and laser cutting beams. Slivers of brain matter sliced out or burned away to render down a self into nothing.

Or something more than nothing, perhaps, if one were generous. Was a tool a worthy thing? Was a lifetime locked into servility commendable? Perhaps, but only if such service was selfless. When shackled to it, made slave and helot in the name of service, then it was another matter entirely.

Unit Eight-Eight-Kappa-Two’s work tables for the day started and ended in this place, a commander’s lavish tent erected on the southern face of the Great Triumph’s stage. A light wind ripped the shallow peak of the pavilion overhead, but the servitor only registered the atmospheric effect in the most vague way. Perhaps if the weather changed it would be required to modify its operating parameters to reflect the circumstances, but so far there was no sign of such a thing. It did not possess the self-awareness to act upon data such as that; if a change was to be made, a fresh directive meme would be broadcast into the implant module that took up a full quarter of Unit Eight-Eight-Kappa-Two’s skull. The module’s outer skin was made of brass polished to a brilliant amber lustre, and it matched the buttons on the servitor’s brocaded coat, the buckles on its boots, the multiplicity of additional fingers at the end of its long arms.

The unit had been a gift from the commander of the Second Mounted Xiphos Regiment, his personal servile bequeathed to the Luna Wolves Legion after his invaliding from the field of battle on Brocktorian; before then, it had come to the Xiphos from the Mechanicum, approximately forty-two years earlier. Before that, Unit Eight-Eight-Kappa-Two had been Toin Sepsoe, a rapist and killer of women in the hives of Hollonan, but like the rest of his sordid and unpleasant pre-life, that had all been taken away and disposed of. Captured by the city guard, convicted and sentenced to perpetual servitude all that Sepsoe had been the adepts chemically smothered or surgically removed. Like the cancer that it was, his noxious personality was excised and what remained of his flesh repurposed for a greater good.

Unit Eight-Eight-Kappa-Two cooked and cleaned, it performed laundry duties, it would fetch and carry, and if one did not look directly at it, one might think it was still a man. This was untrue, of course; beneath the military uniform it wore, the meat and skeleton that had once been Sepsoe was retrofitted with more durable ceramite brackets and numerous bio-organic implants that allowed it to live longer than a human being, to go without the need for sleep and to sustain nourishment through ingestion of a bulk nutrient porridge, similar to that fed to grox or riding beasts.

It had no understanding of the meaning of the place where it worked, it could not have differentiated between the barracks of the lowest ranked Imperial Army soldier or the halls of the Imperial Palace. All Unit Eight-Eight-Kappa-Two had was the works tables implanted in its memory core, the temporary files that told it who was in charge and what level of service it was to provide to them.

One of the subjects on that table now entered the tents, moving with purpose and a manner that could have been read as annoyance. A giant to the servitor, clad in power armour that hummed with every heavy bootstep, incapable of merely walking, only striding.

A subroutine activated, causing Unit Eight-Eight-Kappa-Two to bow low and utter a pre-programmed greeting. ‘M’lord Horus. I await your instructions.’ The words were wet and breathy.

Horus ignored the servitor and stepped to the far side of the tent, where a flexible panel in the weatherproof material allowed him to see out. Night was falling across Ullanor and still the Great Triumph was rolling on. Ships in the sky glittered like radiant jewels, and the fires muttered a steady chorus over which the sounds of a victorious army washed back and forth, like ocean surf. Out there, humans and post-humans alike were celebrating and sorrowful in equal order. They cheered on the Emperor and his newly-appointed commander of all the Imperium’s forces, but they were saddened by the announcement that the Master of Mankind would be leaving the Great Crusade to follow his works on Terra.

Horus shrugged off the wolf pelt about his shoulders, tossing the mantle to one side with scarcely a glance to where it fell. Dutifully, the servitor walked to the heaped fur and gathered it up.

After a pre-determined interval, Unit Eight-Eight-Kappa-Two’s program pushed it to speak once again, a reminder interrupt. ‘What is your will, Warmaster?’

‘Warmaster,’ echoed Horus, rolling the word around his mouth, tasting it. His mood did not appear to lighten. He turned away. ‘Bring me wine.’

‘I exist to serve.’ The servitor ambled to a table and recovered a bulbous oenochoe jug covered with a mosaic of running wolves under gibbous moons. It poured a generous measure into a bronze cup and brought it to Horus’s open hand. The goblet, large in the servitor’s grip, was delicate in the Warmaster’s fingers.

Unit Eight-Eight-Kappa-Two returned to a waiting mode, head slightly bowed, observing without really observing. It did not register the way Horus allowed a scowl to cross his powerful features before he chased it away with a sip from the cup.

Just then, the motion of the tent’s door flap caused the servitor’s head to snap up and focus on another arrival. A second priority personage entered, this one not as high upon the duty tables as Horus but still greatly elevated. Unit Eight-Eight-Kappa-Two monitored the figure for a few seconds, tracking the shape of it. He was another giant like the Warmaster, but his mass was strangely displaced in white forms folded tight across his shoulders. Wings.

‘Brother,’ said Sanguinius, with a smile. ‘Ah, forgive me. Warmaster.’ He bowed slightly. ‘The title does have such gravitas, don’t you think?’

Horus managed a smile in return, but it was brittle and it did not reach his eyes. ‘Shall I grow to fit it?’

The Angel seemed not to notice. ‘It will grow to fit you. And you’ll wear it well.’

The moment stretched into a pause before Horus spoke again. ‘How do you manage that?’

‘Manage what?’

‘To find the right words at the right moment, every time. I see you when you speak to the others, to the rank and file. Even to those outside the Legion.’

Sanguinius spread his hands. ‘We all have some of father’s oratorial gift in us.’

‘Aye,’ he agreed. ‘But when I seek words to express my intent I have to dig for them, measure them first and cut to size. You are effortless with it.’

‘You’re wrong,’ said the Angel, summoning the servitor with a curl of his slender fingers. ‘I’m just better at making it look effortless.’

Unit Eight-Eight-Kappa-Two performed the function expected of it, bringing a new goblet and fresh wine to both the primarchs. Neither of them acknowledged it as it worked, then backed away once more.

‘I saw the royal barge landing.’ Horus nodded in the direction of the ship fields. ‘The Custodian Guard are preparing for the journey.’

‘The voyage back to Terra is a long one,’ said the Blood Angels primarch. His tone was curiously neutral. ‘The Imperator Somnium has shifted out to far orbit. The Emperor will lead the departure, it is only right. He will return to the Segmentum Solar and we… we will return to our Crusade.’

The signifier Imperator Somnium registered briefly in the servitor’s memory core: an interstellar craft of unique classification, it was beyond the security clearance of the lowly machine-slave to even set foot aboard one of its shuttle-barges. A goliath among starships, the Emperor’s command carrier matched in size the great orbital plates such as Riga and Skye, which floated over the surface of distant Terra like windborne island continents. When it had first entered orbit of Ullanor the planet’s sun had been partially eclipsed, and the Emperor’s helmsmen were forced to administer the ship’s course with an iron hand, to prevent the mass of the vessel exerting a tidal effect on the local weather system.

‘Our Crusade,’ echoed the Warmaster. ‘It truly is ours now, brother. Father’s decision to return to the Imperial Palace places it squarely in our hands.’

They fell silent for a moment. ‘You were as surprised as the rest of us,’ said Sanguinius, at length. ‘I had thought he would have told you of his intent.’

‘To lead, one must have a solid grasp of theatre,’ Horus replied distantly. ‘And this is such a stage we have built here.’ He trailed off, glancing back towards the window.

Sanguinius spoke again before Horus could say more. ‘I think I have intruded. You wish a moment alone.’ He turned back towards the door flap, placing his goblet on a table, the contents untouched. ‘I’ll keep the others occupied.’

‘What will you say?’ Horus asked the question to his back, and the Angel halted. ‘That you found me brooding?’

‘Are you?’ Sanguinius asked lightly. ‘We’re leaving that to Angron this night, I thought.’

‘He’s not happy.’

That gained Horus a nod. ‘He never is. It’s his lot in life.’ Sanguinius turned. ‘He’s furious. More furious than usual, I mean.’

Something shimmered, momentarily drawing the eye of the waiting servitor. The Warmaster was fingering the chain of platinum links hanging about his neck, upon them a sapphire cut into the shape of the Eye of Terra. The medallion was a sigil of rank and status, bestowed upon Horus only hours before at the dedication ceremony.

‘Angron won’t be the only one. There will be others who become embittered by the distinction father gave me this day. When Perturabo hears of it…’ He let the sentence trail off.

A shadow passed over his brother’s face. ‘It will not be to his liking, that is so. He will think it should have been him. And Curze, well…’ Sanguinius hesitated before he said the next words. ‘They’ll hate you for it. At least at first.’

Horus scowled and let the medallion drop from his fingers. ‘I never asked for this. But I won’t be sorry for it.’

‘Nor should you!’ Sanguinius went back to the goblet and took it up again. ‘Brother, the mantle of Warmaster is yours and it is right to be so.’ He grinned. ‘I am proud and pleased beyond my ability to express.’

‘You are,’ said Horus, as if it were suddenly a certainty for him.

‘And Lorgar and Fulgrim?’ his brother continued. ‘Did you not hear them cheer with me when father said the words, when he named you supreme commander? The others were an echo behind, but they feel the same. I’m sure if Rogal were not so stiff he would have done so as well.’

‘Dorn did shake my hand.’

‘From the Imperial Fist, that’s practically an outburst of joy.’ Briefly, the Angel’s smile spread to his sibling and Horus gave a shallow nod. Sanguinius went on. ‘Do you know why he picked you? It wasn’t favouritism, it wasn’t politics or expedience. It’s not a reward, do you understand? It’s what you deserve. Because you have always been the best of us, Horus. You are the closest in soul to the people we are sworn to defend, you are your father’s son… and, let’s not overlook the fact that you are a fairly good general.’

The servitor watched the Angel walk to the Warmaster’s side and clap a hand upon the pauldron of his power armour. The easy camaraderie between them was a very human thing for two beings of such a starkly post-human nature. But still, there remained a reluctance in the master of the Luna Wolves that seemed at odds with his manner.

Horus eyed his brother. ‘Some will think it should have been you.’

Sanguinius blinked, the declaration momentarily taking him unawares. Then he shook his head. ‘No. Do you believe that?’

‘Does it matter?’

The Angel’s jaw stiffened. ‘Anyone who thinks I should stand where you do now, anyone who speaks those words does not see either of us clearly.’ Despite the fact that the conversation contained no commands for it, Unit Eight-Eight-Kappa-Two’s attention remained drawn to the two primarchs, as if even the mechanical parts of its mind were fascinated by their exchange. ‘No, not I. I am… Too far away.’ His wings drew in towards his back, the slight motion ringing the small ornaments of silver and pearl hanging from the pinions as they moved. ‘A Warmaster can only walk the field of battle, never soar above it.’ Then the smile and the laughter returned. ‘This honour could only be yours. Our brothers will all come around in the end. Let some of them grimace and secretly claim they are the better choice, and as they do, you will prove to them why they are not with words and deeds. You will validate father’s decision, Horus. You already have. Angron and the rest… They just need to see it. Just as you need me now to tell you what you already know.’

‘Perhaps so,’ Horus admitted. ‘You have always been my conscience, Sanguinius. Never forget how much I value that.’

The Angel came to stiff attention, with a snap of ceramite so gunshot-loud that it made the servitor twitch and stutter. He saluted with the goblet. ‘You will lead us to a final, glorious victory in father’s stead, to the ends of the Great Crusade. I believe this with every fibre of my being.’ Sanguinius drained the goblet with ritual formality. ‘And I will do all I can to help you with this, however long it takes.’

With a nod, the Angel tossed the cup into the air and the servitor smoothly stepped forwards, its eight-fingered hand splaying open to catch the thrown goblet without effort. Unit Eight-Eight-Kappa-Two returned the drinking vessel to a serving trolley, cleaning it as it went.

Sanguinius began to walk away. ‘I’ll leave you to your thoughts, brother. And make the most of this moment of quiet, because I doubt you’ll have many more with your new office.’

‘Wait,’ Horus called out. ‘I have a question for you, that only now comes to me.’

‘I’ll answer if I can.’

The Warmaster did not turn to look at his brother as he spoke. ‘I’ve never asked you about your gifts, Sanguinius.’ The servitor sensed the other primarch stiffen at the words. ‘I have never asked about your sense for… future events.’

‘Nothing so grand,’ the other primarch demurred. ‘An inkling, no more. A greater sense of instinct that sometimes reveals itself to me in dreams.’

‘Indeed,’ Horus replied. ‘So tell me, in your dreams, did you ever see this day unfolding? Our father, taking leave of the Crusade for reasons he does not fully share with his sons, and this new laurel about my head?’ At last he turned to look his brother in the eyes. ‘Did you foresee any of this?’

The warmth faded from Sanguinius’s face. ‘No.’

Horus nodded once more.

‘Neither did I.’

Seven

I Call Conclave
Faces in the Fire
Running Cold

The lithocast chamber was filled with warriors as Captain Raldoron entered, each standing atop a shallow plinth under a cone of faint light. Every pedestal was occupied, and not one presented a man below the rank of company captain. There were close to three hundred of them, representing almost the full complement of the IX Legion. The colours of their armour were stark and blood-bright against the intentionally muted shades of the chamber’s sand-coloured walls and floor.

A marker rune, displayed on the inside of his helmet, illuminated Raldoron’s place as his gaze fell upon a vacant podium. He offered nods to the other men he passed. Nakir and Galan were in the row behind; there was Carminus of the Third Company, the fingers of his augmetic arm drumming absently on the stock of his holstered bolter; Berus, the High Warden, red robes covering his black battledress; the honoured armourer Metriculus, forever glaring through those machine-forged eyes of his.

The First Captain noted other splashes of colour out of place amidst the sea of red. The Space Wolf observer sent by Malcador was here as well, and standing next to the warrior in grey was another in slate-black armour, the stark white of his hair and beard framing his scarred face. The Word Bearers Acolyte Kreed did not meet his gaze.

Raldoron stepped up to his plinth and, with great formality, removed his helm and fastened it to his belt.

Against one wall of the lithocast chamber, ranged like a low ziggurat, were three more podia, the tallest carved from red granite to mimic the wind-smoothed shape of a natural stone outcropping. The room fell silent as Sanguinius emerged through an oval hatch and stepped up to the high vantage. At his sides were Azkaellon and Zuriel, and they followed him, dropping to one knee. The assembled Blood Angels did the same, and from the corner of his eye Raldoron saw Kreed and Redknife give identical, studied bows.

‘Rise,’ said the primarch. His usual smile was notably absent. ‘I call conclave.’

‘We heed the call.’ Raldoron’s voice was just one of those raised loud enough to echo off the walls.

‘The fleet proceeds at full alert,’ Sanguinius went on, the Angel’s words strong and resonant in the stillness of the chamber. ‘Our course and objectives remain unchanged. But after what we saw at Phorus…’ His noble aspect stiffened. ‘I bring us together so that we may speak as one. You are my sons, my swords. There are questions and we shall answer them together. Speak freely.’

‘My lord.’

Raldoron suppressed a brief tic of amusement at the first warrior to break the silence. He could have gambled a primarch’s ransom in gold against the certainty that the captain of the Fifth Company would give voice before all others. Amit stood, his arms folded over his chest, his dark eyes flashing. ‘What would you say that we have seen?’

‘Phorus was a warning, captain,’ said the primarch, accepting the directness of Amit’s challenge without comment. ‘A grand gesture by the enemy, doubtless conceived to strike fear into the hearts of those coming to oppose them.’

Amit caught Raldoron’s eye and spared him a look; then suddenly he seemed to lose definition and become jagged, like a low-gain sensor return. Ripples of colour crossed through him before he became stable once again. Like many of the Blood Angels in the lithocast chamber, Captain Amit was not physically present. At this moment, he stood in a transmission vestibule on board the battle-barge Victus, on the far side of the fleet. Hololithic arrays embedded in all the plinths allowed representations of each company commander to be part of the gathering, without them needing to travel from their own ships. The power requirement and cogitator processing capacity to operate the multiple real-time holograph communications streams was high, and the system was rarely used on this scale. Beyond the range of a few light days, the delay in the message transfer became problematic and unwieldy, but with the massed fleet in close proximity the chamber was performing its function perfectly.

‘Master, one world aflame does not concern me.’ Amit gestured at the air. ‘But a shadow over every sun…’ He let the sentence hang.

‘This… veil…’ began Captain Nakir. The fanciful name for the shadow-effect had been coined by one of Admiral DuCade’s men, and a day later it had spread throughout the entire fleet. ‘What manner of weapon is it? What can kill the starlight?’

‘The stars cannot be dead.’ Helik Redknife spoke without waiting to be acknowledged, mild derision in his voice. ‘I would know it.’

Nakir’s lip curled. ‘But something has been done, and on a scale that dwarfs anything I have ever encountered.’

‘The universe is a gathering of the unknown,’ offered Redknife cryptically. ‘That has always been true.’

‘Perhaps, Wolf Captain.’ Sanguinius glanced at the other warrior. ‘But it is my father’s wish that we know it all the same.’ He nodded to Zuriel. ‘Tell them.’

The Sanguinary Guard produced a data-slate and read aloud from it. ‘This is from the fleet log. Picket ships among the sternguard wings report that an opaque mass resembling a black cloud has formed, six-point-three light days beyond the designated outer marker of the Signus Cluster. Long-range optical observations in all directions appear to support the conclusion that this mass has completely shrouded the system.’

‘Is it some form of displacement?’ said Galan. ‘There are stories of worlds falling wholesale into the immaterium after catastrophic warp space events. Could that happen to an entire star system, and to us along with it?’

Nearby, Metriculus stroked his chin, dismissing the question. ‘The energy to achieve such a result would likely be greater than the sum total output of the galaxy itself. It is irrational to conceive it.’

‘Are these rational times?’ Redknife’s reply was almost a whisper.

The primarch shook his head slowly. ‘We remain in normal space, Captain Galan. Our Navigators confirm this to us, although they report that they have lost all contact with warp beacons beyond the line of the veil.’

‘Chronometrics have been affected,’ Zuriel reported, ‘and so too have our communications. Vox-signals directed into the cloud mass are reflected back. The astropaths...’ He hesitated, shooting the Angel a look before continuing. ‘An astropath aboard the Ignis attempted to make a sending through the barrier. He claimed he was assailed by screaming, maddened echoes of his own telepathic voice.’

Azkaellon spoke for the first time. ‘He took his own life shortly afterwards.’

Raldoron suddenly felt compelled to ask the question. ‘How?’

‘He broke his own neck,’ said the Guard Commander, ending it there.

Sanguinius brought his hands together before him. ‘I have ordered a single ship to disengage from the fleet, the cruiser Helios. They are following a reverse course back along our path of approach to the Signus Cluster. Their orders are to conduct a close examination of this phenomenon.’

He did not give voice to it, but Raldoron saw the concern in his primarch’s eyes, and found it reflected in those of every one of his brothers.

‘The nephilim have nothing but tricks,’ grated High Warden Berus, glancing around and gaining nods of agreement from many of his brothers. Berus’s image crackled with a spit of static. ‘On Melchior we saw what they are capable of. I believe what we encounter here are more of their mind-games and shadow-play.’ He smiled without humour, showing a feral, unlovely grin. ‘This is what they do, brothers. They assault us under the pretence of supernatural powers and sorcery! It is warfare that only succeeds against the weak and the credulous.’

‘I watched Phorus burn. We all did,’ Amit shot back. ‘That was no illusion.’

Raldoron agreed with his comrade. ‘The corpses and the wrecks. The ruined planet and the barrier. We cannot deny this truth, my brothers. Nothing we have seen since entering the Signus Cluster is akin to any weapon known to be used by the nephilim.’

‘Or any other foe, for that matter,’ added Galan.

‘If I may offer an opinion?’ All heads turned towards the Word Bearer, whose image shimmered and jumped as it filtered in from the bridge of the Dark Page. The primarch gave Kreed a nod and he went on. ‘Captain Raldoron is correct, and so is the esteemed Warden. But what you fail to consider is the mindset of these monsters. Our Legion did not have the privilege of drawing blood on these aliens as yours did, but what I have been told of them paints the picture of a tenacious enemy. And if, as we believe, the Khan did indeed obliterate their home planet, then maybe these are the last of their species in the universe.’ He spread his hands. ‘How can we know what tactics they will employ when their survival is at stake?’

Amit’s face twisted and he pointed a finger, his holograph stuttering. ‘You brought this mission to us, messenger. Do you know more than you have revealed?’

For a microsecond, Raldoron saw a flicker of uncertainty in Kreed’s eyes; then it was gone and he was shaking his head. ‘I can offer only my impressions as an outsider. More than that… I can’t say.’

‘The truth of this will out.’ Sanguinius’s words silenced any further conversation. ‘While the Helios undertakes its mission, I have also ordered the Hermia to take on a force of legionaries and travel ahead to Signus VI, the planet known as Holst.’

‘The hive-world?’ said Redknife. ‘Is that wise?’

‘A single ship rather than the fleet,’ Azkaellon broke in. ‘The Hermia is stealth-capable. It will be able to close to landing range with a much lower chance of detection.’

‘Holst is as silent as every other world in this system,’ continued the primarch, ‘but if it is intact, we may be able to learn more about the invasion. There may even be survivors.’

Kreed inclined his head. ‘I have dispatched Captain Harox and two of my best trackers to assist in the operation. If someone still lives on Holst, they’ll find them.’

Redknife raised an eyebrow. ‘Trackers?’ he repeated doubtfully.

The acolyte sniffed at the implied barb. ‘It is not only wolves that know how to hunt, captain.’

The Angel scanned their faces. ‘In the interim, return to your companies and prepare for war.’ His aspect became grim. ‘The battle that lies ahead of us will be unlike any we have faced. I know it in my blood. We will be tested, my sons.’

Raldoron raised his mailed fist and led the return, as was the First Captain’s duty. ‘For Baal and Terra,’ he called, his voice resonant. ‘For Sanguinius and the Emperor!’

‘Sanguinius and the Emperor!’ The shout echoed throughout the fleet.

The Stormbird rumbled out of the aft launch bay and powered into a diving turn across the inert thruster nozzles of the Hermia. The drop-ship threaded around the Blood Angels cruiser and past the slick of wreckage the larger vessel was using as cover. Once, orbital transfer docks had studded the bright ice rings of Holst like gemstones strung along a necklace, but now they were no more than collections of metal fragments. Junkyard remains had spilled into the planetary halo, disrupting the sparkling planes of dust and the shepherd moons. It was ideal camouflage for the cruiser and the drop-ship, enabling the former to come close and the latter to sprint the rest of the distance to atmospheric interface. Regular falls of debris rained down on the ice world, and the Stormbird moved within a swathe of such wreckage. If enemy units were watching the skies, they would not be able to pick out the drop-ship from the burning remains.

That was the theory, of course. The reality was, if the helm-servitors flying Stormbird Delta-25 Blood’s Eagle were not as good as promised, everyone aboard would perish in a fiery collision long before making planetfall.

Meros dismissed the thought as he rose from his cage-seat, and moved to secure his weapon and auxiliary battle gear in preparation for landing. One way or another, they would soon be on Holst’s frigid surface.

He passed Sarga, who gave him a nod. ‘Ready for this?’

‘Always,’ said the other Blood Angel, his attention straying.

Meros looked and saw Sarga was watching Captain Harox and the two other Word Bearers sitting up at the aft of the Stormbird. The three warriors in their granite-grey armour were already fully sealed in their suits – in fact, Meros noted that they had arrived from the Dark Page with their helmets in place and kept them on all through the pre-launch briefing and take-off. Harox and his men were leaning forwards, each of them engrossed in the pages of a small book that was connected to a pouch on their belts by an adamantine chain. The chains each bore a single silver medallion, although Meros could not make out the design stamped upon it. ‘What do you think they are reading?’

Sarga shrugged. ‘Battle doctrine, maybe? You know, I asked one of them if I could see and he showed me a page. Didn’t understand a word of it. All written in some old cuneiform system.’

‘Probably a Colchisian text,’ Meros suggested, moving down the compartment. ‘Perhaps when we return you can ask Kreed to read it to you.’

At the arming rack, he took up his bolt pistol and worked the slide before slamming it deep into his hip holster. Behind him, he heard the hatch to the rear compartment open and close, and presently felt a hand on his shoulder.

He looked up into a dark, serious face. ‘Kano?’

His battle-brother nodded. ‘I decided I’d join you.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said the Apothecary, glancing around the compartment where the other Blood Angels were seated. ‘I thought you had to remain aboard the flagship with Raldoron.’

‘The First Captain can do without me for a while.’ Kano gave a brief smile, but it seemed forced. ‘I called in a favour. I needed…’ He hesitated, correcting himself. ‘I wanted to take a look down there.’ The legionary jerked his head in the direction of the planet.

‘I thought I was the reckless one, forever in harm’s way. You’re supposed to be sensible, all bookish and thoughtful…’ Meros saw that Kano already had a boltgun slung over his shoulder. ‘I won’t say I’m unhappy to have you stand with me, brother. It’s just unexpected.’

That hesitation was visible again, and this time Kano didn’t try to hide it. He knew his old friend too well. ‘Everything about this mission has been unexpected.’

‘Aye, no dispute.’ Meros gave a nod, eyeing his comrade. ‘Now, why don’t you tell me what really occupies your thoughts? Not that iron-skull Annellus, surely?’

‘The Warden? No.’ Kano frowned. ‘He thinks me a target to keep in sight, that’s certain. But I’ve decided to stay as clear of him as I can.’ He leaned in, speaking in low tones. ‘You’ve heard about the deaths, yes?’

‘An astropath, on the Ignis.’

Kano nodded. ‘And the rest.’

That brought Meros up short. ‘There were others? Other astropaths?’

‘No, not yet at any rate. I thought you might have heard something from the medicae staff on the Red Tear.’ He paused. ‘Suicides, Meros. Not one of the Legion, but a handful of crewmen, Legion-serfs. All of them took their own lives after the… the sign on Phorus.’

The Apothecary considered this. It was a harsh truth that some unaugmented humans simply could not withstand the mental pressures of extended space travel and combat operations. Deaths, sometimes self-inflicted, others from uncontrolled emotional outbursts, were regrettably a fact of life among naval crews. He repeated this to Kano.

‘Not all at the same time. On eight different ships, at the exact same instant.’

‘A coincidence.’

Kano shook his head. ‘I don’t believe in them.’ He placed his hand on Meros’s shoulder once again. ‘You trust me, brother. Let me hear you say the words.’

Meros broke into a confused grin. ‘Of course I do, you fool. I owe you my life. That debt earns you my countenance until the grave.’

The other warrior guided him further down the Stormbird’s central aisle, where the roar of the engines was loud enough to cover their conversation from the earshot of others. ‘I must tell someone,’ Kano said, his gaze momentarily turning inwards. ‘Meros, I saw something.’

The Apothecary said nothing, his expression neutral as Kano told him of the vivid dream that had come to him in the meditation cell, the endless fall and the bloody, crimson-stained angel.

Meros had seen many sides of Brother Kano in the years that they had been comrades-in-arms; he had seen him elated in the moment of victory, at his lowest ebb during a long night of battle when death had seemed certain. Furious and enraged, happy and laughing. But never this. Never uncertain.

He took a moment to assimilate the former Librarian’s words, knowing full well what they might mean. Meros didn’t insult Kano by suggesting that it might have been no more than a dream; his friend was trained in the arts of the mind, and he of all men would know the difference. ‘If the Wardens hear of this, you’ll be taken off the line, censured.’

‘At the very least,’ said Kano bitterly. ‘If not for the insistence of the primarch himself, every Blood Angel who shares my skill might have suffered the same fate as the psykers of the Imperial Fists, isolated and locked away from our brothers. If the Wardens had their way, we would have been exiled back to Baal.’

Meros folded his arms. ‘What do you intend to do?’

‘I’m not sure yet.’

The steady vibration of the Stormbird’s thrusters shifted in pitch, and the deck trembled beneath their boots. ‘We’re entering Holst’s atmosphere,’ said Meros.

Kano nodded, turning away. ‘Thank you for your counsel, brother. Keep this between us for now, yes?’

‘On my oath,’ agreed Meros, even as he realised how much the other man’s words had troubled him.

Delta-25 Blood’s Eagle shrieked through the outer regions of the hive-world’s sky, trailing hot plasmatic gas and torn air. A shower of metal fragments from the shoals of orbital wreckage burned up around it, becoming brief flashes of immolation before atomising under the incredible temperatures at the interface zone.

Baniol was the chief flight officer, strapped into the flight couch at the rear of the narrow cockpit, resisting the g-forces of the descent with all the strength he could muster. Like Tolens, the engineer in the seat behind him, Baniol was a Legion-serf. That meant he was a human auxiliary in the employ of the fleet, an ordinary man in comparison to the organic war machines carried in the Stormbird’s troop bays. Once, Baniol had dreamed about becoming one of them, a Space Marine; but that dream had faded away a long time ago, dying in the cold light of reality. He had been deemed too weak. Too human.

And recently, Baniol’s dreams had become a place he no longer wanted to visit. The pilot had been able to conceal the effect of stimms he used to stay awake, at least at first. But now he was afraid the others could see it. Baniol was afraid that the legionaries could smell it on him.

He was afraid a lot of the time, in fact. Especially since the dreams had started to bleed into his waking life.

Baniol made the mistake of looking out of the thick cockpit window beyond the helm and into the turmoil of the crackling plasma fires flashing over the Stormbird’s prow and canards. He saw things looking out at him from within the fiery discharges, things that knew his name and wanted to bite into him.

‘Hey!’ Tolens shouted at Baniol, in a way that made it clear he’d been doing it for a while. ‘Watch the separation! Are you listening to me? We’re drifting off the glide path.’ When the officer didn’t react, Tolens swore loudly and disengaged his straps, turning in his seat. ‘Baniol, are you asleep back there?’

Something snapped in Baniol and he spun away from the controls, glaring at the engineer with such pale, sweating intensity that Tolens actually recoiled in shock. ‘You see them, don’t you? The faces? The faces in the fire!’ He jabbed his fingers at the windows. ‘Look! Look!’

Tolens turned slightly, confused. ‘What are you talking about–’

‘You can see them!’ Baniol didn’t know where the sudden, explosive burst of violence came from, but abruptly he was out of his restraints, grabbing Tolens by the scruff of his neck. Catching the other man off-balance, Baniol rammed his face into the canopy beside the first helm-servitor. ‘Look!’ he shouted. ‘You see them!’

Bone cracked, and blood spurted. The engineer went slack and collapsed across a console, eyes rolling back in his head.

The flight officer whimpered and smacked at his head, panic flaring inside him. That was not what was meant to happen. He blinked through tears, watching the icy surface of Holst coming closer. Man-made structures – huge arcology towers and great earthworks cut into the permafrost – were visible through the constant snowstorm.

He had made a terrible mistake, and now it had matured into murder. He couldn’t let the legionaries know what he had done. He couldn’t go back. Not now. Not ever. He had to make sure no one found out.

Outside, the fires were screaming and giggling, watching as Baniol robotically drew his sidearm and aimed it at the back of the servitor’s head.

The sound was distinct and clear. It could not have been anything other than the discharge from a narrow-bore laspistol. The muffled snap-crack of the shot turned Meros’s head.

‘I heard it too,’ began Sarga, looking up at him from his acceleration rack. He had more to say, but Meros didn’t hear it. Suddenly, the Stormbird’s nose fell and the drop-ship entered a death-dive, tumbling off course. Before he could stop himself, Meros was pitched away from the deck and down the length of the compartment, thrown into disarray like every other loose item on the ship.

He shielded his head as he cannoned down the aisle and finally crashed to a halt against a heap of cargo pods at the aft of the bay. Meros struggled back to his feet, realising that his fall had been broken by one of the Word Bearers. Their commander, Harox, was already recovering, reaching for the hatchway that led to the flight deck.

More crackles of las-fire sounded over their heads, sporadic and random.

‘Captain…’ Meros began. ‘Wait.’

Harox ignored him and hauled himself up, fighting the G-forces with each step. The Word Bearer stabbed at the hatch control and the oval panel snapped back. Meros scowled and grabbed on to the handrail, following Harox through.

The broad form of the captain’s head and shoulders were barely into the cockpit when las-bolts found their way to him. The flight officer shot wildly, pulses of yellow coherent light fizzing into Harox’s pauldrons, his torso plate and helmet. The laspistol wasn’t a battlefield-rated weapon, more a personal defence sidearm, and only a lucky hit to the eye lenses of the warrior’s helmet would have proven dangerous to him. The discharges from the gun cut burning divots in the thick outer layers of his ceramite armour but did not penetrate.

Harox lurched forwards, the dark bulk of him filling the flight deck. Meros came through after him in time to see the Word Bearer slap the gun from the serf’s hand with a snap of breaking bones. The blow carried enough force to bounce the man off the inside of the canopy and back into Harox’s waiting grip.

‘What is this?’ From behind his scowling breath grille, the Word Bearer’s voice was sonorous and fearsome.

Meros processed the scene in a fraction of a second, the quickened accuitive processes of his transhuman mind picking out the dead flight engineer on the deck, the blasted servitors, the skirling alerts from the Stormbird’s warning systems. He saw that the auto-flight cogitator was a wreck, as were the thrust regulators and the long-range vox-unit.

‘It’s… suicide,’ he said. The word lay in his chest like the aftermath of a body-blow.

‘The faces, the faces!’ The serf’s eyes bulged and the muscles of his neck were corded like steel cables as he flailed at Harox’s helmet, scratching at the jade-coloured lenses. He tried in vain to unseat the captain’s headgear, desperately pulling at the neck-ring clasps. ‘I can see the faces, you have to see them too, the faces and the fire and the blood! The face, the face of the–’

The man’s words ended in a wet crunch as Harox crushed his trachea and tossed the body away. The Word Bearer took a step forwards, peering out through the canopy at the fast-approaching ground. The sharp peaks of spindly ice mountains flashed past off the tips of the Stormbird’s wings. ‘Blood Angel,’ he said, without looking at Meros. ‘Can you fly this craft?’

Meros pushed past him towards the auxiliary flight controls. ‘A question you should have considered before you killed that serf out of hand.’ Grimly, he settled into the chair and gripped the controls. They were small in his armoured hands, like something made for a child in the grip of an adult. ‘I suppose we’ll find out. Tell the others to strap in. We won’t have the opportunity for a second attempt.’

Every one of the Legiones Astartes provided their warriors with a hypnogogic training programme that gave them a basic understanding of vehicle operations. Legionaries were imprinted with the knowledge of how to run groundcraft and common aerial units such as skimmers, gunship speeders and jetbikes – but piloting a Stormbird was at the limit of this teaching.

Meros allowed himself to forget for a moment that he was an Apothecary, surrendering his reflexes to the ingrained muscle-memory programmes deep in his mind. He remembered how to the fly the Stormbird in a distant way, with all the clarity of a man singing back a half-heard melody.

There was no time to conduct this cleanly or carefully. The Stormbird’s port wing clipped the apex of a blue-white ice pillar, blasting a sheet of snow and frost out around it, pulling the drop-ship off its heading. Holst-Prime Hive stretched out below the craft in a vast rockcrete sprawl, a dozen narrow triangular towers arranged around a single giant cone, cross-connected by hundreds of aerial viaducts and monorail lines at every level. The hive towers emerged from a low, flat geodesic dome that in turn lay over the junction of several multi-lane highways. There was nothing that looked like a landing pad visible at this altitude, and with all the damage to the controls it was highly unlikely that the Stormbird’s standard vertical touchdown mode would be operable.

As the craft slid through the frozen air, crabbing into the hard crosswinds off the towers, Meros extended the landing skids from the underside of the fuselage.

Under normal circumstances, the highways and the complexes of Holst were protected from the murderous weather conditions of the frigid planet by force walls. The invisible barriers would deflect the snows and cut the teeth of the winds, but it was clear by the almost uniform patina of grey-white over the roads that the system had been inactive for many days. Bulges beneath the metre-thick snowfall concealed the hulks of stalled cargo trucks from the ice mines, abandoned to freeze where they sat.

Meros shouted a warning over the general vox-channel and activated the retro-thrusters, but the damage to the cockpit was too severe.

Stormbird Delta-25 Blood’s Eagle dropped out of the hazy sky towards the highway, its crimson hull still sizzling with the displaced heat of orbital re-entry. It landed badly, ploughing into a snow bank and the obstacles hidden beneath, throwing up plumes of ice. Metal sheared and broke away; the port wing crumpled and the hull twisted onto its side. The drop-ship splayed into an uncontrolled skid that carried it down the frost-rimed road for another kilometre before velocity finally bled away to nothing.

The ship’s hull groaned and ticked as plumes of steam puffed into the air, immediately freezing back into a fresh fall of metallic sleet.

Shipmaster Godolfan leaned forwards in his command chair and peered across the bridge, glaring at the sight off the bow of the Helios as if he could intimidate it into giving him answers. He rubbed his clean-shaven chin. ‘This is damned peculiar,’ he said, his Enigman accent turning the statement into a studied drawl.

As the cruiser closed the distance towards the dark barrier surrounding the Signus Cluster, the mood on Godolfan’s bridge had become muted. Slowly, his people fell silent and the usual sense of professional focus had given way to something else. It wasn’t fear; he refused to call it that. Awe, perhaps.

It was hard not to look out into that fathomless wall of black smoke and not feel something had gone deeply awry in the universe. Godolfan’s six decades of service with the Imperial armed forces had shown him many things and taken him to many places, but the sheer wrongness of the strange shroud affected him in a way he found hard to articulate.

By right, it should not have been so disturbing; it was just darkness. Nothing but some strange stellar phenomenon, a great cosmic blind called into being by the enemies of humanity. Troubling, indeed, even formidable. But nothing to hobble a man’s will.

‘Distance to the inner edge?’ The question came from Captain Reznor, a lieutenant-commander from the 164th Company. The hulking legionary stood close to the gunnery alcove, his hawkish face framed by long black hair. Reznor was part of a force of fifty Blood Angels on board the Helios, in line with the primarch’s orders to investigate and report back on what the crew-serfs were calling the veil.

When the reply didn’t come at once, Godolfan glared at his sounding officer. ‘Answer him, Lieutenant Dequen!’

The young woman worked her console with a building sense of agitation. ‘I would if I could, sir…’

Godolfan’s face twisted in a grimace and he rose from his chair, stalking across the room. The shipmaster had been born on Enigma’s orbital plexes, and he had the spindly, long-legged gait typical of his low-grav upbringing. ‘Explain it to me,’ he demanded, craning over Dequen to stare into the depths of the holograph showing her sensor reads.

‘Sir, I can’t give a sounding because the auspex grids refuse to settle.’ She pointed at a pane of gibberish data on the display. ‘One moment I have a null, almost as if the sensors have been disconnected. Then the scans appear to be reflecting back to us, phase-shifted out of synchrony. At other times, I detect energetic constructs that match nothing on record…’ She frowned. ‘Just now I got a return showing organic matter out there.’

‘Organic?’ echoed Godolfan with incredulity.

‘Aye, sir,’ said Dequen.

The shipmaster turned away. ‘We must be close, Captain Reznor. These effects may be an artefact of the barrier’s creation.’ He glanced back at the main viewport.

The dark vapours billowed through the vacuum, and the motion and shape of them was like no nebulae or dust cloud. The veil moved in a way that could convince a man it had intent, coils of it seeming to reach out hesitantly towards the Helios like the fingers of a curious child, furtively shrinking away before making contact.

‘Best guess,’ Dequen offered. ‘Ten kilometres and closing.’

‘Helm,’ ordered the shipmaster, ‘hold station here.’ The officer at the navigation console replied in the affirmative, but the motions of the cloud did not recede. ‘I said hold!’ Godolfan snapped.

‘The phenomenon is in motion, not the ship,’ said Reznor.

Godolfan glared at the black mass, his annoyance rising. He was a man of rationality and cold certainties, and he disliked anything that defied his attempts to classify it.

Shapes were moving out there, behind the outermost layers of the veil. Ghostly forms that were too regular to be swirls of cosmic dust or radiative energy. The shipmaster’s gaze picked out eyes and mouths, the silhouettes of great faces brimming with tusks and fangs, black upon black, all of them grinning back at him.

They assembled beneath the Stormbird’s intact starboard wing. With the drop-ship on its side, the massive aerofoil curved up over the heads of the legionaries, shielding them from the ceaseless snowfall. Fluid dripped from cracks in the fuselage, unspent fuel spilling out of punctured tanks to pool on the highway. The puddles were already turning to ice around their edges, Holst’s incredible cold powerful enough to freeze the liquid promethium.

Kano found Meros attending to one of the tactical squad. The Apothecary’s unexpected turn at the drop-ship’s controls had brought them all down safely – although safely was a relative term. None of the Blood Angels or Harox’s Word Bearers had perished in the crash landing, but there had been a few minor injuries. Sergeant Cassiel was currently taking stock of their condition; for all intents and purposes they were fully operational and their deployment had commenced.

Kano almost smiled at Cassiel’s stoic, direct reading of the situation. The Stormbird would never fly again, but that would only be a problem if they needed it to.

‘We’re here, we are ready to proceed with the mission,’ Cassiel was saying. ‘Meros, can Brother Xagan fight?’ His helm nodded towards the injured warrior.

Before Meros even had the chance to answer, Xagan pushed the Apothecary out of his way and stepped forwards. ‘It’s no concern of mine if someone wanted to fly the Stormbird like a drop-pod, brother-sergeant. On your orders, sir.’

‘That’s a yes,’ Meros added wearily.

‘I don’t consider it wise to move off from the crash site.’ Captain Harox and his two men were unharmed, and they had flatly refused any offer Meros made to examine them for injuries. ‘The actions of your serf, the man Baniol… We cannot simply ignore them.’

‘He lost his mind,’ Cassiel replied. ‘He stranded us here. Might have killed us into the bargain. It’s troubling, but forgive me, captain, I fail to see how that incident prevents us from setting out on the mission my primarch gave us.’

‘We have no ship, sergeant! No vox with which to reach the Hermia!’

Cassiel accepted this with a nod. ‘Aye, both true. And when we do not make our first scheduled report, they will know something is amiss.’ He kept his gaze on Harox, but his next question was directed to Kano. ‘Brother, how long after we go vox-silent will a condition for concern be declared?’

‘Ten hours standard.’ Kano glanced up. ‘Just around local nightfall.’

One of the other Blood Angels shot a look into the dark sky. ‘This is daytime?’

‘Try to keep up, Leyteo,’ said the sergeant. He went on. ‘Ten hours, sir. More than enough time for us to explore the outer wards of Holst-Prime Hive.’ Cassiel paused, and at last the question that they all expected came to the fore. ‘Unless, of course, you wish to exercise your rank and relieve me of operational command of this mission. Then you can do whatever you want. Sir.’

Harox said nothing from behind the mask of his helm, and Kano wondered if he was speaking privately to his comrades. Then his gruff tones returned to the general comm-channel. ‘Captain Furio’s orders were quite clear, Sergeant Cassiel. This sortie is under your command. My men and I will follow your lead.’

Cassiel nodded. ‘Here’s how we will run this, then – staggered skirmish line, fifteen-metre separation. Vox check every ten minutes.’ He turned to point down the highway. ‘According to the maps on the signum, this road leads into the main atrium of the upper city, so all we need to do is follow it. Set all thermodynamic and infra-red sensing to maximum acuity. If there is anything even remotely alive on this ball of ice, we will either kill it or rescue it. Clear?’

The legionaries nodded in silent assent.

‘Then move out. Xagan, as you are so eager to prove yourself, take the lead with one of Captain Harox’s trackers.’

Kano unlimbered his bolter and took his place in the formation, pausing to throw a look back at the fallen Stormbird. A layer of snow was already settling over it.

‘Give it a couple of hours, and it will be buried,’ said Meros from nearby. He looked back along the line in the ice that marked their landing.

‘My thanks for not killing us,’ Kano returned, trying to shrug it off. ‘Does that make us even now?’

Meros saw through the lightness in his tone. ‘Baniol was trying to kill himself. Like the others. He was screaming, raving. What he said made no sense.’ The Apothecary relayed what he could remember of the dead pilot’s words. ‘Is that what happened to the others, to the astropath?’

Kano shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’ A creeping sense of cold played over his skin – a physical impossibility, given the airtight seal of his power armour and the controlled climate maintained by its life-support systems. ‘But these things are connected. There’s no other explanation.’

They found the first bodies in the atrium where the highway entered the metropolis, at the edge of a multi-level annex that comprised a vendor arcade, an open-air dining court and a monorail station. The corpses were drifted ten deep in some places, almost all of them oriented in the same way: with the city proper to their backs and the highway before them.

Meros saw heaps of dead Signusi citizens lying next to stalled rail cars or crushed against airlock doors that had not opened.

‘They were left where they fell,’ said Sarga, as they picked their way through the silent aftermath. ‘And they died running.’

The bodies were all pallid with the cold, blinded eyes staring into nothing, blackened lips open in silent screams. Their flesh was strangely bloated and frozen solid, and thin rimes of hoarfrost covered them.

In places where the dome had partly collapsed, snowdrifts had entered the arcology, but for the most part the lethal cold had been conjured out of the atmosphere. There were signs of structural damage here and there, but the majority of the buildings were intact. Holst-Prime Hive was a glacial tomb, and with each step the Blood Angels took, their ceramite boots crunched through the new layer of frost. Against the dirty white hue of the snow, the armour of the legionaries stood out in stark, garish contrast. Only the Word Bearers seemed to blend in, as dark as the long shadows cast by the hab-towers.

As per orders, a Techmarine from the Ninth Company by the name of Kaide was documenting everything they saw. He controlled a servo-skull making slow circles over the heads of the warriors, buzzing quietly each time it took a pict-capture of the area. Kaide followed behind Sergeant Cassiel as he approached the Apothecary.

‘Meros. You have a theory about this?’ Cassiel gestured at the mounds of the dead.

He sighed behind his breath mask. ‘For the sake of these poor fools, it seems it was quick. Death struck them all within seconds of one another.’ Meros paused over the body of a male in sequined robes, of the kind favoured by outworld mercantile clans. Judging by the cut of his clothes and his high quality augmetic implants, this man had been wealthy; not that the depths of his coffers had done him much good here.

‘No immediate signs of outward injury. My first guess is some kind of telepsychic offensive, perhaps a fast-acting gaseous or viral agent.’

‘A neuronic weapon?’ suggested Kaide. ‘A mind-shredder has similar effects.’

‘I’ve never known of one that could project over so wide an area,’ said Meros. ‘But that’s not to say it is impossible.’

‘So.’ Cassiel folded his arms over his chest. ‘They didn’t die like the ones on the ships, then?’

Meros slowly drew his fractal-bladed combat knife from its sheath on his boot. ‘Let’s find out.’ He pointed at the greyed skin of the dead merchant’s swollen arm. ‘Sarga? If you would.’

The other Blood Angel held the stiff limb firmly, and Meros struck with the knife in a single, smooth action. The meat of the frozen body came away with a peculiar squeaking sound. The cut was ragged, but clean through. Dispassionately, the Apothecary turned the sample over in his gloved hands, peering at the stump. He saw exploded veins and corrupted arteries, all destroyed by some unknown force, all flash-frozen by the brutal cold of Holst’s atmosphere. But no bone in there.

Meros held the severed arm out to Cassiel. ‘The same,’ he said grimly. ‘The environment here preserved the corpses differently, but they died in the same fashion.’

‘There must be thousands of bodies in this area alone.’ Kaide’s head was bowed, but his vision was coming to him through the optical scopes of the mechanical drone circling high above. ‘And an entire hive-city beyond that.’

‘Other settlements, too,’ added Sarga. ‘This is the second most populous colony in the cluster.’

‘Are we to assume that all the people of Holst are lost?’ asked Kaide.

‘You have the eyes in the sky, brother,’ Cassiel was grim. ‘Do you see anything that tells you different?’ The Techmarine shook his head and the sergeant tapped his helm as he switched to the general vox. ‘Squad. Prepare to move on to the next search sector. All units, report your location.’

Meros mentally tallied the names of the warriors as they voxed one after another. The count came a man short.

‘Xagan,’ Cassiel called his name, his voice harsh and level. ‘Status?’

Kaide was already vectoring the monitor bird towards the legionary’s last known position. ‘There has been intermittent interference on the primary communications channel since we passed the city limits,’ he noted. ‘The density of the buildings may be affecting the vox.’ But it was unlikely, and they all knew it.

Meros toggled a vision mode and an overlay appeared in the lens of his helmet, showing a string of icons indicating the armour status of each warrior in the squad: green for normal, amber for impaired, red for critical. Only the command officer and the unit medicae had access to the telemetry feed, and then only at close range.

Xagan’s icon flashed from green to amber, and an instant later a salvo of shots echoed through the cold air.

‘Over there!’ Cassiel shot forwards like a rocket, mounting the stairs of a walkway three at a time. ‘All units, hold station and stand to alert!’ He didn’t wait for Meros to come after him, knowing that the Apothecary would be quick to follow.

They sprinted over an ice-rimed lawn and a frozen ornamental fountain as another cascade of bolt-shots crashed in the near distance. Meros caught a noise like stone grinding on stone and the tinkle of breaking glass as they vaulted across a stalled groundcar and raced towards a fallen two-storey building.

The icon bearing Xagan’s name blinked amber to red, and then went dim.

The entrance was blocked. Cassiel led the way, making handholds in the rockcrete by punching his fingers into the wall. The sergeant rose up over the lintel of the collapsed roof and slid down. Both floors had flattened into one, forming a small atrium of broken stone. Meros halted at the roof level, panning with his bolt pistol, looking for any hostiles.

Down below, an Umbra Ferrox-pattern bolter lay as if discarded on the ground, vapour still curling from its muzzle. There was no sign of Xagan, but the floor of the building was a ragged sink-hole, the edges of it broken into spars of twisted rebar and fractured rock. Cassiel carefully approached the edge and peered down. He pulled a biolume stick from a pouch on his belt and shook it into life, then tossed the object into the fissure. From his vantage, Meros watched the glowing stick fall away, dimming as it grew distant. There appeared to be no bottom to the crack in the ground, and the protruding spars of jagged metal extending out of the walls made it seem like he was staring into the gullet of some monstrous creature.

Cassiel called the missing warrior’s name once more, but his resignation was clear in the set of his shoulders. If the sink-hole reached into the hive’s underlevels, which extended below almost as far as its towers rose above, there was no way that a legionary, even in full armour, could fall such a distance and survive. The sergeant gathered up the bolter, examining it. ‘This wasn’t an accident,’ he mused. ‘Xagan was firing at something. We both heard it. Two-thirds of this magazine has been discharged.’

The words had barely left Cassiel’s lips when a bellow of rage and pain carried across the rooftops. Meros’s head snapped up, drawn by the sound, in time to see the glassy spire of a gallery tumbling into a cloud of displaced ice and rock dust. ‘To the south,’ he pointed.

‘Harox’s men are there,’ Cassiel called. ‘Don’t wait for me, get going!’

Meros broke into a sprint across the line of the lintel and surged into a leap as he reached the edge. The powered muscle-fibres of his armour turned his jump into a powerful bound that took him across the short distance to the next low rooftop. Stone splintered under the impact of his landing, but he ignored it, running on, picking out the route that would get him to the fallen spire as quickly as possible.

As he moved, he heard Cassiel’s voice over the vox. ‘All units, enemy contact, unknown vectors. Be ready!’

The Apothecary made one last jump that dropped him in the middle of what had once been a parking bay for automated cabs. Garishly-painted capsule groundcars were partly buried under the rubble of the collapsed spire, and the air was still thick with a haze of dust. Meros peered through the thermal vision blocks of his helmet, sweeping about with his preysight. Immediately, he spotted a line of hot white light emanating from a dozen irregular shapes a few metres distant. Switching back to a normal optical mode, he ventured through the dissipating dust cloud, leading with his bolt pistol.

The Word Bearers were not linked in to the train of status icons, but he had his gauntlet auspex and used it to scan for signs of life.

The readings it returned were confused and nonsensical.

Meros paused, getting his bearings. Somehow, the steel skeleton of the fallen spire had not broken in its collapse. Instead, it lay arched over him, the spines along its length splayed open like grasping metal fingers. Impossibly, whole panes of crystalflex were still in place, their edges bared and sharp. They hung above his head like a canopy of executioners’ axes. Dark, oily fluid stained many of them, and more of the liquid was pooling around his boots, steaming as it cooled, staining the layer of frost purple-black.

He came across the first of the warm shapes lying on the ground and disgust clenched in his chest. The irregular forms were pieces of a legionary, cut in hard, fine lines across torso and limb, through joint and neck; ceramite, meat and bone all opened with slices of an immeasurably sharp blade. The slate-coloured armour of the dead Word Bearer was all that identified him, and with a start Meros realised that the purple fluid was the legionary’s blood. Despite the horror of the sight before him, the strange vitae filled his thoughts, his senses.

It did not smell like any kind of blood Meros knew, and his Legion knew blood. He struggled to frame his thoughts.

The Apothecary’s gaze lighted on the shattered half of the Word Bearer’s helmet, cut whole from his neck with his head still within, then broken open. What he could see of the face beneath was a ruin of scarification and dense tattooing, but the tone of the skin was all wrong. It was hate-red and twisted. Deformed.

‘Get away from him!’ Without warning, the Blood Angel was yanked around and pushed back by strong hands. Harox pushed past him, his other Word Bearer battle-brother immediately interposing himself between the Apothecary and the mutilated remains. ‘He is dead,’ Harox grated. ‘Your skills are of no use.’

‘I…’ Meros faltered, still trying to assimilate what had happened. He raised his medicae gauntlet, presenting the reductor. ‘Captain, if you wish I may be able to help you recover Brother–’ He paused; aside from Kreed and Harox, none of the other Word Bearers from the Dark Page had bothered to name themselves. ‘Your battle-brother’s gene-seed.’

‘I do not wish it,’ Harox’s words were colder than Holst’s snows. ‘Be gone, son of Baal. He is fallen and we must mark his loss. In private.’

Meros gave a nod and turned away. He threaded back through the ruins to the central parkland of the atrium area, finding Kano and the others dug in, weapons loaded and ready.

Cassiel saw the facts in his silence. ‘Dead?’

‘Dead. One of Harox’s trackers, carved like the carcass of a sand-ox.’

‘Did you see the enemy?’ asked Kano.

‘I saw nothing,’ Meros admitted. ‘Nothing I can explain.’

EIGHT

Helios
The Living City
Exterminatus

The carousel of horrors turned ceaselessly out in the darkness of the void, and Godolfan stepped away from the viewport, shaking his head. He tried to rid himself of the images, the illusions his troubled mind had created. He tried and failed.

‘This…’ Godolfan was momentarily disoriented and he shrugged it off. ‘This is not correct.’ His gaze fell to Captain Reznor, but the Blood Angel was distracted, sniffing at the air like a hunting dog.

‘The scent.’ The captain came forwards, his head tilting up to study the plasteel hemisphere in the ceiling of the Helios’s bridge, the lowermost face of the Navigator’s habitat module.

Godolfan looked up and saw something glistening around the circular rim of the pressure hatch: a trail of fluid was moving in a slow arc around the hatch’s edge towards its lowest point. The dark liquid pooled and surrendered to gravity, emitting a fat droplet to spatter on the deck plates. Instinctively, the shipmaster extended a hand to catch one of the drops. Thick, coppery fluid stained his palm.

‘Get back,’ ordered the captain, his plasma pistol rising in his fist. Another of Reznor’s warriors came to the hatch control and on his commander’s nod, he pressed the emergency release.

A sluice of stale blood – more than could ever have been contained in a single body – vomited out of the habitat module and flowed over the floor. Godolfan stumbled back as specks of the cold, sticky liquid struck his cheek.

From inside the unlit space of the habitat, a body in wet-slick robes tumbled out, legs and arms flailing at the air. Its fall was arrested just above the deck, the corpse of the Navigator suspended by trailing ropes of cable.

From the smell of it, the remains were heavily decayed; but that was impossible. Godolfan had spoken with the Navigator less than five hours ago, after they had disengaged from the expeditionary fleet.

‘Wounds,’ said the other Blood Angel, pointing at the corpse. ‘Like claw slashes. Too large to have been self-inflicted.’

‘That pod is sealed,’ Godolfan insisted. ‘Nothing can get in or out!’

There was a sharp cry of horror that the shipmaster recognised as Dequen, and he spun, watching her recoil from her console, her face drained of colour. She had blood on the fingers of her hands. The lieutenant bolted up from her chair, backing away.

Godolfan’s first thought was that Dequen had been marked by the same back-splash that had ruined the tunic of his uniform; but then he realised that could not be so, she had been too far away. Around the lieutenant, other members of the bridge crew were following suit, fleeing from their panels in panic.

‘What are you doing?’ he demanded. ‘Mind your stations, look sharp!’

Reznor pointed with an armoured finger. ‘Blood,’ he said simply.

Dequen’s console, like all the others on the Helios’s command deck, was an intricate and finely engineered piece of craftsmanship. It was brass and ivorite, with illuminated crystal buttons and multi-functional tabs, as elegant now as it had been when the cruiser first left the slips. It was also swimming in watery blood, rivulets of the crimson fluid streaming out of the innards of the console. Out of all the bridge consoles.

The shipmaster cast around, not understanding what he saw, and found more trails of red issuing from the seams in the bulkheads and around the boles of rivets. The Helios was bleeding.

Godolfan heard a strange, atonal screaming that hung in the air. It had no source, it was all around him. It was inside his head. He staggered to the viewport, his vision fogging, and fell against the armourglass wall, feeling the cold of the void outside even through the thick protective layers of the hull.

Outside, the cautious smoke let its tendrils gather around the warship and draw it in towards the dark mass of the depthless veil.

By the time the Word Bearers had returned to the atrium, it had been decided.

‘The nephilim must have left hunters in the city, waiting for any rescue force.’ Kano watched as Cassiel spoke to Harox. ‘Obviously, they’re cloaked in some way that renders them invisible to our auspexes.’

‘Obviously,’ echoed the captain. His voice ground like flint on flint.

The sergeant gestured at the trampled grounds of the small parkland around them. ‘This area has good sightlines. We’ll hold here and draw them to us. Kaide has seeded the perimeter with tripwires and krak grenades.’

The Techmarine nodded at the sound of his own name, without looking up from the data-slate in his hand. Kaide’s servo-skull was still up above them, the drone circling in the eaves of the great roof-dome on an automatic patrol pattern, watching for thermal spikes, listening for the high-frequency pulses of xenos vocalisations.

‘Very well.’ Harox offered nothing else, and Kano frowned behind his visor. He had expected some display of emotion from the Word Bearer. The captain had just lost one of his men, and yet he behaved as if they were discussing a drill on the parade ground. The Blood Angel knew that his cousins in the XVII Legion were given to demonstrative fury and righteous rages, but he saw nothing of that in the taciturn Harox and his silent comrade. And considering that their search and rescue mission had barely even managed the first aspect of that description, the Word Bearers seemed unconcerned by Cassiel’s order to dig in and wait. When Kano tried to put a description to Harox’s behaviour, the only word that fit was ‘disinterested’.

The warrior looked away. He longed to remove his helmet and take a breath of air that wasn’t from the close, recycled atmosphere of his sealed armour, but Cassiel had given the command for all legionaries to remain hooded. The fact was, Holst’s toxic air would have been painful to his lungs after more than a couple of breaths, but Kano couldn’t ignore the tension building inside him, the borderline claustrophobic pressure at the edge of his senses. I should have stayed on the flagship, he told himself. This place is nothing but a tomb.

‘We sit and wait, then?’ Sarga asked, pausing as he reloaded his bolter. ‘We lose a Stormbird and two warriors, and we sit and wait?’

‘The enemy are cunning,’ Cassiel replied, his tone silencing the other Blood Angel. ‘Picking off lone men, fading back into the ruins. This is their territory. We have to entice them to give up their cover and strike in the open.’

‘I’ve seen the nephilim up close,’ noted Leyteo. ‘They’re big. Hard to miss. You couldn’t hide one in all this.’

‘True. But they used human slaves on Melchior.’ Sarga pointed towards the dead. ‘Why not here as well?’

‘A conscript-soldier didn’t make Xagan vanish,’ Meros replied. ‘And slaves don’t cut open a legionary.’

Cassiel made a growling noise in the back of his throat and advanced towards the centre of the park. ‘We’ll see the enemy soon enough.’ He shot a look at Kaide. ‘Any comms?’

The Techmarine’s head remained bent, and the wind-rush noise of static from the multiple data channels he was sifting was faintly audible.

Cassiel called his name with all the irritation of one who did not like to repeat himself. ‘Brother Kaide! Your attention!’

Kano saw the Techmarine’s head snap up with a startled jerk, as if he had been awakened from a deep dream. He heard the same rush-sound in his ears, faraway and close all at once. He couldn’t be certain what vox-channel it was emanating from.

‘Sergeant?’ Kaide asked, sounding dazed. He looked at the others. ‘Did you hear that? On the vox, the voice?’

‘What voice?’ said Sarga. ‘I heard nothing.’

Kaide glanced towards Captain Harox, as if he might know the answer.

Five krak grenades detonated simultaneously at different points of the compass as all of the tripwires were sprung at once. The Blood Angels reflexively dropped into firing stances, weapons high, aiming in every direction.

Kano felt a peculiar ripple pass through the ground beneath his feet, and the pounding in his ears became a headache. Through the atmosphere feed in the teeth of his breather mask came the distinct tang of ozone.

He saw Meros and Sarga looking back and forth, trying to see what to shoot at. Kano cycled the vision modes of his helmet optics, but found nothing. That didn’t make sense; even a foe beneath a camo cloak or phase-shunt would leave some kind of visual trace against the background environment.

There’s nothing out there.

The whole park shuddered and tilted downwards, earth groaning as it pitched like the deck of a watercraft in a high swell. The legionaries broke formation and went for safer ground, but there was none.

It wasn’t an earthquake; Holst was almost tectonically inert. Still, hab-block buildings quivered and broken glass pealed as it fell all around them. The black voids behind the shattered windows were sightless eyes.

Across the atrium, a long slab of elevated highway broke in the middle and folded together, scattering vehicles as it swung towards the vertical. Kano’s mouth dropped open: instead of crumbling, the broken lines of road slapped together with a concussive crash. It reminded him of great crocodilian jaws snapping shut. Then the broken highway shifted. It was falling towards them, as if it had been directed so.

‘Scatter!’ Cassiel screamed the command into the vox and the warriors broke apart as the shadow fell over them.

The road slabs boomed as they hit the parkland, and Kano saw a Blood Angel vanish beneath, hammered flat in an instant. A torrent of stone dust and displaced ice wheezed up all around them in a vast blanket, reducing visibility to less than a few metres. Kano stumbled forwards, meeting Sarga. The legionary’s crimson armour was dirty with a layer of grey powder.

Together they forged ahead as the dust settled, moving towards other shadows that turned out to be the remainder of the squad.

‘Contact right,’ called a voice, and Kano heard a raucous, clattering sound. It was as if the contents of a scrap yard were being dragged up the side of a granite tor, daggers of steel crunching loudly against stone.

Then the attack began in earnest.

The first thing that tried to kill Kano had a lumen-post for a spine, and a torso and limbs fashioned out of broken highway signs, beheaded traffic signals and other less identifiable pieces of metal debris. It was not a battle robot, for Kano had fought with automata in the training cages and during the year-long Rust Moon War; this thing was animated by some impossible force outside his reckoning. His instinct told him it was powered by anger, and that seemed enough understanding for the moment.

The scrap-thing assailed with fingers made from the spokes of a wheel, fat yellow sparks jetting up from the ground where they dragged and slashed. From gaping trash-bin mouths it spat broken screw-bolts and scattershot fragments of wreckage, all of it heated to orange-white.

Kano defaulted to impulse and aimed for the centre of the mass, blasting it back into its parts with a powerful three-round burst. Pieces of it clattered down around him, but they did not lie still. Twisted lengths of metal snaked towards one another, tips finding other tips, bending and braiding, making anew. He spun away. From the corner of his eye, the Blood Angel saw something tumbling out of the sky, trailing smoke – Kaide’s drone had been shot down, killing their best tactical advantage.

More of the constructs lurched unsteadily out of the settling haze, drawing fire from all of the warriors. Most were as tall as Dreadnoughts but lacking the density of the venerable war machines. They were thin and spindly, but no single one matched the design of another. The scrap-things were patchwork creations that aped the forms of simians or arachnids or equines, mad sculptures created out of street furniture and wreckage.

There were dozens of them ahead, and more than that behind. Kano blinked, watching one of them come together in the manner of a vid-stream of a demolition played in reverse. He could see no welds or joins holding the pieces in place, detect no electromagnetic fields. Each one of the things had a length of twisting, sinuous cable trailing away behind it, like a leash.

Bolter salvoes thundered around him and he lent his weapon to the chorus, dismantling the constructs over and over. They came on, rebuilding as they went. Adamantium claws scraped over the street and the tiled plaza, ploughing through drifts of snow and stamping frozen corpses into a messy red paste.

‘This is what killed Xagan?’ Leyteo shouted, incredulous. ‘What in the Throne’s name are we shooting at?’

For a long second, Kano felt the urge to know that answer himself. He could reach out, if he was quick. Just the lightest brush of his corralled psychic powers, to seek a mind or an intent behind these things…

He saw his battle-brothers and the Word Bearers all around him. They would see, Kano told himself. They would know. It is forbidden.

‘Keep firing,’ Cassiel commanded. ‘Destroy them!’

At once, the front rank of the junkyard abominations reeled back, resembling archers at the draw. They snapped forwards as one and sent javelins of broken steel hurtling into the lines of the legionaries, the rods of metal ejected from their spindly torsos. One warrior went down, a rusted spear eight metres in length going through his gut to burst out through the coolant pods of his backpack. Kano saw Kaide take a glancing blow that knocked the Techmarine off his feet.

‘Fall back–’ The rest of the sergeant’s words were lost in a moaning rumble from beneath their boots. Pits broke open in the rockcrete all around them, jagged with fangs of split brick. To Kano’s horror, they worked like lamprey mouths, grinding and biting at nothing, trying to savage anything that came close.

The ground contorted and rolled underfoot, the wave of motion rippling back over the entire width of the upper city atrium. In a flash of insight, Kano imagined the surface of the park as if it were a blanket cast over a great sleeping beast, just now awakening to find insects crawling upon its back.

Meros fired into one of the open pits and it actually screamed, the maw sealing up immediately, shedding thin and malodorous oil.

The legionaries were being pushed towards the broken edge of the great dome, the scrap-monsters coming in from all three facing sides. Kano ejected his bolter’s spent magazine and slammed another sickle-shaped clip into the slot, sighting down the gun. As he fired again, he saw the buildings either side of the atrium rock back and forth, shedding more glass and debris.

And then they began to twist. Against possibility, the plasteel frames of the hab towers coiled as the bones of a serpent would bend. The shattered fascias of the buildings glittered in the icy light, the broken balconies and blinded windows taking on the appearance of shouting, angry faces.

Thick cables exploded out from beneath the roadway, whipping at the icy air, fronds of plastek and copper lashing at the stonework. They moved with animal character, snaking forth in the hunt for prey. Support pillars buried in the rock ejected themselves into the air, and upper levels of the atrium complex collapsed one atop another. The mass of the buildings compacted together, breaking and reforming into a new, vast shape. Down in the heart of Holst-Prime’s underlevels, the lower tiers were being remade into a structure that resembled spider legs and grasping tentacles. The entire metropolis was in the process of tearing itself free of the bedrock it had been built into.

‘Throne and blood…’ breathed Kano, his words carried across the vox to all his comrades. ‘It’s the city. The city wants to kill us.’

The mad dream of it would not end. For a brief moment, Meros wondered if he had been knocked insensate during the Stormbird crash, and even now lay in a healing coma, his mind dredging up this lunacy from his subconscious.

No. Meros had been in that state not long ago, existing in a realm where thought was as real as flesh, and it had almost killed him. He knew this was not illusion; that would have been too simple an explanation. It seemed as if the insane reality of the nightmare landscape he experienced then had now followed him into this one.

They escaped from the great dome even as the broken edges of the crystalflex hemisphere became lips of a fanged mouth and snapped shut after them. Out in the snows of the open highway, dead vehicles under thick cowls of snow suddenly burst into motion, lurching forwards on skidding, frozen wheels as they tried to bull the legionaries into the walls of the median strip.

It was a hard drop from the elevated road to the surface of Holst’s ice plains, but they made it, even with their wounded comrades. Cassiel’s orders bid them to put as much distance as possible between them and any element of the city’s infrastructure. If their enemy could call on inert objects to assault them, nowhere was safe.

Meros dared to cast a look over his shoulder and saw the highway bending into ribbons, as whatever monstrous malaise had infected the city spread out across the broad bridges.

That was how it seemed to him, like a great disease. An alien cancer had infected Holst-Prime Hive and metastasised, corrupting it from within. Adamantium and plasteel, crystalflex and stone, all had become contaminated by some science he could not understand.

That was the only explanation. Reason gave him nothing else to cling to, no other rationale that could possibly fit. But for now the question of how this could happen was a distant second to the uncertainty of how they would survive.

The city was malforming before his eyes, taking on rudiments of sessile life and ophidians, mimicking legs and grasping limbs as it assembled them from pieces of commerce malls, hab towers and transit complexes. Meros faltered a step as he watched Holst-Prime Hive dragging itself out of the great crater that had been the base of its construction. If this leviathan had a directing intelligence, then it wanted to be free – but more than that, it wanted death to all invaders.

A tentacle-like protuberance made of monorail trains and power cables trailed a slow, giddy, arc through the frosted air and beat at the ground, narrowly missing the line of armoured figures. Ice fractured all around and the heavy kinetic shock pitched them off their feet.

Meros collided with one of the other warriors and they fell together, sliding towards a newly-opened fissure. The Apothecary used the cutting gear on his medicae gauntlet to dig into the ice, anchoring them both. For a moment, his battle-brother swung over the lip of the deadfall, and then clawed his way back, scrambling to his feet once again. There was no time to share words of gratitude; the other Blood Angel helped him up and then they were moving again, making for open ground.

The howling wind over the ice fields warred with the stone-breaking cacophony of the mutant city’s birth pangs. Rimes of fresh frost were already collecting in the crevices of Meros’s battleplate, and his armour’s skin-sensors registered the sharp drop in temperature. Signus Alpha had fallen beneath Holst’s horizon and what little warmth the other suns provided was negligible.

Perhaps they might be able to outrun this monstrosity, perhaps it might lose interest in them; and then they would only have to face a punishing cold that would push the capacity of their life-support systems to the redline. Meros looked to where Cassiel was helping the warrior who had taken the spear-hit. The compromised integrity of his armour would mean certain death.

Then Sarga shouted a warning and thoughts of dying on the ice were forgotten.

‘Incoming!’

From beneath the elevated highway at their backs, a gargantuan maggot of warped rockcrete reared up from under the frozen ground, knocking aside road supports in a rain of falling cars and broken structural antennae. It lolled and rolled, coming at them over the ice like a side-winding snake. It had once been a service conduit for the hive, running vox-cables and geothermal taps out to the neighbouring settlements. Now it was a serpentine thing, an extension of the titanic city-beast.

A volley of concentrated bolter shells exploded across the splintered stone hide of the kilometre-long feeler, followed by the secondary detonations of krak grenades. The crumbling head of the thing broke off and smashed, but the main mass of it still came on, rising up, leaving the ground. Processor fluids drooled from the maw as it wavered before diving to make a strike.

‘Damn these xenos!’ shouted Leyteo. ‘There’s nowhere we can go to escape this thing!’

Meros had no answer for him, until two spears of orange fire shrieked past above them and pierced the stone serpent along its length. Spheres of force bifurcated the construct and ripped it into fragments, the thrashing tail losing all coherence and falling to the ice. For a moment, Meros thought he heard a distant bellow of agony, deep and booming like winds forced through cavernous halls of stone and metal.

Then it was gone, replaced by the glorious noise of rocket engines. A great crimson hawk flashed past and performed a sharp turn upon the tip of its wing, before settling into a shaky hover on plumes of thruster exhaust. Buffeted by the heavy gale, the Stormbird could not settle to land.

A familiar voice crackled over the general vox. ‘Scout force, this is Captain Amit. What in Terra’s name have you found?’ There was a hesitance in the captain’s voice that Meros had never heard before.

‘I’ll explain later, sir,’ Cassiel responded. ‘We need to get off this rock.’

‘Before it comes back,’ added Sarga.

Lines extended from the underside of the drop-ship and the legionaries took the mag-locks at their ends and connected them to their armour. Meros tried not to think of how much the recovery lines looked like the same snaking cables that had raced after them in the city, and locked on. Then Amit’s Stormbird powered away, reeling them in as it climbed skywards.

Black-armoured hands dragged Meros in through the ventral hatch, and he was dimly aware of Warden Annellus’s skull-helm glaring back at him. He turned away, wiping frost from his eye slits. The Apothecary’s last sight of Holst-Prime Hive was a giant’s hand made of broken buildings atop an arm taller than an Imperator Titan. He watched it snatch at the vessel and miss, falling apart as it collapsed back towards the surface.

Cassiel’s squad and the Word Bearers sat silently on the landing bay’s deck as the beat of air resistance gave way to the smoothness of vacuum. Meros’s helmet came off in his hands and he found himself looking across at Kano. His friend’s eyes were glazed and distant, focused on a point beyond the far bulkhead.

A shadow fell over the Apothecary, but he didn’t look up. The Warden stood over him, surveying the survivors as Captain Amit emerged through the forward hatch.

The sergeant rose and saluted. ‘Sir. Your timing could not have been better.’

Amit dismissed his thanks with a curt nod. ‘I brought ships to assist in the Hermia’s mission. The Victus was in closer orbit, so I offered to take on the search for you myself. I wanted to look upon the enemy.’ He paused. ‘Is that what I saw, brother-sergeant?’

‘I’m a warrior, not a scholar,’ Cassiel replied. ‘Which, begging the captain’s pardon, means I don’t have the first bloodless inkling of what we were shooting at.’

The steady thrumming of the Stormbird’s engines filled the silence in the landing bay, but not so much that Meros missed the single whispered word that fell from the lips of Warden Annellus.

‘Sorcery.’

A buzzing tone sounded over the Stormbird’s internal vox. ‘Attention, this is the flight deck. Brace for combat manoeuvres!’

Amit tapped the comm-bead in his gorget. ‘Pilot, report! We detected no other ships out here. What is the threat?’

The crew-serf’s voice was tense. ‘It’s not a ship, captain… It’s the planet. It’s shooting at us.’

‘It doesn’t want to let us go,’ said Kano quietly.

Sanguinius came to Holst to see for himself.

The engagement was already well under way as they came into visual range. The Hermia, along with the Victus and her escort cruisers, Sable and Paleknight, were connecting back to the planet’s surface with the glittering, impermanent red threads of mega-lasers, but at first it was not clear what enemy the other ships had come across.

The primarch’s flagship hove closer, the Red Tear flanked by the Ignis and the Covenant of Baal, the vessels temporarily detached from the main body of the fleet out in open space. Scans searching for conventional weapons discharges registered only the barrages coming from the orbiting cruisers; returns from Holst itself showed a chaotic mess of interference patterns.

Then a missile made of dense rock, most likely the head of a great mountain from Holst’s equatorial zone, threw itself out of the hive-world’s gravity well. A singular, incredible release of volcanic power ejected the mass into the orbital path of the Paleknight, at such speed that the cruiser’s fusion thrusters were not sufficient to set it on a different heading.

The collision lit a small, brief sun over Holst’s night side. The starship’s back was instantly broken, and it came apart in clouds of venting atmosphere and plasmatic discharges.

Even as the cruiser perished, the planet was spewing more molten hate into the sky. Scatter-shot clouds of stone briefly became flaming meteors as they crossed the ice world’s thin atmospheric membrane, against all reason screaming upwards at the Blood Angels ships. The Victus took hits across its flank and the Hermia lost great divots of hull metal as the hurled rocks gouged valleys in the thick armour of her prow.

The Angel’s wings closed tightly over his back as the Paleknight fell away from him, vanishing into the grey haze of Holst’s churning atmosphere.

‘How many were on that ship?’ asked a tremulous voice from across the bridge; it was a junior rating who had spoken, protocol forgotten in the shock of the moment.

‘Eight full squads of legionaries.’ Sanguinius’s reply seemed to come from a very great distance. ‘Nearly a hundred times that number of crew.’ He didn’t look away from the great viewing window as he gave a new order. ‘Admiral DuCade. Action orders to all ships. Draw back from Holst, beyond the range of those attacks.’

The command was passed on, and they drew away, seething comets of magma snapping at their sterns.

The primarch’s Guard Commander bent over the flagship’s hololith, grimacing. The panes of data and imagery streaming up from the scrying arrays were outside his comprehension. ‘The mass index of Holst is altering,’ said Azkaellon, reading the impossible words aloud. ‘The planet’s dimensions are shifting. It’s shrinking. Changing.’

‘The same as Phorus,’ offered Zuriel from his side. ‘Another… sign?’

‘No.’ Sanguinius shook his head. ‘This is something else.’ He pointed. ‘See.’

Behind the Victus and the other vessels, the blue-white world was becoming a balled fist of ice and rock, wreathed in a halo of blackened ejecta of such turbulent power that the glittering ring system around Holst was breaking up.

‘What kind of weapon can fire objects of such dimension from a planetary surface?’ Azkaellon looked up, questioning anyone who would meet his gaze. ‘There’s no mass driver ever built that could do it. The power requirement alone would be immense!’

But none of the crew, human or legionary, could look away from the great viewport. Centred in the great armourglass window, Holst’s surface was partly visible through clouds of volcanic ash and chemical fog. It resembled a seething mass of colossal serpentine forms, shifting and changing. The icy landscape had become a cancerous husk in constant motion, and the writhing form played tricks on the eye, seeming to resemble faces that bellowed and spat.

When the Sanguinary Guard’s master spoke again, there was a wintry, rigid fury under every word that he uttered. ‘Our blood will not be shed by those who dare not show themselves. There will be no death without reciprocity here. On my Legion, I swear it.’

‘Contact from Captain Amit,’ reported Zuriel. ‘The Victus, Sable and Hermia are entering formation with us. Hermia reports major damage, but it is still operational.’ He hesitated. ‘Orders, my lord?’

‘This ends,’ said Sanguinius. ‘Admiral DuCade, slave gun control on all vessels present to my word of command. Tell every shipmaster to prime their cyclonic torpedoes and megaweapon-gauge systems for full bombardment. Target Holst.’

A ripple of uncertainty passed through the human crew at the thought of such mammoth overkill. ‘All weapons? Against the hive-city?’ DuCade asked.

‘Against the planet,’ corrected the primarch. ‘Synchronize aim-points along the equator, track for geological flux. I want this world shattered.’

Azkaellon felt a chill run through him. The hammer of the Emperor’s will was a powerful force, and in the wars of the Great Crusade it had often been regrettably necessary to punish whole worlds with ruthless intent. The Guard Commander had seen cities wiped off the map in the blink of an eye, vaporised by lance cannons and macronuclear bombs; continents seared by laser barrages; skies scorched.

And while the power to kill a world – to truly, utterly destroy it – had always rested within the reach of the Legiones Astartes, it was not an order that Azkaellon had ever witnessed in execution.

‘All shipmasters report guns at ready.’ DuCade read back the status in a dead voice, as if she was unwilling to believe what would come next. ‘Your will, my lord.’

Azkaellon did not feel any less of the primarch’s anger at the destruction of the Paleknight, he knew that no one aboard these sister-ships felt otherwise; but the act of war that was before them still gave him pause.

Finally, Sanguinius turned away from the great window and looked his old friend and comrade in the eye. In the Angel’s noble face there was at once a great distance that reminded Azkaellon of just how far his master was set above even his superior transhumanity. And within it, he saw a determination, dense as neutronium and equally unbreakable.

‘My patience with this shadow-play is at an end,’ said the primarch, and the words seemed to be for Azkaellon alone. ‘The order is given: exterminatus extremis.’

The void surrounding the planet Holst flashed crimson as energies were liberated and directed, as a surge of weapons of mass destruction hurtled from launch tubes and bore down upon the turbulent world.

Energy pulses struck first, moving at the speed of light and boiling away the vapours shrouding the sky, punching into the nitrogen ice surface. Rocky under-strata that had been sealed beneath permafrost for millions of years were burned clean and exposed. The torpedo barrage came seconds after, great fusion-powered rockets tipped with lethal warheads. Each had the power to lay waste to a continent, but in this instance they were combined with force enough to spear the molten heart of a world.

Whatever unreal influence had spread its cancerous instrumentality through Holst-Prime Hive spilled into the matter of the planet itself. On some primitive level, perhaps the world had even become alive, transformed by dark power into an almost-consciousness.

But it died now, perishing in revenge for the deaths of the crew of the Paleknight, for Brother Xagan and all the other legionaries. Dying for the offence its existence gave to the Angel Sanguinius.

Like a tormented animal, the planet ended with a tortured scream that even the void could not silence.

NINE

A Coward’s Weapon
The Librarius
Summoning

‘We brought a shadow back with us,’ said Meros, the words coming to him unbidden. His gaze remained firmly locked on a blank point on the plasteel bulkhead across the chamber from where he stood, his focus unwavering.

‘A shadow.’ First Captain Raldoron was at the edge of his line of sight, the crimson of his battle plate stark against the grey metal walls. The compartment on board the Red Tear was a secure holding chamber, of the kind the Legion would use if prisoner transport or confinement was required. ‘What do you mean by that?’

Raldoron was the red; to his left, in the centre, Guard Commander Azkaellon was the gold, his fine artificer armour rendered dull and flat in the bleak gloom; and High Warden Berus, hastily embarked from the Chalice, was the black at the far side. The three warriors were there to judge Meros and his words, along with those of everyone who had ventured down to the surface of Holst.

‘When the ships that killed that blighted hell returned to the fleet, there was a change.’ He glanced at Berus. ‘I know you have seen it.’

‘We ask the questions, brother.’ Azkaellon was quick to admonish the Apothecary.

Berus answered nonetheless. ‘I have seen it,’ he agreed; his rasping voice was an animal growl. ‘It is days now since we passed inside the orbit of Signus Six, and left that world killed and broken. The mood of the Legion has shifted. While the mission to Holst-Prime Hive was undertaken, word came to us of the final communication from the starship Helios…’ He trailed off, thinking. ‘Lost with all hands under strange circumstances.’

Meros gave a humourless grunt. ‘We have been beset by “strange circumstance” since the moment we arrived in the Signus Cluster, Warden.’

‘He isn’t wrong,’ noted Raldoron.

‘Our Legion has shed more blood than this during the Crusade,’ Azkaellon retorted. ‘You speak as if we shrink from it.’

‘With all due respect, my lord,’ said Meros, ‘I said nothing of the kind.’ Outwardly, he maintained a steady countenance, but inwardly the Blood Angel was on edge. Any one of the warriors in this room had the power of an entire battle company at their fingertips; they were legendary figures with honour rolls that spanned hundreds of years of warfare – and he was no more than a legionary of the line, a lowly tactical squad medicae.

Yet he could not let himself be cowed. He risked a glance at Captain Raldoron, wondering what intentions moved behind that impassive face. Azkaellon carried himself with an air of eternal arrogance, Berus with a manner that was as watchful as a hawk, like his brother Annellus. But Raldoron… His aspect was unreadable, like the unchanging scowl of a combat helm.

The fleet was on the move, at battle speed now, crossing wide of the White River asteroid belt in a half-loop over the plane of the ecliptic, towards the inner planets and a direct speed course to Signus Prime. The command had been passed through every vessel, every company. The primarch’s patience was wearing thin, and the orders from Warmaster Horus – to oust the enemy that had taken the Signus Cluster – were still their prime motive.

But while the Legion had been marking time, sparring and preparing for open war, Meros and his brothers were held aside, isolated from the rest of their company. Only Captain Harox and his surviving battle-brother had been allowed to leave the Red Tear to return to the Dark Page, and even then under sufferance. It was said that Acolyte Kreed had not set foot off his ship since the conclave of commanders, the Word Bearers vessel moving silently alongside the flagship and offering nothing but the most terse communications. Meros wondered about the other observers at large in the fleet; no one had mentioned the whereabouts of Helik Redknife’s Space Wolves.

‘We have listened to your after-action report,’ said Berus, producing a data-slate. ‘The best that can be said is that it corresponds with those of your squad mates, in the broadest strokes.’

Meros nodded. He had done his best to keep his debrief on the Victus as succinct and to the point as possible, but the anomalous events he had lived through in Holst-Prime Hive proved difficult to render into such colourless language. Along with Kano and Sarga, Cassiel and Leyteo, Kaide and the rest – even Captain Amit and Warden Annellus – the eye-witness description of what he had encountered on the ice world was now a matter of Legion record.

Berus went on, looking at the slate’s oval screen. ‘I read this with equal dread and disbelief, Brother Meros. What you say you saw defies logic and possibility.’

‘I did not lie,’ Meros insisted. ‘And if my mind was clouded in some way, it was so subtle I never knew it.’ He looked at Azkaellon. ‘Is that what you think? You were aboard the flagship, sir. You saw the planet.’

‘From orbit,’ the Guard Captain corrected. ‘I saw no monstrous amalgams of metal and stone.’

‘But you did hear the scream.’ He said it before he was aware of it, and instantly Meros regretted his reply.

Azkaellon’s expression became stony.

‘We all heard it.’ Raldoron spoke before the Sanguinary Guard could respond.

‘Another psychological weapon,’ Berus insisted. ‘Transmitted across all vox-channels, broadcast in a resonant wave. A known tactic of the xenos.’

‘A coward’s weapon.’ Azkaellon’s lip curled, and he glared at Meros. ‘Meant to undermine the steady mind.’

If the Guard Commander was baiting him, looking for a reaction, the Apothecary refused to provide it. Finally, it was Raldoron who spoke.

‘You are dismissed, brother-medicae. Return to your unit and await further orders.’

Meros hesitated. He had questions of his own, and he wanted answers; but one look from the First Captain told him that he would not have them today.

The Apothecary gave the salute of the aquila and marched out, smothering his doubts as best he could.

The lighter settled in the Encarnadine’s number six cargo bay on thick, jointed legs that hissed under the weight of the transporter’s load. A gaggle of servitors immediately swarmed towards the craft, ready to gather up the supplies within and carry them off to the pneu-trams that would ferry the containers back and forth along the keel passages.

Even though the Blood Angels fleet was at condition one, combat ready, a handful of intraship transport movements were still taking place. The heightened alert state did not prevent one from venturing ship to ship, but it did make it harder to do so without good cause. To travel across the flotilla without a formal waiver or a marque of liberty was to court censure at least and a court martial at worst.

Kano had managed it, though. He was canny and careful, charting a course that wove back and forth over the ships of the fleet, in the span of a day making his journey from the Red Tear to the vessels in the great assembly’s spinward quadrant. He rode in tankers, Stormbirds and shuttles. He made himself as unremarkable as a gene-forged could, his armour left behind on the battle-barge, his face lost beneath a set of hooded robes. It was a busy fleet, and the adjutant of a First Captain knew how it worked.

Kano stepped down onto the Encarnadine’s echoing deck and glanced around. His arrival went unnoticed, and that was just as he wished it. To have come here under official lights would have meant answering questions, and he wasn’t ready to do that. Not just yet.

Walking with purpose, he crossed the cargo bay towards one of the wide transit elevator platforms, schooling his manner so that any who might look upon him in passing would not consider the Blood Angel out of place.

The elevator gantry was two leaves of filigreed brass, one atop another, and they slowly and gracefully peeled back to grant access to the lift. As he paused to wait, the sense of someone else behind him became clear; despite himself, the legionary allowed a small smile to form on his face.

‘Hello, Brother Kano.’ Another warrior, also out of his battle plate and robed in similar fashion, came to stand beside him and lingered. ‘It’s been a while.’

‘Not as long as it seems.’ The elevator opened to them and they boarded. The platform began a lazy ascent that would take several minutes, riding from the cargo bay at the bottom of the Encarnadine’s ventral sail to the core decks of the great cruiser. Shallow pillars of rectangular containers surrounded them, rising as tall as houses, arranged in neat two-by-two rows. The shadows the modules cast concealed them; the warriors were quite alone.

The other legionary rolled back his hood, revealing an olive-skinned face with narrow, steely eyes. A thin black beard came off his chin like lines of ink on a pen-sketch, and he seemed gaunt. Kano’s memories of the man were out of place. He recalled that face wearing the crystal-and-steel matrix of a psychic hood, not bare and shorn as it was now.

‘Brother Ecanus.’ Kano offered his hand, pulling back his own hood with the other. ‘Well met.’

‘That remains to be seen.’ Ecanus accepted the gesture, and Kano saw the conflict in him. His old friend knew that they were not meant to convene under such clandestine circumstances.

‘How did you know I would be here?’ Kano asked.

‘I had an inkling,’ said Ecanus. ‘Wasn’t sure until I saw you step out of that lighter’s airlock.’ He looked away, watching the deck levels drop past them as they rose higher and higher. ‘The Wardens won’t see us here, fate willing. You’ve come to talk.’

Kano nodded. ‘To a brother, yes.’

Before the Decree of Nikaea, Brother Ecanus had served the Blood Angels as a battle-psyker in the 202nd Company. And like Kano, he had accepted the orders that made the use of his skills taboo. Kano remembered days of sharing wars with Ecanus; he had a particular affinity for a power they knew as ‘the Lance’, the conjuring of a great spear of telekinetic force with which to strike down the Legion’s foes. To think of the warrior before him without it diminished Ecanus in a way that struck Kano with a brief dart of melancholy.

‘Things are different now,’ Ecanus said, as if he sensed his thoughts. ‘Our duty asks other things of us.’ He paused. ‘Brother, as much as it pleases me to see you, there are conventions we challenge by meeting this way. In secret.’

‘No order stands that says two battle-brothers cannot share a conversation.’

‘Not formally, no.’ Ecanus’s hands came together, fingers meshing. ‘But when the Emperor spoke the edict, the Legion put distance between our kind for a reason.’

Kano couldn’t stop the scowl that pushed its way forwards. ‘Well, damn Berus or any Warden who dares challenge me. I won’t be treated like a exile-in-waiting and tarred by the foolishness of others!’

Ecanus eyed him. ‘Is that what you came out here to say to me?’

He’s as perceptive as ever, Kano thought. ‘Not that, no.’ He sighed. ‘I came to you because I must speak of something that only you would understand.’

‘This is to do with the killing of the planet Holst? Word of the primarch’s order spread quickly through the fleet.’

Kano shook his head. ‘That may be a ripple from the same fallen stone. No, brother. Before that, before we even reached the Signus Cluster.’ Now it was time to say the words aloud, Kano found it hard to form them. His throat was suddenly arid. ‘There was a dream,’ said the former Librarian. ‘A vision of potency that came to me as I meditated. I did nothing to seek it.’ Remembering it now, he felt his pulse race. ‘But powerful, brother. Strong and dark and deep.’ He took a slow breath. ‘I was falling, and there was–’

‘A red angel.’ Ecanus whispered it. ‘A blood-stained seraph, reaching out.’ He raised his hands in the exact mirror of the apparition Kano had experienced. ‘I saw it too.’

Meros sensed the grim, gallows-walk mood of the infirmary as he passed through its halls. Outside of an actual combat engagement, when the medical centre was healing the wounded and tending to the dying, it was typically quiet. It was so now, but in a different way. The air felt heavy with despair, and there were many more crewmen and Legion-serfs at large in the corridors. Those of them who dared to look up at the Blood Angel as he passed did so with open fear on their faces. In his mind’s eye, Meros saw them and remembered the frozen corpses on the streets of Holst-Prime. They seemed like two sides of the same coin: alive and dead, here and there.

Humans were so frail, even in the absence of wounds. It was hard for the legionary to imagine that he had once been like them, before he survived the trials and earned the right to gene-implantation and enhancement. He had pity for them, the ones who would forever remain ordinary. They would never see the universe as clearly as he did, never be so certain and sure of purpose…

The thought curdled. What am I certain of now? Meros asked himself. His rigid, ordered view of things was being challenged. Assumptions the warrior had built his life upon were turning to sand, falling through his fingers.

I have travelled far and I have seen the incredible, he thought. That is a gift I was given in return for my service to this Legion. But until Signus, he had never experienced the impossible. That was the shadow of which he had spoken, and one look in the eyes of Raldoron and the other commanders had made the truth clear to him.

They know it too.

The sensation that came with the realisation was strange and new. A prickling cold across the surface of his thoughts, a hollow in his chest. Could it be… an echo of fear?

Impossible. That word again.

‘There is nowhere we fear to tread,’ Meros muttered, the words of the inscription in Baal’s Sepulchre of Heroes returning to him.

‘Hey!’ Someone was calling out, jogging towards the Apothecary, and with that his moment of introspection disintegrated. ‘Lord Meros!’ It was Gerwyn, the remembrancer he had met aboard the Hermia. The man seemed smaller than he recalled, as if his clothes were hanging too large upon him.

The Blood Angel gave him a nod. ‘You transferred to the flagship, then.’

‘Aye,’ Gerwyn returned the gesture, his hands moving, nervous with energy. The sequentialist’s eyes were haloed in grey and his complexion was pale. ‘I’m billeted with the rest of the troupe up in the Swan Tower.’

Meros knew of it: a golden minaret on the dorsal surface of the Red Tear, largely used for ceremonial purposes. The primarch had graciously turned it over to the remembrancer contingent so that they could make it their own.

Gerwyn was still talking, idle words of little interest to the Apothecary about the man’s relationships with the artists, playwrights and journalists who documented the fleet’s mission. Meros noted something, and pointed.

‘Where is your drawing slate? Did you lose it?’

‘No, no. Not at all. I, uh, I just don’t have it with me.’

That seemed like an odd thing to Meros. A scribe without a notebook was like a legionary unarmed: incorrect, incomplete. He said as much.

‘Ah, you see true.’ Gerwyn deflated a little. ‘In all honesty, I have not had the focus in recent days to complete my serial. The illustrations go undone, the text half-conceived.’ He waved a hand in front of his eyes. ‘Troubled sleep, that’s the root cause.’ From a pocket, he produced a tiny envelope and opened it. Inside there were two white capsules. ‘I came down here to ask your brother-medicae for respite, lord. They say these will help me rest.’

The pills were somnolents, strong by human standards. ‘They will do so indeed.’

Gerwyn gave him a doubtful look. ‘I hope for some brief oblivion.’ He gave a weak chuckle. ‘I’m forgetting what sleep feels like.’

‘I don’t sleep,’ Meros told him. ‘The warriors of the Legiones Astartes are beyond that need.’

‘Huh.’ Gerwyn rolled the tablets around in his palm before returning them to the envelope. ‘I don’t know if I should be envious or commiserate with you for that.’

‘Explain.’

The remembrancer baulked, as if Meros had done something to frighten him. ‘No, it’s… it’s just that I want to sleep but I can’t. It’s hard to. After what happened in the chambers.’ Gerwyn must have seen the frown on the Blood Angel’s face. ‘You know about the suicides? And the ones who went mad, out of nowhere?’

Meros thought of the frenzy he had glimpsed in the eyes of the Stormbird pilot. ‘I know.’

Gerwyn leaned closer, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘Do you know how many? Over a dozen in the Swan Tower alone, and not in the quiet way of it. Horrors, lord. Horrors to hold a man awake at night.’

‘There are more beyond the eight?’

‘Eight?’ Gerwyn’s eyes went wide and he almost choked on the word. ‘Eight hundred, more like! I’ve heard word from a sculptor on the Chalice of enginseers choking themselves with spindle oil. They say the sergeant-at-arms on a picket destroyer ate his own lasgun.’ He backed away, blinking as he regained his composure. ‘None of your kind, mind. Only the lesser of us…’ His voice trailed off into a shudder. ‘I should go. Forgive my interruption. Begging your pardon.’ Gerwyn made a clumsy bow and marched off at a pace.

For a long moment, Meros stood in the infirmary corridor, turning over the serialist’s words in his mind. Eventually, he went to a cogitator alcove in one of the secondary laboratoria and activated a data-trawl.

A machine-slave stuttered into life. ‘I exist to serve,’ it piped.

The Apothecary spoke into the vox pick-up. ‘Death notices. Sort by the following criteria. Time index, Signus Cluster arrival to present. Non-legionary only. Self-inflicted trauma.’ He paused. ‘Unusual circumstances. Begin.’

‘Compliance,’ said the machine. On the gas-lens screen above the cogitator, panes of data began to appear, one overlaid across the next.

There were many more than eight.

Kano blinked, struggling to take in what his battle-brother had told him. The way of the psyker’s path was complex and always in flux, and he had learned in his first years of service to the Legion that his greatest weapon was also the gateway to madness and destruction. Too many times, Kano had fought renegade telepaths or mutants fuelled by baleful psychic fires, and seen them consumed by the very warp energies they had tried to master.

The vision of the bloody-winged spirit that had assailed him in his vivid dream had not faded with the passing of the days. It was this sight that had compelled him to seek some kind of answer, first following his curiosity down to Holst with Meros and the others, there confronting more signs and lunacy. And now, leading him to Ecanus.

The vision had been so potent, so very personal, that it seemed as if it had been ripped from the deepest halls of Kano’s psyche. From the threads of my soul, he thought, if there is such a thing.

How could another have experienced so powerful a vision that was so much alike in detail? Kano listened as Ecanus relayed his own experience, unable to speak. Every factor was similar, every instant unchanged.

Only one thing seemed different, one small detail. ‘The eyes of the thing,’ said Kano. ‘Were they familiar to you? Known, but lost in memory, impossible to place.’

Ecanus shook his head. ‘I looked into its eyes. But they were not known to me. Whatever that angel of pain is, I’m thankful he isn’t of my comradeship.’

They both fell silent, yellow strobe lights playing over them in shifting waves as the elevator continued its long climb past service decks and storage tiers.

‘I never expected this,’ Kano admitted. ‘I came to ask your advice and instead find common cause.’ He glanced at his old comrade, his mind racing. ‘The others – Brother Deon and Brother Salvator. Novenus and the rest of them…’ The names of other Librarians – Epistolaries, Codiciers and Lexicaniums – turned in his thoughts. He wondered where in the fleet they all were, and what questions they were asking. ‘What if they saw this too?’

‘What did we see?’ Ecanus asked darkly. ‘I don’t know. I touch the memory of that dream with even a momentary thought and my hearts tighten in my chest. My skin becomes ice. I smell smoke and blood and decay.’ He grimaced. ‘And now you say you have shared it with me. I can no longer dismiss it as if it were some trick of the brain.’

The platform rose ever upwards. Kano stared at the floor, half-expecting it to open up and swallow him back down into the depths. ‘If you and I saw the red angel, and the others did too–’

‘What?’ Ecanus’s voice hardened. ‘Shall we venture out, you and I, and secretly comb the fleet for every psyker stripped of his hood, question and gather… And then what?’

‘We go to the Angel. He will listen to us. He shares the gift.’

Ecanus shook his head. ‘We would never be permitted to see him! Between them, Azkaellon and Berus know everything that happens within the Legion. What suspicion do you think they would build if they learned of this intent?’

‘They would imagine a transgression alike to the disobedience of the Thousand Sons.’ The voice came from all around them, rough and broken.

Kano whirled, his hand slipping beneath his robes for the combat knife holstered there. ‘Who speaks?’ he shouted, his words echoing off the containers. ‘Show your face!’

‘That was my intention.’ A figure hove out of the shadows, and like the two Blood Angels he was hooded. Unlike the dark earthy tones of their robes, however, the new arrival’s attire was frost-grey. The lights of a passing deck threw a sheet of illumination across the elevator platform, exposing a craggy face with a white beard, and long hair chained in plaits, adorned with stone beads and metal rings.

The bare skin about the other legionary’s throat was detailed with runic tattoos, and Kano saw threads of leather and copper beneath the robe. Carved items made of ebony and bone rattled as he walked.

‘Son of Russ,’ said Ecanus. ‘Rune Priest.’

Kano’s eyes narrowed and he eased his grip on the blade. ‘You are Redknife’s brother. Your name is Stiel.’

‘Aye,’ said the Space Wolf. He halted and bowed slightly. ‘Apologies. I did not mean to alarm you.’

His lip curled. ‘When you arrived, you wouldn’t speak High Gothic. Suddenly you do?’

Stiel gave a casual shrug. ‘What makes you think I speak it now, Blood Angel?’ He made a motion with his finger, a circle to include the three of them. ‘Divisions of birth world and Legion aside, we share commonalities that make us kindred, after a fashion.’

‘I don’t know you,’ Kano insisted. ‘I’ve shared nothing with you.’

The Rune Priest smiled, showing canine teeth studded with silver rivet heads. ‘We shared your journey from the Red Tear. Inaction has made your skills dull, cousin. You forgot how to see me.’

Kano paused, thinking. There had been moments during his passage when he thought he sensed a presence nearby, a motion at the corner of his eye, but he had ignored it, his mind occupied by other concerns.

‘And more than that,’ Stiel continued. ‘The sight. The dream. The red angel and the fall.’

Ecanus studied the Space Wolf carefully. ‘Your captain. He sent you?’

‘No. This matter is only for us. At least until we can make sense of it.’ For the first time, Kano heard something like doubt in the Rune Priest’s tone. ‘I will say what you will not, Blood Angel. There is a dark power at work in the Signus Cluster, and we are only now perceiving the ragged edges of it. The veil and the star of eight carved in the surface of a planet, a world gone mad, flesh without bone, and the dream, the dream, the dream…’ He closed his eyes. ‘We cannot turn away from it.’

‘The unsanctioned use of psychic ability is an act of treason,’ Ecanus reminded them. ‘We are watched because of that, because of what we are!’

‘You have no need to tell a Space Wolf of the dangers of a mind unchecked,’ Stiel replied, with a feral snarl.

Kano went on. ‘He’s right. Something is amiss. We need to know the full scope of it.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘By the Throne, I think we need to be ready.’

‘To do what?’ Ecanus shot him a look. ‘To defy a command from the Emperor and Sanguinius?’ He turned his glare on Stiel. ‘That might be easy for you, but not me. Not us. I’ve heard the stories from the other Legions, with their flouting of protocol, their hidden fellowships, their lodges.’ He shook his head. ‘This is not the way of the Blood Angels. We leave behind the separation of tribe and clan on Baal. We transcend our roots.’ The warrior sighed. ‘We have unity, in the Angel’s name.’

‘And yet, you are still divided.’ The Space Wolf cocked his head. ‘Perhaps it takes an outsider to see it. You sons of Baal, with your Wardens and your warrior elite in gold, your winged master in the clouds high above the ranks of red.’

‘You don’t know us,’ Ecanus shot back.

‘As you wish,’ Stiel demurred. ‘But I know this: your words will mean nothing if darkness strikes a divided house.’

Kano laid a hand on his comrade’s shoulder. ‘This is not treason, Ecanus. We only speak of brother talking to brother, sharing a common concern.’

‘Others will not see it that way.’

‘That,’ said Stiel, ‘is why others must not see it.’

As Harox knew he would be, Tanus Kreed was furious at the battle captain’s unexpected arrival.

Every servant son of the Legion knew the importance of the rituals, and a warrior as highly placed as he knew it more than most. Harox bore marks that had come from such moments of communion, burned into his skin and his soul. He had felt the sweet kiss of the warp during his pilgrimage.

But the acolyte’s anger faded away and became rapt attention with the passing of the moment, the interruption soon dismissed. Kreed’s arms fell into a fold, the bloody short-sword in his right hand hanging forgotten, pointing to the deck. Harox’s commander paid no mind to the rivulets of fluid dripping off the tip, tapping lightly on the black iron floor and pooling around the bare feet beneath his surplice.

As Harox gave his report, the arching, gloomy corridor outside the sacellum muffled his words in a strange way, deadening the air so that they did not carry. The Word Bearer’s clipped diction had always been harsh, a remnant of an old wound to his throat that had not mended well. With his helm removed it made his grating voice ring in his ears like the snapping of small bones.

‘The signal was detected by Amit’s ship, Victus,’ he explained.

‘It’s real?’ Kreed wondered aloud.

Harox nodded. ‘You would know better than I, Lord Acolyte.’ The plans of the higher ranks were always a mystery to him, and more often than not, needlessly so.

Kreed didn’t bother to address that. ‘Did they reveal the contents of the message?’

The legionary shook his head. The report from the Red Tear had been direct and to the point, mercifully free of the usual verbose pomposity the sons of Sanguinius liked to heap on their formal communications. A faint vox-signal on an Imperial Army fleet frequency had been detected by a crew-serf aboard the Victus. It had no vocal content, only a numeric code string that matched a standard military distress call. The most likely explanation was that an automated beacon was broadcasting, but at a power level so faint it had not registered until now.

‘The asteroid belt might have blocked detection,’ Kreed mused. ‘A ship, then? One that escaped the cull?’ He clucked his tongue. ‘Careless.’

‘Not in space,’ Harox corrected. ‘Transmission was traced to the fifth world, Scoltrum. No other returns. No life detections.’

‘Ah, of course. The agri-colony.’

The captain recalled what he had learned before embarking on the mission. Signus V was a bread-basket planet – a large, windswept sphere in the habitable radius of the triple suns. Wildly fertile, it had been transformed into a patchwork of continent-sized farms to feed the Signus Cluster’s colonists and grow trade stock for the greed of decadent Terra and the core worlds.

Harox had known immediately what was going to happen. Sanguinius would not let such a discovery go unchecked, even if his captains warned him otherwise.

Kreed knew it too. ‘The Angel’s heart bleeds too much for the humans,’ he grinned. ‘If there is the slightest chance survivors might still be alive down there, he will send ships to see. His weakness will compel him to do it.’ The acolyte sniffed. ‘For all the great potential of the Blood Angels primarch, I sometimes find it hard to believe that being shares true brotherhood with our master, Lorgar.’

This much was true; Harox doubted that the lord of the Word Bearers would have been so easily swayed by the small concerns of the un-Enlightened. ‘Raldoron suspects a trap,’ he went on. ‘As does Amit.’

‘Of course,’ agreed his commander. ‘But Captain Amit won’t let that stop him from going.’

‘Not him,’ Harox said, with a curt shake of the head. ‘Nakir of the Twenty-Fourth Company has been given the order. Ships have already been deployed.’

‘Good. That’s good.’ Kreed toyed with the sword, rolling the grip in his hand. ‘Better Nakir goes and dies out there. We don’t want the Flesh Tearer to put himself at undue risk over some minor trivia. Amit will be of use to us when the time comes. Of all of them, he’s walked the greatest distance along the scarlet path.’

Harox fell silent for a moment, processing his thoughts. This was an unexpected turn of events, after all. ‘Erebus said there would be no survivors out here. How is this even possible?’

Kreed’s eyes narrowed, and jealousy glittered behind them. ‘Dare I suggest that Lord Erebus’s insight may not be as perfect as some wish to believe?’

‘The Dark Apostle would not be pleased to hear you say that,’ noted the captain.

Kreed’s nostrils flared. ‘Erebus isn’t here.’

Harox cocked his head, glancing casually into the depths of the corridor’s shadows. ‘Are you certain?’

The acolyte’s irritation returned in a rush at the veiled threat, and he gestured sharply with the heavy pommel of the short sword, making stabbing motions. ‘Keep the Dark Page at arm’s length from the Blood Angels and maintain vox silence. Now, go. And if you dare to interrupt a rite again, if the matter is anything less than the heat death of the universe, I’ll take your hearts for it!’

Harox dutifully bowed, but Kreed had turned his back on him and was already stalking away to the sacellum’s door, leaving a trail of bloody footprints.

The octagonal portal rotated open, the entrance turning on a central pillar-hinge. Harox caught the odour of hot stone and rust, and the cloudy air trembled with the hollow tone of a woman weeping. He watched a headless servitor hand Kreed another, identical sword as the acolyte crossed the threshold; then the door was closing again and the gloom returned.

Harox heard a whispering from the corners of his senses, as if something had been allowed to escape the room and linger out here with him. He went on his way, reluctant to remain where any spoil from the ritual might fall.

‘We will begin again,’ Kreed said, marching through the lines of waiting supplicants. The test kill he had made was lying off to one side, discarded by one of the litanic helots, who stood over it, rocking back and forth. The servile had many mouths, all of them moving to form secret, noiseless words.

Four men kneeled to either side of him, each one of the eight marked with the octed across their bare chests. The skin and fat beneath had been carefully flayed away by a laser, so that the lines formed channels down which to guide the flow of blood.

Out on the floor of the chamber, the astropath Sahzë lay in a heap. She attempted to climb up to her knees. ‘I’m not ready,’ she wailed. ‘Please, lord. A moment.’ Her hands fluttered, white doves of pale fingers grasping at nothing.

‘Harox’s imposition gave you that and more,’ he snapped. ‘Don’t disappoint me now, mamzel. You promised so much. You’ll bestow it all.’

‘I will, but… the veil, the veil, the veil. I cannot see through it.’ She didn’t have the words beyond that, and she wept in pain.

‘I’ll give you what you need to burn through.’ Kreed nodded, considering it good. He didn’t spare the men on their knees a glance as he moved inside the arc of the sacrificial blades in his hands. The spin and cut was a remarkably light-footed motion for one as large as a gene-forged; it was almost elegant.

Four heads and four again lolled back from their shoulders, ripping away from necks which had become stumps, pillars of blood making brief fountains before falling in slicks across the desecrated mosaics in the floor.

Kreed pointed with the swords, guiding the motion of the pools of vitae like a conductor before an orchestra. He smiled. The acolyte liked that metaphor: an orchestra with a single instrument.

The blood flowed and became a shallow wave. Sahzë screamed as it rose towards her face, up like a cobra to strike. The noise she made was choked as the fluid engulfed the astropath. It hung in the wet air around her, boiling and steaming. There had been such dedication in the eight dead crewmen. They were among the longest-serving ratings aboard the Dark Page, and in their life of attachment to this starship there was a bond that went beyond the corporeal. Kreed used that now, the force of their existence and the permanence of their souls chained to this vessel.

The litanic helots began a new silent chorus, and Kreed smelled burning meat. He had personally sewn the warp flask into Sahzë’s belly, tethering it there in an obscene and very deliberate echo of motherhood. Her blood power and that of the dead men would peak in this ritual. Thus it was important to draw the octed correctly, or risk a catastrophic collapse of the sacrament.

The iron walls of the chamber and the starship beyond were dense with icons and glyphs from the Ruinous Powers, eyes of hell and myriad other devices looking inwards to hide all trace of sorcery from the psykers in thrall to the Blood Angels. If the rite were to fail, it would all be for nothing. The Dark Page would be consumed in a warp schism – and worse, their true intent would be revealed too soon to the sons of Sanguinius.

But then Sahzë did her trick, and Kreed was laughing. With a horrible, bass gurgle that never should have come from the throat of someone so delicate, the astropath ejected wreaths of smoky, blood-shot ectoplasm into the air. The foul mist gathered to itself, swirling into balls of acrid yellow vapour.

Gravitation inside the sacellum fluttered and Kreed staggered back a step or two. The smoke moved, congealed, gained colour and form.

‘I see you, Word Bearer,’ said Horus Lupercal’s avatar. ‘A sketch of your face, at least.’ The Warmaster seemed disgusted. ‘Speak now.’

‘The jaws of the trap close on the Angel,’ he said, bowing low. ‘He does not know.’

‘Don’t presume to see into my brother’s thoughts, Colchisian. Such arrogance makes a fool of you and burns my tolerance low.’ Hard planes of annoyance resonated through the reeking chamber. ‘Sanguinius could outwit you with a single breath. Underestimate him at your peril.’

Kreed pushed on. ‘The scions of the Three Hundred companies are not of one mind as to what they have entered into. This disunity hides beneath obedience but it will be made clear and turned to our use when the axe falls.’ His head bobbed. The stink of sulphur was growing strong, overpowering the odour of blood and metal. ‘The fleet makes quarter-speed for Signus Prime and the core of the trap.’

Horus loomed, the haze-shape growing a cloak of ash as it shifted, passing over a still lake of arterial blood. ‘You have not told me everything, Kreed. You are all so like Lorgar. Holding on to your secrets as though they were more precious than gold.’

The acolyte stood his ground. ‘Ask any question of me, Warmaster.’

‘Russ sent legionaries to join the expeditionary fleet. You did not think that important enough to tell me?’

Despite himself, Kreed snorted. ‘A handful of wolf-whelps, my lord? Grains of dust on the scales, nothing more.’ He swallowed a poisonous breath. ‘If it pleases Great Horus, I ask you to task me. What more may I do to make this grand turning come to pass?’

A low rumble sounded, and it took a moment for Kreed to realise it was the primarch’s laughter. ‘More arrogance. You hope to attain a greater role.’ The smoke-face grew cold. ‘You are nothing but a messenger, Tanus Kreed. A servile. Now be silent. I did not make this communion to speak to you.’

It was not the answer he had been expecting. I don’t understand was what he wanted to say, but the cloying, overwhelming stench was now so great that it robbed Kreed of the ability to speak.

With a final, ululating shriek that cut into his soul, Sahzë burst. The Word Bearer turned to see her consumed by a torrent of witch-fires that burned with black flames, acid fog billowing from her pores that ate her flesh and made it into cinders. She crumbled away around the shimmering glass horror of the warp flask, which remained utterly untouched by her tormented death. The container rocked back and forth as if something within wanted its freedom. Kreed decided that he did not want to know what that was.

The communion should have broken immediately, but it did not. Horus – or what ghost-proxy there was of him – was still present. Kreed’s flesh crawled as a different energy filled the chamber: another power, something much greater, old and primal and hateful, was holding the conduit open. The Warmaster looked up, over the Word Bearer’s shoulder, into the shadows above his head.

The dark up there was a mercy, he realised. It was protecting him, hiding the full sight of the monstrosity in there with them. Wings the colour of blood and fury were visible at the edges of the gloom, but Kreed could not look at them for long. He was a blinded man trying to see through a cataract, only here it was the universe itself repelling the sight. Opposed forces of reality and illusion, shimmering and lensing as they fought for supremacy.

Had it been there all along? Shrouded in some way, hiding behind a folded dimension? The possibility turned Kreed’s gut to ice.

He could only hold parts of the great beast in his mind, segments of it that his psyche allowed him to perceive – and even then it was a hardship that drove the acolyte to his knees. Kreed saw teeth as long as missiles, the tails of a whip thicker than anchor lines. The wings and the horns, chains made of souls petrified into iron links, bronze armour tempered in baths of molten flesh. Cloven hooves and jangling cascades of god-skulls.

His thoughts reeled with the effluent aura of this monster made of hate. The echoes of a million incidents of anger and bloodshed pulled at Kreed like a burning tide, the spillage of emotion running across the spectrum. The petty, selfish rage of a spoilt child; a victim’s towering and impotent fear-fury; the lust of a deranged psychopath; the singular, mass-minded hate of an army unleashed. And these were only the discards of the creature, the footprints it left as it walked.

Kreed went to the floor, partly in pain, partly in hopes that he would not draw the attention of the creature, for instinct told him it could end him with a glance.

‘Horus Lupercal,’ said the daemon, teasing out the name with open relish. ‘Samus sends his regards. And now the game begins.’

TEN

Hidden
Unholy Communion
Old Names

Five drop-ships put down on the harvest plains, landing nose to tail in a battle ring. Tactical squads from the 24th Company lay down the perimeter in moments, securing the small patch of Scoltrum’s surface as a forward operating post. They set up guns and lines of attack fanning out in every direction.

It was the middle of the day on the agri-world, but much of the sunlight was swallowed up by the drifting black clouds of fire smoke that wreathed the sky. Colonial pict-records of the planet showed grain fields that went from horizon to horizon, flatlands of amber wheat-analogue broken only by the narrow spindles of bone-white wind turbine clusters. Those fields were alight now, smothered by advancing lines of orange flame that were visible from low orbit, moving slowly across the landscape as they were pushed by the planet’s constant winds. Someone had set a torch to the farms and left them to burn.

Visibility on the ground was poor, so for the most part the Blood Angels relied on preysight and thermographics to navigate across the scorched wastes; but their objective was too large to be totally hidden by the smoke.

Before it had destroyed itself in a terminal fall towards the surface of the planet, the ship had been a frigate called the Stark Dagger, part of the Signus Cluster’s outer defence squadron. It was not clear exactly what kind of mishap had befallen the vessel, but by the pattern of the debris dispersal, it was apparent the Stark Dagger had come in across the atmosphere at a low angle and broken apart as it crossed the line of interface. Ripping into three sections, the plough-shaped bow and the midships had carved muddy, ashen paths that ran kilometres long through the crop fields. The heavier stern was much further distant, lost in one of the shallow inland seas over the eastern horizon. Plumes of radiation from the cracked power cores of warp engines were visible as scintillating fountains of colour via rad-scan optics, showing like distant aurorae.

Saviour pods from the frigate had fired too late, and they peppered the long crash site of the ship, most of them buried in the harvest world’s soft brown loam.

Captain Nakir sent squads out on jetbike chariots to conduct a survey of the escape capsules, but they reported in the same thing from each they found: many had deployed empty, the rest had mis-fired and killed whatever occupants they might have had on impact. Not one of the pods showed signs that those who fled the Stark Dagger’s destruction had survived.

The rest of the advance units moved on foot, breaking into a pair of formations to make for the two sites where the wreckage was most dense. Nakir himself led the group making for the bow section, and on the insistence of his fellow captain of the Ninth, he had brought men from Sergeant Cassiel’s squad along for their ‘perspective’.

Meros and Cassiel followed Madidus, Nakir’s second-in-command on the ground; the last time the Apothecary had seen the dour veteran was in the Red Tear’s airdock, as he examined the remains recovered by the crew of the Numitor. Kaide and Sarga were on the surface as well, temporarily posted to the other advance formation venturing to the midships remnant.

Meros felt very much an outsider among the men of the 24th. After their debriefing at the hands of Azkaellon, Berus and Raldoron, the legionaries who had been at Holst-Prime Hive were being treated differently by their battle-brothers. It was a subtle difference, to be sure, but Meros saw it.

They’ve heard the rumours of what we witnessed, he told himself, and they think we’re either fools or madmen.

It troubled the Apothecary to admit he had entertained the same thoughts about the scouts aboard the Numitor, when they had come back with talk of the strange and unusual among the wrecks surrounding the Signus Cluster. But they had not been mistaken. If anything, they had only glimpsed the edges of the impossibilities rife in this place.

He frowned. The whole fleet had seen the sign upon Phorus, and the crews of a handful of ships had been witness to the killing of Holst… And yet no one had answers that could fit the facts. There were only more questions.

One of Madidus’s warriors, a severe hulk of a man called Gravato who carried a meltagun, was watching him with a questioning gaze. ‘Brother-medicae,’ he called, and Meros knew before he said any more what he was going to ask. ‘Is it true what I hear? That the xenos attacked you with scrap iron in the upper city?’ There was an edge of challenge in the words, even shading towards mockery.

‘At first.’ He saw no reason to be less than honest. ‘They killed two legionaries in as many seconds. Then, they…’ He faltered, trying to find words that didn’t sound fanciful. ‘I do not believe they were robotic proxies. I do not…’ Once more, words failed him, and he glanced towards Cassiel. The sergeant gave a slight shake of the head.

Gravato gave a soft, sneering grunt, sharing a look with his squad mates. He raised his weapon. ‘Show me them. I’ll put an end to such tactics.’

Meros’s temper flared. ‘I hope it will be that easy.’ The grim, cold-eyed conviction in his reply smothered any further possibility of scorn in an instant. He wanted to say aloud that what they had faced on Holst smacked more of myth and magick than weapons born of reason, but to utter those words would make Gravato and the rest of Nakir’s men doubt his sanity.

And they would have good cause. His thoughts turned to Kano; he had not seen his friend since they returned to the fleet, and they had barely spoken on the flight back from the ice world. At this moment, Meros would have welcomed his comrade’s counsel.

‘Look sharp,’ said the captain, as a giant harpoon-shape hove out of the smoke above their heads. As they approached, it revealed itself as the tip of the frigate’s prow, sweeping away into the blade-like planes of the armoured fore-sections. The massive segment of wreckage was inverted, the dorsal surface disappearing behind a thick bolus of churned earth that had been compressed by its passage across the fields. All around them pieces of hull metal lay in fragments, shorn off in the crash. Here and there fires burned in ponds of spilled promethium.

Sergeant Madidus halted abruptly, raising his fist. ‘Do you hear?’ he said.

The warriors fell silent. Meros thought he caught a faint noise, like the sound of static on a dead vox-channel. It was inconstant, rising and falling at the edge of his hearing.

Captain Nakir advanced slowly towards the hull of the Stark Dagger. The plasteel plates of the fuselage were stained with a layer of what appeared to be black ash. It glittered faintly in the feeble daylight.

Without warning, Nakir raised his gauntlet and struck the hull with his fist, hard enough to sound like a gunshot. The static-noise suddenly became a ripping buzz-saw chorus, and what Meros had thought was ash suddenly exploded away into the air, swirling around.

‘Flies,’ said Madidus. ‘A swarm of them.’

The insects made an angry, snarling drone as they rose and contorted into a dark cloud. For a moment, they dithered over the Blood Angels, as if they were considering them; then the swarm coiled away, deeper into the wreckage.

‘Some kind of local insect pest,’ offered Nakir. ‘The fires must have attracted them.’ He beckoned the rest of the legionaries to follow him. ‘Come, this way.’ The captain pointed up the slope of the fallen hull to an impact crater. ‘We’ll make our entry there. Once inside, sweep for any working cogitator consoles, log records…’

‘Survivors?’ said Meros.

‘Survivors,’ repeated Nakir, although his tone was doubtful.

Using cables and the mag-locks in their boots, the Blood Angels climbed aboard the Stark Dagger, emerging in a long, low arming chamber beneath the frigate’s torpedo bays. They broke into ten-man teams, and set off into the wreck’s infrastructure, using the pin-lamps on their bolters to guide the way.

Meros activated the illuminator on his backpack and illuminated the path for Madidus, who took point with Nakir a step behind. Cassiel stayed close. The veteran had said very little since they left the Red Tear, and he eyed each heap of wreckage they passed with a glower, as if he expected it to rise up and attack them at any moment.

The passage into the grounded frigate was slow and careful. They had no deckplates to walk upon; with the wreck upside down, the ceiling became their floor, forcing them to pick their way over arches and decorative crenellations. Meros’s bio-implants rendered any possibility of disorientation moot, but still it remained a tricky descent.

Madidus found bodies soon enough, but they were burned to a crisp, blackened shapes resembling human beings but with little other definition to them. One of the other legionaries reached out to touch one of the dead and the corpse-form immediately broke apart like poorly-fired clay. Pausing a moment, Meros offered his auspex to the remains, but the readings gathered by the sensing device shed no light on the exact manner of death.

They moved on, past the weapons decks to the service tiers. The wreck of the Stark Dagger was not still in its repose. All around them, the bulkheads creaked and moaned, either from the passage of wind through gashes in the hull or the slow settling of the starship’s dead weight. Rains of rust flakes fell like snow, glittering as the beam of the flood lamp caught them. Vessels like the frigate were never designed to operate inside a gravity well, and their own mass pulled against them. Given time, sections of the wreck would eventually collapse under their own weight. High over their heads, metal scraped on metal, and Meros fancied it was the noise of bared talons against the twisted plasteel.

Every ten minutes, the vox muttered with the voices of the other teams checking in. They too had found the burned dead, along with more colonies of the strange black flies.

An alert icon blinked in the corner of the Apothecary’s vision block and he halted, bringing up his gauntlet’s auspex again.

‘You have something?’ said Cassiel.

He nodded slowly. ‘Yes, captain. A change in gas concentrations nearby.’

Nakir hefted his boltgun. ‘Toxins?’

Meros shook his head. ‘No, sir. But a marked rise in carbon dioxide and other by-products of respiration.’ He panned the sensor head around, letting it sample the air. ‘Something is alive nearby.’

‘Weapons to ready,’ he ordered. The commander’s face was unreadable as his men brought up their guns and snapped off safety catches. Carefully, he tabbed the vox-pickup in his gorget and spoke into it. His words were immediately amplified tenfold by an address relay in the helmet hanging at his waist. ‘Attention. This is Captain Dar Nakir of the Fourth Legion Astartes.’ His call rebounded off the walls and down the dark corridors. ‘Anyone within the sound of my voice, make yourself known. We are here to rescue you. You will not be harmed.’

The last word echoed away from them, fading, and Meros held his breath, straining to listen.

Up above, very distinctly, something heavy struck the bulkhead three times.

‘There.’ Gravato pointed towards a hatch in the wall beneath a twisted gantry.

Nakir arranged his men in a staggered formation to cover all angles in the event of an ambush, and then climbed up, with Meros and the others following closely. The hatch was a thick autolock, the kind that would automatically seal shut in the event of catastrophic loss of atmosphere, but as the captain looked closer, he picked out thermal damage around the release clamps. ‘These handles have been welded in place. From the inside.’

‘They didn’t want anyone coming in after them,’ noted Cassiel.

Meros held up the auspex, the green glow of the display backlighting his face. ‘Confirmed, my lord. Someone is in there.’

Nakir stepped back, shooting a look at Gravato. ‘Get it open.’

‘Aye,’ he replied, raising the melta weapon with one hand, dialling down the projector choke with the other.

‘Wait!’ Meros stepped into the firing line. ‘We don’t know who is on the other side of this. The shock effect could be lethal.’

‘You have another suggestion, Apothecary?’

‘I do.’ Meros drew his chainaxe and threw a hard blow against the first of the clamps. Fractal-edged tungsten-alloy teeth met plasteel and yellow sparks flew. The handle spun away from its mounts, and in moments Meros had beheaded all of the clamps. Cassiel put his weight behind the hinges, and with a shout of tortured metal, the hatch swung back.

It revealed a dark, wide space beyond, thick with human odours and stale atmosphere. Meros stepped over the threshold, the lamp over his shoulder bringing hard illumination to the gloom. It was hazy inside – and something else.

The air in the chamber seemed strangely dead. It was almost as if a shroud had been placed over everything, muffling sounds and sensations even though nothing seemed quieter or less defined. He thought he could smell ozone.

Bare feet slapped against metal and a slight, limping figure fell into the cone of the beam. Utterly out of place in the plasteel dungeon, the woman wore a fine sundress that was now much the worse for wear, with a short jacket draped over thin shoulders. Her face was pale and grubby beneath an unkempt knot of red hair. She had an expression that was somewhere between the poles of awe and relief.

A long-fingered hand dared to come up and touch the sigil of the alatus cadere across Meros’s chestplate, and a smile like sunrise split her smoke-dirty face. ‘You are the Emperor’s Angels,’ she breathed.

‘We are,’ he replied.

‘I knew you would come for us.’ She spun on her heel and shouted into the shadows. ‘I told you they would come!’

From the edges of the darkness, more survivors dared to show themselves, one by one coming forwards to see the Blood Angels, as if they wanted proof that this was not an illusion.

Kreed had given his understanding when the Urizen had demanded it. He had never questioned; that was not the way of the Word Bearers. They were built, soul and bone, upon a certainty of purpose that was ultimate and unbreakable.

Our blood is our oath.

Those words were said in the years before the Enlightenment, back in the wastes of Colchis when the enemy were cruel priests and heartless lore-lords. They were spoken again when the Emperor came in his false glory. Now they were uttered in real, total truth for the first time, and it was a renewal. The Legion was born again under Lorgar’s revelations and it was, at last, right.

The other, older truths, now revealed in the light of the new as mere husks, had been sloughed off as a snake would shed a desiccated skin. Those ghost-truths were not mistakes, but tests. The XVII Legion had been tested and found good.

How could it be otherwise? The Word Bearers had broken down the barriers and at last ascended to the path of the real truth. The great road was revealed.

Tanus Kreed believed this with all his heart. Doubt was unknown to him. If his Legion had failed to comprehend, if his master had not seen and brought them illumination… then they would have been forever trapped in false dogma. For a moment he thought of the Ultramarines who would perish on far distant Calth, the hidebound Imperial Fists, whose days were similarly numbered; the Salamanders and the Raven Guard ground into dust beneath the boot heel of the new order.

None of them saw as the Word Bearers saw. None of them saw what Kreed laid eyes upon now.

A being made of nightmares and war, too terrible for paltry words to encompass.

It spared him an arch look and he recoiled, his flesh searing. The acolyte brought up his hands to shield his face and felt them burn cold. Kreed’s eyes prickled as if a thousand needles stabbed through them into his skull. Each time he tried to gain some understanding of the massive, bestial form, the scale of it slipped away from him. It filled the room, and yet it seemed even larger than that. The iron walls surrounding them, decorated with layers of profane iconography, took on new, impermanent dimensions. Reality seemed to distort around the towering behemoth. All around the chamber, the litanic servitors were dropping dead where they stood, multiple mouths open in voiceless screams.

At last the monster turned away, and mercifully Kreed was – for the moment – once again beneath its notice.

Across the sacellum, the Warmaster’s ghostly avatar gave a nod to the winged creature. ‘What are you?’ The question flashed across the void, buzzing with malice.

‘Names are for cenotaphs,’ it rumbled, drooling black venom through gaping jaws. The creature gave an exaggerated bow, the blurred mass of it making a mockery of so very human a gesture. ‘Know that I am a Warlord of the Damned, Arbiter of Unmercy. I am your general upon the field of battle for this great conflict, Horus Lupercal.’ It chuckled and gave a mocking salute in the oldest of ways, flicking a clawed hand from its savage brow. ‘I know you yearn to call me daemon. That word fits well. I’ll skin it and wear it about my girth.’ It rocked back and forth on taloned feet, exuding a sense of incredible fury held barely in check. The massive creature was almost squirming with the need to commit violence, and Kreed dared to wonder what it could do given unfettered release.

Above the shivering mass of the warp flask upon the bloody deck, Horus’s face hazed and reformed in a scowl. ‘If you are a mere general, then where is your commander-in-chief?’

There was a barb there and the beast reacted to it, chains about its arms rattling in annoyance. ‘It is… indisposed. Much is to be done, I am told. Final preparations.’ The daemon shrugged, as if the thought of such a thing disgusted it. ‘The work of the hesitant and timid witch-minds disgusts me.’ It leered. ‘I came for blood and skulls.’

‘You’ll have them, enough to slake your thirst and more,’ Horus promised. ‘If you do as I command you now.’

Kreed sensed the undercurrent beneath the Warmaster’s words, and he felt a flutter of panic in his hearts. The scope of this great turning, the complex and perfect design of the betrayal at Signus had been planned with exacting focus and absolute precision by the hand of Erebus and his ethereal cohorts.

It could not be changed, not at the eleventh hour.

Not even by Horus Lupercal, the fulcrum of the war to end all wars.

The acolyte dared to stand, taking a step towards the smoke-phantom that carried the Warmaster’s presence. ‘My lord,’ he began. ‘What do you intend?’

The daemon made a motion with the smallest of its claws, less than a gesture; still, it was enough to make Tanus Kreed’s lungs and throat fill with tainted bile. The gooey, purple-black ooze gushed out from his lips and nostrils, drowning him as he stood there. He swayed, the agony shocking him rigid, yet somehow, he was not dead, even as the oil-thick fluid refused to expel itself from his body. Kreed crashed down to the scarred mosaic floor and lay there, shivering.

‘My thirst is great,’ said the beast, its grin growing to terrifying width. ‘And my tastes are refined.’ A wicked tongue flicked out, tasting the air. ‘Mortals are common and good.’ It nodded towards Kreed. ‘I look forward to sampling these gene-forged.’

‘I will give you a primarch’s blood, an angel’s skull,’ said the Warmaster. ‘Is that a prize that will sway your full loyalty to me in this?’

A great, quaking churn of laughter beat at the walls. ‘Samus was right. For an ephemeral, you are very clever, Horus Lupercal. You have my measure.’ The laugh ground the air with its passing once more. ‘A brother’s essence, made sweet with despair and sorrow–’

‘And hate,’ Horus broke in. ‘There will be such hate.’

‘I want that. I will gorge on it,’ the daemon growled. ‘Give it to me. Tell me how.’

At last, the pain ebbed and Kreed could breathe again. His flesh was hot and filmed with sweat as his bio-implants worked feverishly to rid his body of the toxins that had briefly flooded it. Still, he was able to force out a few words. ‘Sanguinius… The plan…’

Horus’s avatar merged into a newer, more savage expression. ‘Erebus’s plan. Their plan.’ He shook his head. ‘Not mine.’

Moment by shuddering moment, Kreed rose to his knees and then to his feet, blinking bloody tears from his eyes, spitting gobs of ejecta to the deck. ‘We… agreed. This place, this colossal trap… The entire purpose of it was to contain the Blood Angels, to push them to the abyss. To bring them to our banner or destroy them!’

The daemon’s horned head bobbed. ‘I can smell it on them. They do not see it, but the scarlet path passes beneath their feet. The correct application of pressure and they would turn fully to it, marching to the Skull Throne. The bleak, red release is in them all. The little Angel knows it, even though he lacks the words. It is the only thing he truly fears.’

‘Yes,’ said Horus. ‘I gave you the key to them. Use it. Strip away their dutiful nobility and virtue. Break them and bring me what is left. Make weapons of them for my crusade.’

Kreed tried to imagine that: the fury of the Blood Angels with no control, nothing to hold them back. No code, no morality, nothing but rage. They would become mindless killing machines, fit only to be cast down upon the enemy to destroy everything they saw until all was ashes. To take the Angel’s proud sons and remake them as blood-hungry berserkers would be a desecration of such magnificent power… But the breaking of Sanguinius himself would be the greatest challenge of them all.

The Warmaster seemed to sense his thoughts, even across the light years. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘I want the Blood Angels for the crusade against my father, so he can see his folly, so the Imperium can know that even the most noble can be corrupted. But not my dear brother.’

A low rumble of amusement issued out from the daemon’s fanged mouth. ‘Ah. A detail becomes apparent.’

Old, buried venom emerged in Horus’s words. ‘Sanguinius will never turn his face from the Emperor. Erebus is a fool to think it could ever be so. The Angel must fall and never rise. Without him, his sons will embrace your scarlet path, creature. They will be lost.’ His eyes became hooded. ‘They will belong to your bloody king.’

‘I see clearly,’ said the beast, drawing in its great wings. ‘Your hubris is entertaining, Horus Lupercal. I see what you see. If the impossible were to happen, if the Angel Sanguinius could be turned… Then for the first time you would have a true rival among your traitor allies. Perhaps, one the Ruinous Powers might grow to favour over you, given time. You do not wish to take that risk.’

‘He will not turn!’ Horus’s shout shredded the smoke-shape of the avatar, and it twisted angrily as it reformed. ‘None of you understand him as well as I do. But mark this, he will die even if I must do the deed myself. On my soul, I swear it.’

‘It will be as you say.’ The daemon brought its clawed hands together, talons scraping across one another. ‘And I accept my part in this.’ Hellish eyes, burning red like murdered stars, turned to fix Tanus Kreed in their sight. An expectant silence fell.

The acolyte was not a fool. ‘I accept my part in this,’ he echoed, quashing all hesitation. He would consider his collusion in the defiance of Erebus’s orders later. If he lived long enough to do so.

Kreed bowed his head and closed his eyes, listening to the echo of monstrous laughter, the stink of blood and sulphur all around him.

When at last he dared open them again, he was alone with the meat of the dead.

Meros passed from one ragged survivor to the next, giving them a cursory examination, documenting their injuries with growing concern. There were thirty-two in total, twenty males and twelve females, whose ages ranged from a boy of approximately three to a woman of one hundred and six standard Terran years. All of them were severely dehydrated and malnourished, with two of them close to death and several more with minor wounds.

He grimaced at nothing. The chamber made him feel uncomfortable in a manner that reached to his marrow. There was a hollow, sepulchral atmosphere to the room, like the depths of an ancient tomb best left to the lifeless. Meros sensed the ghost of a void out at the edges of his thoughts, a wrongness that he couldn’t shake off. He sighed and pushed it away, trying to focus.

Captain Nakir and Sergeant Madidus were close by, towering over the humans. The tattered refugees huddled together in a loose group, their fear apparent in every motion of their hands, every furtive look from their eyes. Meros learned that the woman in the dress had the name Tillyan Niobe, and she had been the caretaker of an unimportant ornamental garden in a town on the outskirts of Landing, Signus Prime’s capital. At first she talked at him rather than to him, as if it was a matter of great importance that she give him as much data about herself as she could in as short a time. It was almost as if she wanted to prove to him that she was what she said she was. Almost as if she was trying to fix herself in the real.

‘Can we go home now?’ she asked. ‘Have you defeated them?’

‘The nephilim?’

Niobe hesitated. ‘I… I don’t know that word.’ She swallowed. ‘We’ve been in here for weeks. We have not seen light of day since the crash.’

‘What happened to the ship?’ said Nakir. He pointed at a man who had identified himself as Lieutenant Dortmund, formerly of the Signusi infantry brigades. ‘You. Explain it to me.’

Dortmund peered up from beneath a mess of blond hair. He seemed too young to be wearing an officer’s braid. ‘It’s hard to say, lord,’ he began, fingering the lasgun slung at his hip. ‘We were below decks for most of the flight from Signus Prime. The ship was trying to move beyond the mass shadow. We did not see much.’ Dortmund nodded at another man in a crewman’s oversuit. ‘Mister Zhomas here, he was one of the Stark Dagger’s enlisted ranks.’

‘I know less than you think,’ Zhomas insisted. He was a thin, old man with an acidic manner, and he clearly resented the lieutenant’s attempt to bring him to the attention of the legionaries. ‘She was overloaded, captain. We were making good speed, but pushing the reactor too hard. Much too hard. I know there was power loss and we... we started to drift. That’s when the beasts came upon us.’

‘You were attacked by nephilim ships,’ said Nakir. ‘Did the xenos board this vessel?’

‘You keep saying that word!’ A man in a black greatcoat who hovered at the edge of the group spoke up, as if he were no longer able to keep his silence. ‘What does it mean? Neff-what?’ He spat on the deck.

‘Who are you?’ said Madidus.

‘You can call me Hengist, Space Marine. And that’s all for now.’

‘Indeed?’ The sergeant stepped forwards. ‘Why don’t you tell us what you know, Hengist?’

The man tried and failed to stand his ground, shrinking back at the approach of the Blood Angel. Meros suspected he was a criminal of some sort. When they had first entered the chamber, Hengist had made an attempt to conceal a short sword and a narrow-gauge bolt pistol beneath a pile of rags; he’d not been pleased when the Apothecary took them from him.

‘I know what came out there weren’t no alien.’ Hengist showed his teeth. ‘Aliens don’t make walls bleed nor mothers eat their children, don’t turn sky to glass and men into cold smoke…’ There was something vicious about how he retorted.

‘He’s right,’ Zhomas added, with a jerk. ‘I’ve seen greenskins and the fey ones in my service, never nothing like that what killed this ship. All things made out of fangs and wings, lord. Horrors that you can’t lay eyes upon too long.’ He made motions with his fingers, little stabbing gestures. ‘Punched in through the hull, like snakes. Fires and all.’ He gave an involuntary shudder. ‘Down we go.’

‘The ship started to break up,’ offered Niobe. She looked towards Zhomas. ‘We went through the atmosphere.’

The crewman nodded, his eyes wet with sorrow, staring into nothing. ‘Oh aye.’

She went on. ‘We all… found each other after the crash. Came in here and locked the door. We had food and water.’

Meros saw where racks of supplies had been piled. Most of the containers were empty. ‘What were you going to do when you ran out?’

‘Die?’ Dortmund wondered aloud. ‘We couldn’t leave. Not after what we heard through the doors.’

‘Killings.’ Hengist’s head bobbed. ‘Killings the like of which never came afore.’ He raised his hands and pressed them to his head. ‘The sounds of that never fade.’

‘But the…’ Nakir hesitated. ‘The enemy that attacked the frigate. They left you alone.’

‘We’re not the only ones!’ Dortmund said it like it was a foolish suggestion. ‘I mean, we can’t be.’ His face fell. ‘The only ones on the ship?’

‘You are the first we have encountered since our fleet entered the Signus Cluster,’ Madidus replied, matter-of-fact. ‘Phorus, Holst, all dead. No signs of life on this world or any indications of it on the inner planets.’

A palpable sense of shock spread through the civilians, and Nakir went on. ‘Why would they allow you to live?’

The captain’s inference hung in the dead air. None of the survivors showed any mark of the xenos, no evidence of the masking the nephilim used on their helots, but still he was reluctant to evacuate them to the fleet without further information.

‘Because…’ A woman’s voice, thin and laced with pain, came from a figure lying along a low bench. ‘Because it amuses them to watch us die slowly in our despair.’

‘Lady Rozin, you must rest.’ Dortmund went to her side, frowning. ‘Don’t fear. We’re safe now.’

‘We are not,’ the woman insisted, rising painfully to a sitting position. Meros noted that she wore the status brooch of a colonial political aide on a blackened, blood-streaked jacket. ‘The Legions have not liberated us. They’ll never do that.’

‘No,’ Hengist shouted at her, ‘because you brought those monsters here, didn’t you? Invited them in, like, with tisane and garlands of flowers!’

‘Be quiet,’ Madidus snapped. ‘You had your chance to speak.’

‘What does he mean?’ said Meros.

Rozin looked up at him, and she had eyes that belonged to a broken spirit. He had seen it before, in warriors who had lived too long at the pinnacle of bloodshed and death. Whatever she had witnessed had aged her decades without taking a day from her flesh. ‘Bruja came to us.’ It cost her just to utter the name aloud. ‘He was brimming with lies. We thought he was the solution but he was the root.’

Niobe placed a hand on Meros’s vambrace. ‘He said he was going to save us. His voice rang through every watch-wire across the cluster. But he turned us on ourselves.’

‘Our weakness and our fear were all he needed. By the end of the first week we were building concentration camps for the ones who dared disagree.’ Tears fell from Rozin’s eyes, but she did not seem to notice them, her expression blank. ‘Within a month Bruja was ruler of the system in all but name. He told us if we appeased the forces that assailed us, we would live.’

‘What forces?’ said Meros.

Niobe met his gaze, confusion in her expression. ‘The daemons,’ she said, as if the answer were obvious.

The dull, leaden silence that followed was broken by a crackle across the vox-link. One of Nakir’s men in the other formation was reporting, several minutes before the scheduled check-in. The legionary’s voice was thick with static and peculiar resonance effects that sounded like distant whispers – but what was utterly distinct was the crash of bolter-fire in the background.

‘Withdrawing to landing zone,’ came the message. ‘Staging point is under attack. We have intermittent enemy contact.’ Before Nakir could demand further explanation, a droning buzz filled the channel and the signal ceased abruptly.

‘They’ve come back,’ Hengist hissed, a gallows grin on his lips, almost as if he was pleased to be proven right. ‘Your legionaries drew them in anew!’

Meros looked up and met Cassiel’s gaze. The veteran’s expression was grim and determined.

‘Orders?’ said Madidus.

Nakir gathered up his helm and secured it in place, the vox-filter darkening his tones. ‘Take Meros, Cassiel and Gravato, bring the survivors. The rest of the squad will come with me, we’ll make a sprint to the staging point.’

‘Aye, lord.’ The sergeant saluted.

The captain hefted his weapon and barked out a new command. ‘To arms! Take the pace!’ In a blur of red armour, the legionaries thundered from the chamber, vanishing back the way they had come.

‘You heard him,’ said Cassiel, scanning the faces of the civilians. ‘On your feet. Carry the ones that cannot walk or they’ll be left behind.’

‘Blood Angel!’ Niobe’s hand pulled on Meros’s arm, panic filling her. ‘You don’t understand, we can’t go out there–’

‘Stay close. We will protect you.’

‘You believe that now,’ she said, shaking her head, ‘but you are wrong.’

At the staging point, the legionaries on guard had thought at first it was a gale of wind bringing new plumes of black smoke from the fires, pushing it across the ruined landscape towards them.

Then one of the warriors noted that the clouds were moving against the direction of the rest of the smoke. They heard the buzzing, the low drone building quickly to such noise that it was hard to make one’s voice heard below a shout.

The fat, ebon flies came in a swarm thick enough to eclipse what remained of the sunlight. Blood Angels who had gone unhooded went for their helms as the insects fell upon them like a tidal wave. Some were too slow and collapsed clawing at the exposed portions of their skin. The flies bored into bare flesh with acidic mandibles, eating their way into the unwary. The mass choked the breather grilles of their battle plate and the intake vents of the Stormbirds. Thick mats of hissing insect bodies filled thruster bells and choked the engines’ fire, grounding the ships.

Then there were faces in the fire smoke, the suggestion of lithe, graceful forms dancing around just out of clear sight. Pink, naked flesh and sinuous curves, laughing eyes that mocked the warriors in crimson. Savage claws that snapped and clattered together in raucous chorus. The air shimmered as if it had been cast like a glamour out of ancient myth.

By the time Captain Nakir reached the landing zone, the Blood Angels were in the teeth of the attack. He opened fire, placing his trust in bolt shell and blade’s edge.

Meros and the others could only move as swiftly as the slowest members of the ragged group of survivors, and their advance became a drawn-out struggle. Madidus took the lead, and they travelled in bursts. First through the winding, broken corridors of the Stark Dagger, then threading out through the dispersal field of wreckage and spoil. Now they were on open ground, with only the occasional low rise and the wreaths of heavy, choking smoke to give them cover.

Madidus raised his fist in the air and they went to the ground; some of the civilians had reacted too slowly the first time the sergeant had made the gesture, but Cassiel had shouted them into obedience and now no one dared to linger off the mark.

‘What is it?’ said Gravato over the vox, from the middle of the group. From his place at the tail end of the party, the Apothecary could see the Blood Angel pull his meltagun to his shoulder.

‘Overhead,’ said Madidus. ‘I hear… wings.’

Meros strained to listen and caught a fraction of the noise. The dull thump of air over beating, leathery sails; the strange skirling cry of something that was no common avian creature. He looked up, but all he saw were shadows moving above the smoke clouds, fast and flowing.

Part of him wanted very much to sight in and take a shot at those vague shapes, just for the certainty of being able to see what forms lurked out in this wasteland. But a single bolt-shot would alert the enemy to their presence, and the lives of the people they had come to rescue could not be put at risk.

He looked down and saw Niobe watching him. Her plain face had kind eyes that implored him. She seemed so small and feeble, so incapable of strength. That she and the others had lived this long was miraculous to him.

The galaxy is a harsh and pitiless place, he thought. That is why the Emperor created us, to tame it for people like her. It was important to remember such things; in the long conflict of the Great Crusade it was sometimes easy to forget that the galaxy was not only a place of war.

Niobe’s eyes flicked to a point over Meros’s shoulder and he saw the colour drain from her cheeks. Her mouth dropped open in horror. Slowly and carefully he turned, silently drawing his bolt pistol.

It was three hundred metres from where they crouched, pausing to sniff at the air, licking at nothing with a forked, serpentine tongue. The dimensions of the creature and the svelte curves of its body suggested femininity, but only as an afterthought, only as a dressing for its true nature. Humanoid after a fashion, the thing was a very pale pink, almost corpse-white in places, and it balanced coyly on thin, muscular legs that ended in taloned feet. A face like mis-sculpted marble with feline eyes, no nose and a lipless sneer of a mouth turned this way and that. Meros saw striated elfin ears like those of the eldar, but the female bore no kinship to that species. He knew that instinctively; aliens Meros had encountered on many occasions, and although they were repulsive to him, no xenos he had seen carried this same sense of wrongness about it.

‘Contact right,’ he whispered into the vox, becoming an armoured statue. ‘Single target on foot. Could be a scout.’

‘Can you make a silent kill?’ Madidus replied.

‘Negative, too far. No reaction as yet.’

‘Don’t risk the humans. Let it go if you can.’

‘Aye.’

There was a pause and then Madidus spoke again. ‘Can you identify it?’

‘It’s not nephilim, sergeant. I don’t know what it is.’

‘Succubae,’ whispered Niobe. ‘Daemonette. Seducer. Those are the old names for them. They came in Bruja’s wake.’

The creature toyed with a blade in one pale hand, rolling it in idle circles. Its other arm ended in something resembling the pincer of a giant arthropod, toothed chelae tapping quietly against one another. The legionary could not be certain if the claw was some kind of weapon or if it was actually part of the female itself.

As that question formed in his mind, the black, pupil-less eyes turned and looked right at him.

There was no way it could have failed to see them. Even in a low crouch, the crimson and white of Meros’s battle plate stood out against the churned dirt of the plainsland.

But then it turned, with no hint of understanding on its face, and vanished into the smoke with a low, trilling call.

ELEVEN

Daemons
Signus Prime
The Scream

Madidus brought the survivors to the staging point, threading through the safe corridor. They were almost to the Stormbirds when Gravato reported that the count was short. Meros realised that Hengist and the man he had been carrying, a wounded farmer by the name of Quan, had fallen far behind. He went back for them.

Quan was in a heap a short distance from the perimeter and Hengist was angrily trying to pull him to his feet. When Meros was two paces from the injured man, the creature, the thing that Niobe had called a daemonette, attacked.

Hengist ran screaming as the succubae fell out of the air, dropping from the back of some winged mount-beast to run Quan through with its great claw. The farmer died quickly, but not easily; he gave no resistance to the thing. Instead, Quan lost himself in the creature’s opalescent gaze even as it gutted him alive.

The daemonette’s mount, a grotesque lizard-bird with four wings and a mouth full of cilia, wheeled and dived at the Blood Angel, instinctively blocking the line of fire to its rider as he drew his bolt pistol. Drawn off mark, he brought down the winged monster with a head-shot. Fountaining pink fluids, the mount crashed into the mud and lay there, foaming and twitching in the throes of death.

The succubae cried, a strangled, bloodcurdling sound, and came at him in fury. Meros tried to kill the beast with bolt-fire, but she – if considerations of gender could be applied to such a being – was fleet of foot, and on him before he could reload.

The flat of the succubae’s blade-claw hit him with such force that Meros’s helmed head stuck the bulky ridge of his backpack and he saw stars. The Blood Angel rolled and came up with his chainaxe, swinging in a blind arc that roared through the space where the creature had been standing.

She blurred away, dodging the clumsy reflex blow, making play at a cocky parry with the obsidian dagger in her other hand. The creature made a noise of almost sexual pleasure, pantomiming a demure expression that was odd and disturbing on the sharp planes of her face. Then she attacked him, shrieking.

Meros came in with the axe’s backswing and connected hard, the flat of the weapon slamming into the succubae’s breast, knocking her into a stumble. Agile as she was, the creature turned the fall into a roll and sprang into readiness once more. Meros turned, keeping her before him, waiting for the next attack.

He shut out all the distractions, the crashing thunder of gunfire, the buzzing swarm-screams, the deafening chaos of battle unfolding all around the grounded Stormbirds. His battle-brothers had engaged the enemy, and doubtless each of them was matched in his own small war just as the Apothecary was now. A single moment’s inattention could be fatal against such a foe.

From her low stance, the creature sprang at him, powerful taloned legs launching her at him with new speed. Meros turned his shoulder into the assault and leaned into the motion. They collided with bone-shaking force and he heard the crackle of ceramite as the outer layer of his armour was nicked. The claw-hand swept at him and he slammed it down with the butt of his pistol. Bony, chitinous material fragmented and the succubae spat angrily, a cascade of noises that seemed like words, but not from any language fit for a human tongue. He glimpsed a flash of bleeding meat inside the cracked claw; it was not, as he had wondered before, a sleeve-weapon, but actually a mutant outgrowth of the female’s slim, fleshy arm. The small, abhorrent truth of this detail sickened him. What kind of monstrous evolution would create such a twisted creature as this one?

The black dagger plunged to his chest and struck at a poor angle, scraping across the curve of his armoured torso, failing to penetrate. Meros made a split-second choice and released his bolt pistol, letting it drop into the scorched mud at his feet.

With one hand now freed, he grabbed at the claw’s wrist and forced it forwards in a sharp jerk of motion. The daemonette was caught off-guard and the curve of her great pincer slapped hard across her face, drawing streaks of oily purple blood.

Meros followed through, shoving the creature back before she could regain balance and break off. He turned the chainaxe’s head in his hand and brought it up, squeezing the trigger bar in the grip. The spinning blades bit into the bare skin of the creature’s midriff and tore through. With all his strength behind him, the Apothecary lifted the daemonette off the ground and into the air.

She screamed and ripped at him, knowing death was upon her, and the unearthly beauty of her strange aspect suddenly turned into a portrait of something hellish and filled with hate. The depthless opal eyes that had captured Quan’s will burned white, and the scream cut out with a dry gasp.

He flung the corpse to the ground and stooped to take up his discarded pistol.

Hengist, who had been cowering nearby for the duration of the fight, staggered to his feet, unable to look away from the carcass of the creature. He pointed at it. ‘I told them,’ he spat, as if he were accusing someone of a great crime. ‘I told them.’

‘Follow,’ Meros barked, reloading as he went. ‘Tarry again and I leave you here.’

The cough and grunt of flamers met them as they passed beneath the wing of the nearest Stormbird. Nakir’s men were tracing ropes of flame over the fly-clogged exhausts, burning the foul insects off in droves and forcing the swarms to scatter. It was better to risk minor damage to the Legion’s own ships, Meros considered, than remain grounded on Scoltrum’s surface.

Dead succubae and lizard-birds lay all around, and with them a number of warriors in red armour. Meros cursed under his breath to see even a single Blood Angel dead at the hands of these grotesque harpies.

He looked away and saw Madidus at the stern hatch of a waiting drop-ship. Niobe’s face was also visible inside, peering out at him. The sergeant beckoned; they would not wait for a second wave to come after them. The beacon that had called to the Blood Angels had been found and silenced. There was no reason to remain on the agri-world any more.

Hengist was at his side. ‘Can we go now? I want to get away from here.’

The open terror in the man’s voice made Meros angry. ‘Get away from me,’ he said, moving to the nearest fallen legionary. ‘I have a duty to perform first.’

He activated the reductor probe on his medicae gauntlet, and with solemn care, Meros began to harvest the progenoid glands of the dead.

The mood in the lithocast chamber was in stark contrast to the temper of the conclave only a few days earlier. Captain Raldoron folded his arms across his chest and scanned the room, picking out the avatars of the commanders who were transmitting from their ships. Along with countless other minor malfunctions and small indignities, the hololithic network between the vessels of the Blood Angels fleet was suffering intermittent loss of data parity, and the synthetic avatars of many of the Three Hundred’s company captains were blurry and crazed with static. Techmarines and servitors from the Red Tear’s Mechanicum enginseer brigades had been unable to correct the problem, or blot out the damnable interference whisper that had gradually made itself known on every vox-channel and tactical relay.

The temper of the room was grim, and the presence of the Great Angel did little to lighten it. Officers of good and level bearing were showing signs of irritation and division. These warriors had gathered expecting to fight a definitive battle of the Great Crusade, to end a threat to humankind, but what they had found at Signus Prime continued to defy categorisation.

Captain Nakir completed his report to the assemblage and there was obvious dissent, even towards the battle-brother’s unembellished description of the enemy engagement on the fifth planet.

‘These creatures...’ began High Warden Berus, sharing an arch look with his subordinate Annellus, who stood nearby. ‘Did you think to bring a dead one back to the fleet so that it might be examined in the apothecarion?’

Nakir’s lips thinned. ‘Of course,’ he snapped. ‘But the corpses denatured on the way back to our vessel.’

‘What do you mean by that?’ asked Zuriel, from the cohort of the Sanguinary Guard.

Nakir glanced at the legionary standing beside him, a line Apothecary from the Ninth Company. ‘It melted, Guard Sergeant. Like ice upon a griddle. All that remained was a foul, toxic residue that could not be analysed.’

‘The survivors, then,’ said Captain Amit, his gaze steady and intense. ‘They live still? They were examined?’

‘Aye, brother-captain. The group are being held under guard in a secure compartment on the lower decks.’ Again, Nakir looked at the Apothecary. The younger warrior’s head was bowed. He was clearly in awe of being called to the presence of so many of the Legion’s greatest heroes – not the least of whom was the primarch himself. Raldoron considered him and drew slow recognition of his face from memory. Melchior and Nartaba. The warrior had served in both conflicts with fortitude and honour.

‘Meros.’ Sanguinius said his name and the Apothecary looked up, stiffening to attention. ‘My son, you have dealt directly with these people. What is your opinion of them?’

The Angel’s manner was solemn and calm, and Meros seemed eased by it. ‘Lord. The survivors carry no signs of chemical alterants or invasive implantation.’ He hesitated, as if in consideration of something, then continued. ‘I found nothing unusual about them, save that they are alive while every other Signusi we have seen is a boneless corpse.’

‘Reason enough for us to have left them where we found them,’ said Annellus coldly. ‘They could be another ploy on the part of the xenos. Collaborators.’

‘We will not grace the suggestion of abandoning these people with a moment of consideration.’ Sanguinius did not raise his voice, but his censure was clear, and the Warden was visibly cowed. ‘We are not callous. We came to Signus to save it.’ He nodded to Meros, indicating for him to go on.

‘I have taken testimonies,’ he said. ‘Along with data recovered from the wreck of the Stark Dagger, it may be possible to reconstruct a partial timeline of events to show what happened here.’

‘What do they know of the nephilim?’ demanded Azkaellon. ‘Any indications of force disposition and tactics?’

‘They were shown picts of the xenos and their ships,’ said Nakir. ‘Not one of them had ever seen the giants before.’

‘Then what attacked them?’ The question came from the commander of the Two Hundred and Sixteenth, his holo-image wavering slightly.

Meros’s expression stiffened. ‘Captain, they spoke of armies of beings that were a mixture of… of life forms. Humanoid-animal amalgams, winged beasts and things of fluid flesh. An army of daemons.’ He frowned. ‘That was the exact word used, my lords.’

Berus snorted. ‘It is as I said before. This is the result of psychological warfare, doubtless enhanced by the use of mind-control methodology. Drugs or chemicals, mental programming. The untrained human psyche is a malleable thing, open to manipulation and corruption.’ The Warden threw a brief look across to where Raldoron was standing – but no, not to the First Captain, instead to his adjutant. At his side, Brother Kano said nothing, remaining in the shadows.

‘With respect,’ said Meros, ‘no trace of such manipulation has been found in the survivors. They believe in what they are saying.’

‘I’m sure they do,’ said Berus, earning him some dry mutters of agreement from a few of the other captains.

‘They say an inhuman warlord leads this army of monsters,’ said Nakir. ‘A being that calls itself “the Bloodthirster”, a killer that revels in violence and suffering.’ He paused. ‘A second leader, another creature, is also known to exist.’

‘How many of these so-called daemons are there?’ asked Galan.

‘The accounts conflict,’ admitted Meros. ‘Some of the survivors spoke of a human, a man named Bruja. He came to them claiming to be an agent of the Imperium, but he appears to have been responsible for the collapse of the Signusi government.’

‘One man?’ Azkaellon’s doubts were clear. ‘How did he do it?’

‘With magick.’ Raldoron watched Meros force the words out, his brow knitting. ‘Bruja was allegedly subsumed by a creature of the warp, a perverse mastermind that conducted terrible acts of desecration and cruelty.’ He stopped abruptly. ‘I have no further explanation for you. I merely repeat what the survivors said to me.’

‘He repeats a wild fiction!’ said Annellus. ‘And does so as if it has merit.’

‘I am forced to agree with the Warden.’ The words came with a hiss and crackle, broadcast from the bridge of the Dark Page. Acolyte Kreed, his image cloaked in duty robes, had until now offered nothing to the conversation. ‘These descriptions of horrific creatures, the insistence that they are somehow unreal… They are the fanciful creations of uneducated minds that cannot grasp the scope of something alien.’

‘Are you certain?’ said Amit, grim-faced. ‘Is that how you explain the troubling phenomena we have encountered? What of the incidents aboard our own ships, the epidemic of suicides among the crew-serfs and the remembrancer contingent? No cause has been found to explain it.’

‘Some allow their fear of the unknown to destroy them,’ Kreed said. ‘We have all seen the xenos in their many forms, the strange and the inexplicable. Yet, nothing that cannot be explained in the light of reason. These poor fools whose lives were saved by Captain Nakir’s bravery… They are not a source of credible intelligence.’

Raldoron held his tongue, even as he saw Galan and several other captains nodding in agreement with the Word Bearer’s comments. He weighed the words in his thoughts. Kreed had a fair point, but it could not be denied that there was more at hand here than could be easily dismissed.

It was Helik Redknife, watching from the wings, who finally said what many were thinking. ‘Do not be so quick to deny the words of the humans. They may not see with the eyes of a Space Marine, but they see. No warrior here assembled can deny that they have not glimpsed the raw madness of the warp from the corner of their eye, and wondered what swims in its depths.’

Raldoron could hold his silence no longer. ‘Riddles and talking in circles do not serve the mission. Whatever the origin of the enemy forces we have encountered in the Signus Cluster, they are still the enemy. Nakir and his men showed we can fight them and kill them. That is all that matters. Our orders from the Warmaster have not changed. We liberate this system from the hands of those who have taken it.’

‘What is your opinion, Brother Meros?’ Sanguinius’s question silenced any other voices in the chamber. ‘You have seen these creatures close at hand twice now. I would have you give us your honest, unvarnished thoughts.’

The Apothecary looked up at his liege lord. ‘The nephilim are not here, my master. These horrors are not their work. Whatever name we wish to give it, xenos, daemon or unknown… I believe we face something outside the experience of any son of Baal or Terra.’

Kano left the chamber as quickly as he could, taking leave of his commander. He found Meros in a corridor radiating off the atrium. The Apothecary’s face betrayed his troubled mind. He seemed lost in his own thoughts.

Kano had to call out to him twice before his old friend snapped out of his reverie. ‘Brother, a moment.’

Meros nodded. ‘Come to ask me why I didn’t keep my damned mouth shut?’ He grimaced. ‘Furio will probably discommend me. Now every captain in the Three Hundred thinks I’m a soft-brained idiot.’

‘Not every one of them,’ Kano offered, with a dry smile. ‘Just the ones who think they know better than you.’

Meros rounded on him, suddenly animated. ‘Where have you been, Kano? After we came back from Holst, you vanished. You never breathed a word about–’

His brittle good humour crumbled. ‘About what we saw down there, you mean? No. I did not. In all truth, I had questions that I had to find answers for.’

‘And did you?’ Meros advanced a step, frustration and anger beneath his words.

Kano spoke quietly. ‘It is my burden that I see with different eyes to you, my friend.’

‘I echo Captain Raldoron,’ said the Apothecary. ‘Riddles serve nothing. Speak to me plainly.’

‘I think what you told the Angel is right,’ Kano told him. ‘And I’m not the only one.’ He put his hand on Meros’s shoulder. ‘You saved those people’s lives. They trust you, yes? They will confide in you?’

He nodded. ‘The woman, Tillyan Niobe… She called us the Emperor’s Angels. As if she believed we truly were the seraphs of old myth.’

‘Speak to her. Find out all you can about these “daemons”. Whatever Annellus or Berus may think, they could have the key to the truth about Signus.’

‘Aye.’ Meros was silent for a moment, then he looked up again as something occurred to him. ‘What truth?’

A shadow passed over Kano’s face. ‘When I know, I will tell you.’

As he walked back to the lithocast chamber, intending to seek Raldoron for his duties, Kano found his path blocked by another officer.

‘You.’ The captain of the Fifth Company was waiting for him. ‘I will have words with you, Librarian.’

Kano’s eyes narrowed, but he bowed as protocol demanded he should. ‘I no longer carry that duty or title, Captain Amit. You know that full well.’

‘I was at Nikaea, that is so. I know that rank and title may be excised with a single word of command, but a duty… Not so easily forgotten, in my experience.’

He kept a neutral aspect. Amit was a hard man to read. At first glance, all that he was seemed there on the surface, quick and fierce. Kano knew that was only the edge of him, though. Amit ran deep and dark, and kept much more of himself hidden than many realised.

‘I know what you have been doing,’ said the captain. ‘I’ve watched you, Kano.’

‘I do not–’

Amit cut him off, his face splitting in a snarl. ‘Lie to me and I will deem you worthless, Librarian.’ He leaned closer. ‘I know you have been abroad in the fleet, seeking word of your psyker kindred in secret.’

Kano went cold. He had not yet reconnected with enough of his former comrades to gain a consensus. If Amit were to try and stop him…

The captain showed a feral smile. ‘I don’t need your talents to know what you are thinking. Rest easy, Kano. I don’t want to hinder you. I’m going to assist.’

‘Why?’ The question came immediately. ‘I… We risk censure from the Warden cadre, or worse.’

Amit’s smile broadened. ‘That threat carries little weight within the Fifth.’ Then he was cold and serious once more, his manner changing like the dousing of a lamp. ‘I don’t trust the words of narrow minds like Berus, or that zealot Kreed. What I glimpsed when I came to rescue you on Holst, the words of those survivors. All of it. It connects to something from our shared past. Archetypes of the subconscious, otherworldly forces that are more than just alien. I see that, even if others do not. You see it too.’

Kano nodded slowly. ‘More than you know, brother-captain.’

‘I believe that the entire Signus Cluster is some grand snare, Kano. A trap in which to hold the Blood Angels and destroy us. I won’t let that happen. We will not let that happen.’

‘And if to do so we must defy the orders of the Council of Terra? Or an edict of the Emperor?’

‘We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it,’ said Amit.

The stories Niobe told him were a collection of nightmares. Meros listened and kept his silence, careful to do nothing to show any kind of judgement about what the woman said.

Before they came to Signus, even before his near-death experience at Nartaba Octus, the Blood Angel might have found doubt in what she said. Now, he thought differently. Hour by hour, the unreal became more real to him.

Meros found Niobe in an alcove of the medicae chamber where the survivors from Scoltrum were being held. She was as far from the rest of them as was possible without leaving the chamber. A naval trooper from Admiral DuCade’s crew stood guard at the door to make sure that none of them could.

The others were gathered in a loose knot, talking in low tones or else saying nothing at all. She was tending the sleeping form of the woman Rozin, who rested fitfully on a low pallet.

‘Her dreams are troubled,’ Niobe told the legionary, quietly stroking Rozin’s hair from her face. ‘They torment her with what she was forced to witness. She told me she can only find rest when I comfort her, so I do so.’

‘Did you see what she saw?’

‘Rains of blood and nature turning on men.’ She nodded wearily. ‘Horrors that made me doubt my own sanity. Oh yes, warrior. I saw that.’ Niobe looked down at her hands. ‘I want so much to go home, back to my quiet garden, but I know it no longer exists.’ A brittle smile crossed her face. ‘I must seem selfish to you. I have always lived alone and had little contact with others. I liked it that way, and so did they. Just me and the plants. No one came to see the gardens, but I tended them. It was a fine arrangement.’ She sighed. ‘I’ve never had great empathy for my fellow man.’

Meros nodded at Rozin. ‘The care you give this one puts the lie to that.’

‘Does it?’ Niobe looked up, glancing over at the rest of the survivors. ‘They never liked me. Dortmund and Hengist always arguing in that dark compartment. The thief swore I was in league with Rozin, and that she in turn was in with the creatures. Always saying, “Open the door. Throw the witches out.” He wanted us dead.’

‘Dortmund didn’t let that happen.’

‘Aye. But more by lassitude than effort.’ She paused. ‘Rozin was there when that whoreson Bruja came to Signus Prime. The others treat her like she is tainted.’

‘This man Bruja… He was a turncoat, then?’

She shook her head. ‘He turned his flesh, legionary. And good people followed him down that path in fear of their lives. They were consumed.’

‘But not you.’

‘Not us.’ Niobe looked up at him. ‘A daemon’s cruelty means nothing if it is not witnessed.’

‘That word again.’ The Apothecary folded his arms. ‘There is no such thing. No magick, no devils and gods, no–’

‘Angels?’ She broke in. ‘Then what are you? What is your master?’

Meros’s answer faded on his lips as a motion at the hatchway distracted him. The remembrancer Halerdyce Gerwyn had cross words with the guard at the threshold and pushed past him. Gerwyn was pale and drawn in his face, and the look in his eyes was vacant and cold. He didn’t see Meros, didn’t really seem to be registering anything at all as he crossed the chamber towards a maintenance bay, ignoring the looks he got from medicae serfs and other Apothecaries.

The guard was shouting now, and Meros stepped away from Rozin’s slumbering form, sensing something amiss.

Gerwyn pulled at the handles of a secured panel and wrenched it open. Inside, Meros saw a bank of switches for emergency control systems, the local control boards for the medicae chamber’s fire retardant nozzles and anti-decompression vents.

The naval crewman reached the remembrancer before Meros did, placing his hand on Gerwyn’s shoulder. The sequentialist spun, still dull-eyed and blank of face, and struck the young man with a heavy cudgel that had been concealed in his sleeve. The guard fell bleeding to the deck and Meros broke into a run.

Gerwyn grabbed the purge lever for the retardants and twisted it a half turn. Vents in the ceiling puffed a weak breath of acrid white vapour; a full turn would release an immediate surge of dense halomethane mist that would smother any naked flame in a heartbeat.

‘Stop him!’ someone shouted. ‘He’ll kill us all!’

The chemical haze would also suffocate anyone without a legionary’s augmented lungs – every survivor of Signus, every crew-serf, everyone who was not a Blood Angel would choke and die, including the remembrancer himself.

Another one, Meros thought, even as he shouted Gerwyn’s name. Another soul crushed by a madness spun out of nothing. His bolt pistol was in his hand. A single shot would reduce the hapless artist to a bloody smear.

He hesitated as panic exploded around them, and heard Hengist bellowing as the survivors fled for the hatchway. Meros liked Gerwyn; the man deserved better than a lunatic’s bloody death. He stood frozen, his pistol trained.

‘What is he doing?’

Niobe had followed him, and all at once Meros felt the same strange deadening of the air that he had sensed in the sealed compartment on board the Stark Dagger.

Halerdyce Gerwyn’s face shifted, expression returning to it. He blinked like a man waking from a dream. The remembrancer saw Meros, saw the bolt pistol, and he broke into weeping. His long fingers fell from the purge lever and he dropped to the deck, burying his face in his hands. Meros lowered the gun and snapped the lever back to its safe position.

Kneeling, Niobe clasped Gerwyn’s arm and spoke to him. She was asking him what was wrong. ‘Why did you do that?’

‘Peace,’ he managed, through his sobs. ‘Wanted. Peace.’

Meros heard the man’s words, but his attention was on Tillyan Niobe. He was thinking of Gerwyn’s sudden calming, Rozin’s troubled dreams now banished, the succubae that had not seen them, and the raw impossibility of the survivors themselves.

With slow inevitability, the light of the three suns was eclipsed across the Red Tear’s bow as at last the planet Signus Prime came into sight before the Blood Angels fleet.

No voice of man nor sign of life bled from the capital world. Sensors reaching out to touch the surface threw back streams of data that were meaningless, unreadable gibberish, and even simple optical scopes brought reports that were confused or contradictory. The whole planet was buried under a sheath of thick, bilious cloud, and so it resembled a glass orb filled with yellowed, sickly smoke. Tumultuous storm cells were visible, moving in random patterns at odds with meteorological norms. Towering jags of lightning lit the night side, curving in purple-white slashes that mimicked the shapes of fanged smiles.

The warships deployed in combat formation, squadrons of cruisers, carriers and destroyers forming their own battle elements, laying out screens of interceptors and picket gunboats. There was not a single degree of black, starless sky that did not have a weapon pointed towards it, a warrior’s attention aimed and ready. Too much had happened along the voyage to this place for any Blood Angel to take the endeavour lightly.

In the Red Tear’s shadow, ships with histories no less storied than the primarch’s vessel moved in steady progression, waiting for the first hint of their shadowy foe. The Covenant of Baal and the Encarnadine, the Nine Crusaders and the Blood’s Son, Victus and Scarlet Liberty, Requiem Axona and Ignis; these and many more drew their guns and charged their void shields.

Lead elements of the fleet – patrols of Ravens sent out in probing sorties – came back with gun-camera picts of what surrounded Signus Prime.

The two moons of the third planet were gone. They had not been destroyed by any conventional means, for that would have left debris to settle into an accretion ring and the spillage of radiation and particle traces marking their points of obliteration. The satellites had simply been stolen from their orbits, lost to the unknown; and with them had gone shipyards, barracks and manufactories for the Signus Cluster’s defence forces.

The fate of the defence forces themselves was much clearer. The shells of their fleet were adrift across the orbit of the planet in a thick, ragged shroud. A cowl of dense wreckage from countless obliterated vessels and orbital complexes hung close to the edge of the atmospheric interface – military and civilian ships alike, everything from suborbital wing-shuttles never designed to venture beyond the stratosphere to interstellar juggernaut haulers, all had been killed close to the capital world and left where they fell. Plasma fires still burned in the cores of some wrecks, leaving streamers of radiation in their wake. Great slicks of debris flowed from the insides of cracked hulls and thickened the stew of fragments.

The dead ships were not just the fallout from the brutal beheading of an entire colony world. They were more than the spilled blood forgotten by a careless killer. They were more than grave markers. The silent ships had been turned into a barbed shoal of debris, which any who approached would be forced to penetrate if they meant to make planetfall. And more than that, they were there as a silent, monumental threat: vessels broken and skinned alive, hung dead in the sky like the bleeding trophies of a wild killer.

The horror might have been enough to chill the heart of even the most experienced of space’s cold warriors, but this exhibition was not the end of the bleak, voiceless message. For where there were thousands of murdered ships there were ten thousand times that number of human dead drifting bloated and frozen in the vacuum.

The pilots of the interceptors brought the images to the Red Tear’s command deck, and the primarch looked upon them without speaking, sorrow and anger robbing him of words. Others who saw the same picts were similarly silenced, unable to frame the grotesque reality of what lay before them.

Each body had been brutalised in a way that went beyond understanding, their bones subsumed from the meat of them, stolen away like the vanished moons by the same unknowable process that had claimed lives on Holst and elsewhere. What remained in the airless void over Signus Prime had become clay for a psychotic sculptor. Millions of corpses floated in fusions of flesh, twisted into repulsive monuments, glossy with coatings of frozen blood. They had been compacted into dolmens and rings, carved like soapstone. Some of the shapes had rigid angles and toothed spires made of cut limbs; others were flattened into discs and wicked curves, meat-red and shimmering. The octal sign that had burned across Phorus was also repeated, over and over in that grisly tableau, like an offering that only something with eyes as large as mountains would be able to see.

The vision came again, and as before in the meditation cell, Kano had no warning.

The deck cracked beneath his feet and he stumbled. Beneath the metal floor plates, a depthless black abyss revealed itself, sucking the broken fragments of the world around him into its endless, inescapable gravity.

Kano’s hands came to his face and he blotted out the image of it. Before, there had been nothing to stop the onslaught of the dream-sight, but this time he knew what to expect; he had the smallest measure of armour against it, and the former psyker marshalled his defences.

Inside his thoughts, he threw up defensive walls of anti-power, drawing himself in, mentally planting his feet in the sand as a storm of sensation whirled up to engulf him.

Kano heard it coming, the shrieking phantom rising up from the gloomy deeps, faster than death, sharper than night. A gale of reeking, charnel-house stench blasting the apparition towards him on its ghostly, dead wings.

–a warrior, ironclad and daubed head-to-toe in crimson vitae, the glow of dead singularities and murdered stars enveloping him, nauseating light leaking from the joints and cracks in his sundered armour, ashen tresses stark about his howling, unknowable face, the skeletal wings of a carrion eater reaching from his back–

‘No…’ He put out his hand, his eyes shut tightly, denying it.

–soaked to the core with polluted blood–

The vision seemed to echo in the halls of his thoughts, as if he were witnessing it through the sight of another.

–a screaming, red-stained angel–

Kano was caught in a ripple of experience, a sense-memory radiating out across his mind. It was a precursor event; instinctively, he knew this with absolute clarity.

–impossible to escape–

Like ocean surf draining away before the impact of a tidal wave, the vision-echo was the warning of worse to come. It would be more powerful than before, he could almost taste it in the soiled air. The ex-Librarian had the sudden and total certainty of looking into the muzzle of the biggest gun in creation.

–fear and hate and darker things–

With monumental effort, Kano sealed his mind shut against the images and opened his eyes, finding himself in the corridor once more, the decks around him untouched.

A legionary of the 170th in duty robes was at his side, reaching out a hand to him, concern writ large across his face. ‘Brother? Are you ailing?’

Kano shoved him away, regaining his balance. He took a step, faltered, finding his direction. ‘The Angel,’ he muttered, shaking his head as if that would rid it of the remnants of the psi-effect. ‘This cannot be ignored… I must warn the Angel…’

He rocked off his stance and broke into a sprint towards the nearest conveyor. The primarch’s sanctorum was far distant across the span of the Red Tear, but he could reach it if he was quick–

But then the crew-serfs all around him began to scream, and he knew he was too late.

The Blood Angels fleet was ready for every form of attack save one.

With the planet Signus Prime at its core, a cry that went beyond voice and sound exploded out into space towards the assembled vessels of the IX Legion. A vast hurricane of psychic shock, created from the bottled murder-essence of millions of surrendered souls, resonated out from the shrouded world. It swept across the crimson starships in a shuddering, immaterial wave. Void shields could not halt the ethereal power of it, and the mere matter of adamantium hulls and plasteel bulkheads were penetrated as easily as if they had been made of paper.

The terrifying distillation of pain and anguish had been weaponised by architects of grief who knew no other joy than to conduct agony like music. They had sculpted it with tools made of delusion and paranoia, edited away any lasting traces of hope and goodness that might have clung to the edges of such dark and punishing emotions. The sheer, monstrous force of the shockwave battered at every living mind aboard the ships of the Blood Angels flotilla.

The transhumans of the Legiones Astartes met it full and with their courage unencumbered. It bombarded them, took some to places of great pain and suffering; but they were the Emperor’s Angels and despite its raw power, no weapon of such indiscriminate attack could defeat them. The sons of Sanguinius weathered the blow and turned it.

It was only later that the Blood Angels would come to understand that they had never been the intended targets. For this was not a force aimed at them, but a weapon of denial seeking the weakest links in their chain of war.

Every human – every human but one – in the flotilla was united for a fleeting moment in a single, soul-tearing scream that burned through into their minds and beat them down. It killed many on point of contact, those who were utterly unready for such crushing, black despair. Some would live a little longer before their hearts gave out, some would walk into airlocks or use knives and lasguns upon themselves or others.

The screaming went on and on, and none would be unmarked by it.

TWELVE

Revealed
Hell-Ships
Collision Course

Some might say that the most potent torment a man could experience would be to see into the beating, bloody heart of his darkest inner soul, to look upon it with perfect and unfiltered clarity. To know the rage, the hate and evil that he was capable of.

That then, but in a torrent a million times more powerful, a flood of black emotion from not one but countless dead and corrupted souls, sacrificed for just such a moment.

This was the force that swept into the psyche of the men and women who stood to serve the great fleet of the Blood Angels. Every heart and mind among them was tested to the limit, and many would break under the strain. The strongest would survive, scarred forever, tormented to their graves. The weakest became unhinged, seeing horrors wherever they turned, their minds fracturing like brittle glass.

The opening shot had been fired.

Captain Raldoron sprinted down the golden gallery towards the Sanctorum Angelus, his mien set and hard. The screams and the shrieks echoed off the walls of the ornate passageway, twisting his perception so that the statuary and great artworks took on a warped, threatening aspect.

He made a snarling noise under his breath and beat back the sensation, blotting it out. Raldoron had been trained to weather attacks of insidious nature, but the common crew of the Red Tear had no such defence. He saw naval officers he knew well reduced to bawling children, some clawing red gashes over their faces, others struck dumb and staring into space, trapped in the prison of their own mind. It tore at him that he could do nothing for them, but this was battle now and they were casualties. His first deed was to see ship and primarch secure; once that was done, he could enact his vengeance upon the enemy who had struck at them.

He was almost at the atrium when gunfire turned his attention. Raldoron skidded to a halt at the gallery’s balustrade and saw on the deck beneath him a mass of crewmen in a huge, furious mob. Dead bodies were strewn about, and to the far side of the compartment a handful of Blood Angels stood in a line, weapons in their hands. A figure in black armour, a crozius held out before him, was shouting orders.

‘You will stand down!’ Warden Annellus bellowed the command to the crowd. ‘Return to your posts or you will be shot!’

‘Belay that!’ Raldoron vaulted the railing and dropped the distance to the deck below, landing with a grunt. He turned on Annellus with cold anger. ‘In Baal’s name, what are you doing?’

‘This rabble attacked us.’ The Warden nodded to one of the battle-brothers, who bore fresh cuts upon his bare face, one eye a ragged, ruined pit. ‘They have turned on their masters!’

‘They are not rabble,’ Raldoron snarled. ‘They are our crew!’

The legionaries had bolters raised; they could make short work of the serfs with only a moment’s burst of fire.

Raldoron shoved Annellus aside and walked into the middle of the tormented crewmen. They parted around him, pushed back as if by his force of will.

‘Look to me,’ he shouted, glaring at them. ‘Look to me!’ The captain reached out and grabbed the nearest man, a gunnery lieutenant whose lips moved in a constant litany of mad panic.

‘The blood and the blood and the blood and the blood and the blood–’

‘You will silence your fears.’ Raldoron’s words were adamantium-hard. ‘All of you. The terror that attacks you now will gain victory if you submit. Do not! Remember who you are! Remember your oath to the Angel and the Emperor!’

The lieutenant trembled in his grip. He looked up at Raldoron with imploring eyes. ‘It’s in my head, lord. I have to make it stop. The blood…’ Crimson matted the thin beard around his chin, streaming from his eyes, his ears, his nostrils.

‘By blood we are bonded and by blood we serve,’ said the captain, invoking the vow of duty. The words seemed to calm the mob’s anger. ‘We are the Legion, all of us.’ He shot an acid look towards the Warden. ‘Never forget that. Do not falter. Take strength from your comrades and brothers.’

The other legionaries had already lowered their weapons. Raldoron let the man go and turned away. ‘What can we do?’ came the call, from among the crowd. ‘If the foe can cut into our minds, what can we do?’

‘Defy them,’ Raldoron said, without turning. ‘Until they die of it. Or we do.’

He reached the primarch’s sanctum without further interruption, and as he strode across the atrium before the great brass and gold doors, Raldoron felt the subtle shift in the deck through the ceramite soles of his boots. The Red Tear was turning, and steeply enough that the massive flagship’s gravity plates were labouring to compensate.

As alarms keened all around, he wondered what was out there, forcing the vessel to change course. The next attack was imminent, he knew it in his marrow. His only uncertainty was from where to expect it. Raldoron’s hand fell to the hilt of the power sword sheathed at his waist. Part of him welcomed the joining of battle, while another dreaded it.

‘First Captain.’ At the doors, the Sanguinary Guard Sergeant Zuriel led a barricade group at the ready, the blade of his glaive encarmine shining. ‘The vox-net has collapsed. We’re getting intermittent signals from other commanders, other ships. There’s no pattern to the disruption, only random blackouts and the voices…’

Raldoron had suffered the same loss of signal, but nothing else. ‘What voices?’

Zuriel gestured to the captain’s vox-bead. ‘Listen. Hear for yourself.’

Raldoron tabbed his vox-relay. For a moment, there was only the bray of static; but then, faintly, he picked out words, a sing-song pattern of them in an unsettling language.

Nearby, Mendrion frowned. ‘I heard those voices before, but it seemed to fade from my memory…’

Raldoron snorted, cutting the signal dead. ‘To hell with these shadow games.’

Zuriel opened the door and allowed him entry. ‘Indeed, brother-captain.’

Raldoron entered the primarch’s sanctorum and gave a bow that earned him a brief gesture of acknowledgement from the Angel. His master was before a fizzing, barely stable hololith in the middle of the chamber, the display showing Admiral DuCade’s head and shoulders. The shipmistress looked worn and old, the bright spark of vitality that the captain had always associated with her doused by pain and distress. Like the rest of the human crew, she would not have been immune to the psychic shriek from Signus Prime. He thought of the maddened lieutenant that Annellus had been ready to kill; that DuCade had weathered the same mind-terrors and still maintained her command spoke greatly to her fortitude.

‘The disorder is widespread,’ she was saying. ‘Deck officers are reporting in sporadically, but there have already been deaths and some… vandalism. I believe, for now, that the flagship is in no immediate danger from within.’ The admiral paused, as if she was finding it difficult to breathe. Over the open channel from the bridge far above, Raldoron could hear other voices, many tight with panic, as DuCade’s officers tried to maintain control.

Sanguinius’s expression was grave. ‘The other ships?’

At these words, Raldoron looked out past the holographic image and to the great armourglass portal that showed the void beyond. He picked out fleet cruisers, some of them moving in chaotic patterns, a few of them apparently damaged.

‘The few intelligible contacts we have made report similar incidents,’ said the woman. ‘Crew-serfs acting erratically. Violence and panic.’

‘Contain it,’ said the Angel. ‘If my sons are forced to fight their own crews for control of their starships, we will do the bidding of our enemy for them.’

‘I will–’ began DuCade, her voice rising an octave, becoming a shrill, drawn-out squeal. The hololith juddered and burst into a cloud of photons, but the high-pitched whine did not cease. The projector matrix in the deck overloaded with a screeching howl and exploded in a flare of smoke and burned metal.

Raldoron drew his pistol, fearing that this was the precursor to another psychic attack, and nearby the Guard Commander Azkaellon raised his arm, the Angelus bolter on his vambrace locking.

The other members of the Sanguinary Guard in the chamber pulled their blades. ‘That noise!’ cried Halkryn. ‘Where is it coming from?’

The primarch turned, glaring up at the ceiling, a thunderous cast to his face as his eyes darted back and forth in search of something only he could see. ‘No…’ he whispered.

There were a handful of servitors in the chamber, helots for minor duties and administrator functions. As one, they stumbled from their sleep alcoves and joined in the keening chorus, puking blood and processor fluids onto the mosaic floor.

Raldoron watched them die, each falling apart in a pinkish-grey mist like deconstructed puzzles made of meat and brass.

With a ring of crystal on plasteel, Sanguinius drew his battle sword and brought it up into a fighting stance. The two-handed blade was as long as a Space Marine was tall, slender and deadly, forged in red metal with a golden, ruby-studded guard. The weapon hummed, coming to life in the Angel’s hands. His wings turned against his shining armour and the primarch pointed the blade into the air. ‘Show yourself, if you dare!’

The shrill note reached its zenith, a dagger through Raldoron’s ears, but as it died a new affront occurred. The remains of the servitors writhed and conjoined, ropes of entrails and broken limbs groping for one another. The air lensed around the pieces of meat, as reality was turned and split.

The parts assembled a new body. The torso was an androgynous mutation with four arms and quivering, muscular flesh; a head grew into something like that of a great goat, with horns and a sharp, snorting muzzle. The newborn creature flexed and stood tall, looking down on the Blood Angels. It traced claw-fingers over its form, toying with the bloody meat it was made from, and emitted a wet, orgiastic gasp.

‘Sanguinius,’ it said, labouring the name with sibilance. ‘You have no idea how much delight it brings me to finally have you in my domain.’ The amalgam-creature gave a mocking bow and licked its dead-flesh lips. ‘Welcome.’

‘In all the stars, what manner of being are you?’ The primarch’s cold fury became disgust. ‘You have the stench of the warp upon you.’

The being gave a grotesque nod. ‘So true. You have such sight, abhuman. That excites me.’

Raldoron sensed a strange merging of odours in the air: a cloying perfume smothering almost everything, but beneath it the stale reek of sweat and body fluids, the tang of sulphur.

The patchwork monster brought its quartet of hands together, as if in prayer. ‘Consider yourselves flattered by the presence of this proxy, the essence of I, who you shall be allowed to call Kyriss. I am the glimpse at the edge of ecstasy in death, the Perverse and the Charmed, son-daughter of the Master of Pleasure and eager servant of Q’tlahsi’issho’akshami. The void itself sings my praise.’

‘Your titles mean nothing to me,’ Sanguinius replied. ‘What is your form, alien? Name it.’

The creature let its gaze stray, and Raldoron found it looking at him with something like hunger. ‘Alien. So limited a concept. You all know what I am.’ It released a mad giggle. ‘I am one of those. Say it with me. Daemon.’ A length of black tongue followed the word from its lips.

Azkaellon spoke: ‘You stole that designation from the people you murdered. A name from ancient myth and legend.’

For a brief instant, the beast’s play at coquettish civility vanished, replaced by sudden fury. ‘You stole it from us!’ But then it was gone again, and Kyriss bowed low. ‘I greet you, Angels of Blood. I own these worlds, these souls and this kingdom, in the name and the glory of Slaanesh.’ Kyriss cocked its head in a parody of demure coyness. ‘Do you wish to try and take them from me?’

As Raldoron looked on, the anger that had first been present in his primarch seemed to fade away, and an icy calm descended upon the Angel. Sanguinius lowered his sword and rested it point-down towards the deck, his hands knitting across the jewelled hilt. ‘You have committed an act of war against the Imperium of Mankind, and atrocities against her citizens. Know that there can only be retribution for these deeds, not accommodation, not appeasement.’

‘Oh, do tell,’ breathed Kyriss.

‘I will make this offer once. Surrender and give up your claim on the Signus Cluster. Do so now and I promise your end will be swift and merciful.’

The creature’s laughter began high and strident, falling into deep, threatening registers. ‘You have no comprehension of my majesty, vulgar, trivial angel-thing. Nothing so crude can kill such splendour! I am the cardinal of the Cathedral of the Mark, the king-queen of Signus and enemy of all life. These worlds will be monuments to your despair, abhuman. Everything you love will be taken from you and tainted by my kiss.’ It turned towards the viewport. Two hands pointed out, off towards the clouded mass of Signus Prime; the other pair of limbs beckoned them. ‘Come,’ said Kyriss. ‘You will find me there. I await your pleasure.’

As the last word faded, the broken pieces of metal and meat came apart into an ugly pile, the animating power of the monstrous proxy abruptly withdrawn.

Sanguinius stared silently at the remains for a long moment, before turning to his men. ‘Take us in,’ he said.

‘My lord, the fleet is still in some disarray–’ began Azkaellon.

‘As the enemy planned.’ The primarch’s eyes were dark and hard, like shards of flint. ‘But we have walked the road they laid for us long enough. We will not suffer this creature to live, my sons. Carry out my command.’

The second phase of the attack lurked in plain sight, concealed in the shoal of wreckage that girdled Signus Prime in a thick band of broken metal.

Deformed, mutant vessels broke free of the planet’s gravity and surged forwards to assault the Blood Angels fleet, their engines vomiting smoky plumes of fusion fire. There could be no classification for these craft, no formal way to measure them against conventional laws of void-combat. They were hell-ships, and, like the remains of their crews, they had been twisted and remade into something repugnant and unthinkable. At first dormant, dead to all sensors, now they came alive with ghostly energy, motivated by powers that came from nothingness.

Some were two-headed freaks, merged plasteel and bronze that resembled the aftermath of a catastrophic warp departure. Others had been cut open, hull plates flensed away to reveal the skeletal ribbing beneath, mirroring an anatomical etching in the textbook of some medicae. Fires burned within the predatory wrecks, flaming orbs at their serried bows glaring like eyes into the dark. These ships did not so much fly through space as they did swim in it, hulls undulating. They moved like great animals, forms directed by the maleficent intelligences that inhabited the shells of what had once been the pride of the Signusi defence force.

Others opened great sails made of tanned human skin, unfurling on telescoping armatures that resembled horn and ivory. The massive spinnakers cut the light with their size, and impossibly, they filled as if a phantom wind was pressing at them. Guns grew from every surface of the hell-ships, releasing cascades of purple energy and scatter-shot discharges of spiked explosive spheres the size of Stormbirds.

Some of the craft were little more than gigantic missiles, empty hulks thrown into the path of the Imperial warships without guidance or heed to where they might go. One such ship-carcass ploughed through a flight of Raven interceptors and found the cruiser Numitor before it could effect an escape turn. The two craft embraced in a blaze of flame and fell out of the formation amid a cloud of ashen fragments.

The echo of the malaise that had swept across the Blood Angels crews had not yet died, and the ships of Sanguinius’s fleet were struggling to stand firm against the enemy attack – but to delay would mean death, attrition and destruction. They were off their guard, robbed of balance, but there was no choice other than to fight.

Victus and the Covenant of Baal unleashed salvoes of lance-fire that raked over a juggernaut powering towards the flank of the Ignis. The enemy craft – a once-pristine system carrier that now appeared infected by a plague of rust – was obliterated, coming apart in great chunks of rotten metal. Like wormwood struck by a hammer, the hulk exploded, pieces of it flashing to atoms as they collided with the void shields of the crimson-hulled warships.

Nearby, the Chalice and the Hermia were racing to fill the gap left ahead of the flagship, surging through the confusion of their own lines to face contact with the enemy. Bloated frigates, their panels distended from within, powered towards them leaving black pennants of toxic gases trailing behind. The star of eight was emblazoned upon their hulls, daubed in bloody colour over desecrated emblems that had once been proud exemplars of Signus’s fealty to Terra.

The Blood Angels ships fired torpedo barrages and pulsing blasts from their mega-lasers, stripping all protection from the attackers, but still the enemy came on. For a moment it seemed as if the lead frigate was going to ram the Chalice, but then the fouled hull broke open and revealed what was within.

Inside each of the transformed ships was a mass of ropey, muscular flesh, sheathed in glistening chitin. Like a cancer, these monstrosities had grown to fill the interiors of the craft and now they burst free. Limbs that shimmered in the light of the stars of the cluster unfolded, eight spider-legs each half a kilometre in length. The cancer-creatures inside the hulls writhed, wearing the husks of the vessels like a crustacean might carry a seashell across its back.

Ignoring zero-range fire from the Chalice’s point defence guns, two of the spider-craft leapt at the heavy cruiser and began to chew upon it, huge mandibles wet with fluid flashing in the dark. Streams of oxygen spurted into the vacuum as the Chalice began to lose her atmosphere through countless breaches. Similar violence was taking place all along the line of engagement, as every ship in the fleet found an enemy ready for it.

Ahead, the Red Tear opened her gun ports and let her cannons give their all, the brilliant spears of particle beams and the streamers of missile salvoes striking hard across the line of the hell-ship advance. The Blood’s Son and the Encarnadine followed suit, releasing everything in their arsenal, cutting into the enemy and the vast debris zone at their backs. Perfect, pearl-like globes of nuclear fire bloomed in the night, destroying what should have already been long dead.

Kreed licked the blood from the tips of his fingers, savouring it. The fluid that bled from his eyes was dark and oily, and it carried with it a pungent odour that drew his mind back to distant Colchis. It smells like birth, he told himself. Rebirth. The herald of the new.

Silent torrents of light cast sweeping shadows across his command throne as the skies around the Dark Page burned with weapons discharges. Kreed rose and looked down.

His warship’s bridge was a bubble of mirrored armourglass, rust-tinted and opaque from without, but within alike to standing in the cradle of the void. Massive blast shutters normally kept the great pod safe and armoured, but the acolyte had ordered them all lowered so that he might watch the moment of betrayal unfold.

Kreed watched the spider-ships feasting on the Chalice and his smile grew wide. Soon, the Blood Angels would count the crew of that craft as the fortunate ones, just like the dead aboard the Helios, the Paleknight and all the other offerings.

The bleeding had not stopped; it began in the wake of the manifestation before Horus in the sacellum, and now it was slow and constant. The Word Bearer felt no pain or discomfort from it. He had come to realise that it was a sign upon him, a mark of advantage that had been left upon his flesh. He did not allow himself to dwell upon the Warmaster’s words, nor the conflict that came from them. Horus had ordered him to defy the plan laid by Erebus, and Kreed searched within himself to find guilt at that; he found none. Erebus, so arrogant, so cocksure, he and the half-breed Kor Phaeron granting power like gifts to their favourites… They were not here. They did not see opportunity. Kreed had the chance now to advance beyond them, perhaps to earn the right to stand at Lorgar’s side in their stead.

If we succeed. When we succeed.

The great winged daemon-beast had let him live, and the crimson streaks were a reminder of that beneficence. Once again, Kreed dared to wonder about the future. I am marked. That makes it a certainty. He smiled to himself. This war is already won.

‘Repeated messages from the Blood Angels command ship.’ Kreed turned to face the warrior who had made the report. His name was Felleye; the hulking reaver was one of Captain Harox’s hand-picked personal guard.

‘They beg for our help,’ said the acolyte. He looked down. Beneath his boots, through the armourglass deck he saw the great sculpted shape of the Red Tear, lighting up the void with her weapons-fire and beam discharges.

Kreed felt a strange kind of calm at being adrift in the midst of such a violent confrontation. The Dark Page had yet to fire a shot in anger or receive even the slightest attention from the enemy.

‘The woman DuCade demands we apply our guns to control of this flotilla sector,’ Felleye continued.

‘Let her feast on static.’

Harox came to his commander’s side. ‘The ships of this element are following established combat protocol,’ said the captain. He pointed out the battle cruisers moving sluggishly into a protective phalanx around Sanguinius’s vessel.

‘As I knew they would.’ Kreed nodded to himself. ‘And little thought given to the dispensation of their cousins in the Seventeenth Legion.’ He watched the vessels move in their slow ballet. ‘Trust is such a foolish thing.’

‘Incoming approach, port quarter high,’ called Felleye. ‘Masters, it appears to be the shell of a civilian bulk tanker. It will pass directly through our fire corridor on a collision course with the Red Tear. We are the only vessel in position to fend off the assault.’

Kreed looked up and his genhanced sight picked the attacker from the blackness beyond it. A cylinder wreathed in foetid smoke, exhaust fires propelling it at increasing velocity, the flanks of the craft were covered in vile texts and uncanny symbols. The acolyte’s hand went to his forearm, where his tattooed flesh bore many of the same sigils.

He closed his eyes. If he listened carefully, opened his soul to it, Kreed could almost hear the cackling, joyful hate radiating from the incoming ship. The creatures on board were eager to taste the blood of angels.

‘Orders?’ said Harox.

‘It is time, at last,’ said Kreed, opening his eyes. ‘The perfect moment of treachery has shown itself.’

Kreed returned to his command throne and savoured the act, wishing he could look upon the faces of those he had betrayed.

At first Meros thought his eyes were deceiving him. His hand pressed to the armoured glass of the viewport, he peered out at the battle and his breath caught in his throat as a flash of silent colour grew from the stern of the Word Bearers starship. For a moment, the Blood Angel believed the Dark Page had suffered a catastrophic internal explosion; but then the flames resolved into engine thrust discharges and he knew the cruiser had abandoned them.

It was enough to stop him dead, even in the midst of the unfolding battle. What reason could Lorgar’s sons have to flee?

‘Meros!’ A familiar voice called to him and he wheeled to find Kano approaching at a run. ‘Quickly! They’re coming!’

‘Who?’ His battle-brother looked fatigued, clutching a bolter to his chest. ‘Kano, what do you mean?’

‘Look.’ The other legionary pointed an armour-clad finger out into the dark. Meros followed his direction and saw the blunt bludgeon-ship bearing down on the Red Tear. ‘Do you see?’

Meros looked back at his comrade. ‘Do you?’ He tapped a finger to his brow.

Kano’s expression soured. ‘That does not matter now.’

The Apothecary had more questions, but they were drowned out by the impact of the tanker as it crashed through the outer hull below them.

The ship had once been a transport for volatile chemical fuels, a slow barge that took long voyages back and forth from Signus Prime to the White River and back again. Its endless circuits had been broken when the warp-spawn came to the cluster. The crew were made meat-proxy for minor beasts of the immaterium, sheathes of flesh that they could wear in order to walk in the realm of the ephemerals. In turn, they gathered more from the Signusi, who swore their allegiance in hopes that it would save them. It did, but not in the way they wanted.

The mark of Slaanesh covered every surface of the craft, the unholy words ribbing the prow of the craft making it a benediction when the time came to bring death to the Emperor’s Angels.

Point of contact was portside, a machine space where pneumatic rails connected to the forward weapon bays ferried torpedoes from the main ammunition store. The beasts peeled open the walls of the tanker and swarmed out into the Red Tear.

The Blood Angels were waiting for them, but not in great number.

Meros saw a festering hell beneath him. Trapped between the outer skin of the flagship and the first wall of the inner hulls, the compartment had never been designed with movement of humans in mind. Below him was a plasteel pit lined with broken cables and torn runners, sparks from the control mechanisms of auto-carriages illuminating the places where the muzzle flash of bolter-fire and the beam of his shoulder lamp did not go. The prow of the captured tanker had jammed itself in place, further passage arrested by the presence of thick armour plating, but that had not stopped its horrific crew from disembarking.

Things that resembled the soft, lamprey-like dwellers of deep oceans chittered and slid over the gridded catwalks and up the impact-bent walls. They moved in leaping bounds, nests of whipping tendrils snapping out, catching a hold and hauling themselves bodily upwards. Others – gelid creatures of snapping crab-claws with spiny bodies that resembled great skinned canines – leapt incredible distances on powerful back-legs, hooting and braying.

Battle-brothers had already been taken by these things. Some, killed by the impact itself, others captured by razor-tipped tentacles or cut open with talons. Meros was intent on making the intruders pay. He fired single shots from his bolt pistol, pacing each round. The Apothecary tried to gauge the location of nerve clusters or braincases, just as he had been taught to by his mentors, but there was no uniformity or logic to the shape and form of these monsters. Only the application of brutal overkill seemed to end them. At his side, Kano was lost in the fight, coldly executing everything that moved.With him were a dozen more warriors who had come to the attack point with the same intent – to defend the Red Tear until death.

The creatures sang as they came at the legionaries, ugly melodies full of ululating shrieks and gasps that rang across the bulkheads. There seemed to be no end to the deluge of the things, more and more of them spewing from the tanker’s hull in a glossy, writhing swarm. The tide was rising, and without reinforcements they would soon be overwhelmed.

The breech on Meros’s pistol snapped open. ‘Reloading!’ he shouted, ejecting the clip with speed born of focus and constant practice.

Kano did not have time to speak; instead he pivoted and aimed as one of the horrors took the Apothecary’s moment of pause to throw itself at the gantry where they stood.

Kano’s shots hit home, but the creature was a big one and though the mass-reactive rounds blew divots of purple flesh from its flanks, it did not die. It ignored Meros and attacked his battle-brother, knocking buckled pipes out of the way to get at him. Kano went down with a crash and was lost to sight under the bulk of the monster. Meros drew his chainaxe and laid into its dripping flanks.

Fanged mouths opened all along the side of the creature, snapping at him. With fresh loads in his pistol, Meros fed a bolt shell to each one, earning him several screeches of pain. The glutinous mass shrank back and tumbled away, revealing Kano in a crumpled heap.

‘Brother-medicae!’ A shout from above drew Meros’s gaze. Overhead, grouped upon a length of rail, was a line of legionaries in steel-grey armour, lending their guns to the fight. He saw Captain Redknife stab a finger towards Kano. ‘Get him out of there. Pull back now!’

Meros shot a crab-form scuttling up behind him and pulled Kano to his feet. Blood oozed from cracks in his battle-brother’s armour; he was pale, as if the air had been sucked from his lungs. Together they stumbled up the incline towards the rest of the hastily-assembled defenders.

The invaders were at their heels, giggling at the sight of this apparent retreat. The hull space below was now a frothing mass, boiling with uncountable numbers of the enemy.

‘They mustn’t get past us,’ Meros shouted. ‘They’ll get into the decks and we’ll never find them all!’

‘They won’t,’ Redknife called back. ‘Valdin found something to discourage them.’

It was then the Apothecary saw that one of the Space Wolves was manhandling a conical object easily the height and mass of a human, dragging it off one of the munitions carts stalled by the impact. ‘Mag-locks,’ shouted the captain. ‘Brace yourselves!’

It was a seeker-head, the weapon payload for an anti-interceptor missile.

With a grunt of effort, Valdin threw the warhead over his shoulder and it tumbled down into the enemy throng. Meros turned away, bringing up his hands to shield his face as it hit the tanker’s bow and detonated.

In such a confined space, the explosion blew out a great plate of the Red Tear’s outer hull – not enough to puncture the inner armour, but enough to unseat the invaders’ ship and expose the fleshy monstrosities to the harsh caress of space.

Air and debris fled into the vacuum. Secured in place on the adamantium decks by the magnetic plates in his boots, Meros held Kano upright as the enemy were blown out into nothingness, their scream-songs abruptly silenced.

Athene DuCade allowed her hands to smother her face, burying the heels of her palms in the hollows of her eyes. The warmth of her flesh felt disconnected from the moment, as if she were experiencing it second-hand. The admiral was aware of blood rumbling in her ears, thudding with each beat of her heart.

All her life she had known control: of others, of her ship, of herself. Now that seemed like a distant dream. Athene had tried so intensely to hold on, but now she knew her strength was waning. Soon it would be gone.

She heard her aide speaking. ‘They are inside the ship!’ His voice was tight with hysteria. ‘Those monsters have penetrated the hull, infected us…’ He took a shuddering breath.

DuCade’s hands dropped away. ‘Major, calm yourself.’ She tried to say the words with authority, but they came out cracked and broken. The hard light of the Red Tear’s bridge prickled her eyes and she winced in spite of herself.

He turned on her, and he was florid and filmed with sweat. ‘Don’t you understand?’ The officer bellowed the question at her, cutting through the chatter, drawing the attention of the other crewmen. ‘Wake up! Look around. The Legion has led us to our deaths. This is a trap, a pit to hell!’

His face was so very red. DuCade’s stomach tightened in revulsion as she realised she could see the pulse of blood though the capillaries across his skin. How was that possible? A tiny voice in her head asked the question, but there was no answer.

The major rocked forwards and grabbed the arms of her command chair, shouting at the top of his voice. ‘Get us out of here!’ He had become quite unhinged, she saw that now. ‘For Terra’s sake, we must run! Answer me, you cold-hearted bitch!’

In the rhythm of the crimson across his face she saw black too, ink-dark and poisonous. The major realised with a sudden start that it was he who was infected, with madness, with fear, with whatever disease that crippling scream had left behind.

‘Kyriss.’

‘What did you say?’ she snapped.

DuCade bolted to her feet and the major staggered backwards. The name crackled through her like electricity. Her sight cleared for a moment.

‘I… I never said…’ The major’s face was just a mask of meat hanging over something horrible that had usurped his form.

She understood now. One of the laspistols from her cross-belt was suddenly in her hand, and then she was shooting him, one bright bolt of coherent light after another, putting him down on the deck, the sizzling stink of burned flesh rising. His corpse buzzed and writhed, becoming blurry.

When DuCade looked around, the sickness in her gut twisted tighter still. All the other faces of the crew were upon her – and all of them were marked with the same writhing crimson-black. Were they laughing? She could hear them laughing.

They wanted to kill her as much as the thing inside the major had. She pulled the other laspistol and opened fire with both pistols at once. The admiral blasted them as they ran, streaks of fire crossing the bridge chamber, cutting into tainted bodies or destroying control panels.

She killed the helmsman last, as he tried to hold up clawed hands to rake at her face or perhaps to surrender. It didn’t matter. All of them had the black blood in their flesh and now it pooled on the deck around her, gathering at the hem of her cloak, soaking the grey ermine.

But the greatest horror was reserved for when Athene DuCade caught sight of her own face, reflected in the navi-monitor. Her old, warrior’s face, red with exertion. Red shading to black, melting and distending on her skull.

She was not immune. The infection was in her too. Of course it was. The madness had turned into a virus, a lethal contagion. The others had fallen to it, and soon so would she.

The admiral wept bitter tears. She loved this ship so much, like a daughter. She loved her primarch and his Legion, but she had brought them to this. Now the Red Tear was riddled with corruption and it was her fault. It was all her fault.

DuCade’s brittle self-control shattered. ‘I have to atone,’ she said aloud, through a sob. ‘This cannot go further. Yes. Yes.’

Sanguinius would understand. She knew that he would. The Angel’s forgiveness was enough.

The admiral entered the new course into the helm, beginning the thruster burn that brought Signus Prime up to rest on the tip of the flagship’s bow. Engines accepted the commands and the great vessel sailed out of position, into the grip of the planet’s gravity well. With her guns, she destroyed the command console so that her deed could not be undone.

The last las-bolt bored into DuCade’s heart, flash-burning a hole through her chest.

THIRTEEN

Falling Tear
Fortress
This is Our Vow

Lit by atomic fires and the blaze of coherent energy, the war in the skies above Signus Prime was a tapestry of violence. Hell-ships reanimated from dead, cold corpse states threw themselves at the Blood Angels warfleet, powered by pillars of flame and other, more ephemeral means.

Many of the turncoat ships still had crews, after a fashion, but they resembled nothing of the loyal men and women who had once filled their ranks. The closest to human were the zealots, the weak of spirit and cowardly of heart who had sold their birthright and loyalty to Bruja’s lie of redemption. Their fear of death had taken them into a servitude that would see them perish a thousand times over.

Then there were the other things, the monsters and the freaks, the meat-borne shades that had used the flesh of the dead as a man would wear an environment suit, so that they could walk from the warp into the realm of the material. These creatures, clad in garb of boneless human meat, played and crowed under the name of daemon. They had grown tired of culling the weak Signusi colonists, and now they wanted new prey to bite and claw and slice. After the seduction and murder of a handful of worlds, it was time for them to bathe in blood and hatred.

Together in this blighted place, the children of two dark gods had joined forces for a war unlike any other. Signus Prime was the beachhead, their foothold in the crude reality of matter, and each of them knew that the battle begun this day would be repeated a million times over, on countless other worlds for millennia to come.

Amidst this turmoil, the hail of laser-fire and the screaming, a great winged teardrop cast from adamantium and bronze burned a black path across the planet’s wounded sky.

With nothing to stop its fall, the Red Tear plunged into Signus Prime’s gravity well and kissed the outer atmosphere in a flickering cascade of orange fire. Plasmatic flames licked the ventral hull, wreathing the battle-barge’s slender keel in coruscating bands of electromagnetic discharge. Antennae and thin beam emitters wilted under the steady, increasing heat, curling and melting like fronds of a plant meeting the fury of a forest conflagration. A great, animal moan sounded for kilometres along the length of the massive vessel, the fuselage twisting as stresses it was never meant to experience were placed upon it.

The Red Tear was a mighty craft, built for the punishment of a hundred wars; it was not some delicate solar sailer or gossamer-skinned xenos yacht. Yet, the battle-barge had been forged in vacuum and made for the deeps of interplanetary space. The flagship of the Legion was not a vessel configured to accept the embrace of a world and the touch of an atmosphere across its hull. The primarch’s chariot was made to live and die in the void – but Athene DuCade had changed that destiny with a gunshot.

The Red Tear was falling, shrieking as it cut across the day-night terminator, the curvature of Signus Prime’s horizon slowly rising to gather to it.

Cassiel had to shout to make himself heard over the thunderous rumble sounding down the corridor. ‘Can you do it, or not?’

The deck beneath the sergeant and his men was pitching and rolling. The Techmarine Kaide knelt close to the central hatchway to the bridge, one hand bracing him against the deck and the other buried to the elbow in the open panel near the control mechanism. His eyes were unfocused, an aspect that belied his intense concentration.

‘Can you open it?’ Cassiel asked again, casting a look back at Leyteo. The other Blood Angel hefted a meltagun in his hand, showing he was ready to turn it on the jammed hatch as soon as ordered.

Nearby, Sarga cast a frown and muttered something under his breath about lost causes. Cassiel and his small group of warriors had found themselves in the opportune place to race for the bridge the moment the battle-barge had begun its uncontrolled descent – but now an armoured barrier thick enough to deflect las-cutters lay between them and the command deck. Kaide’s bleak assessment had not been welcomed; even with Leyteo’s melta weapon, it could take hours to burn through the blast hatch.

‘I can open it,’ the Techmarine said, at last. Something inside the panel gave a sparking, fizzing jolt that flooded the corridor with the hot tang of electricity. The hatch grunted and slid back on hydraulic pistons, showing the legionaries the interior of the multi-levelled bridge.

The smell of burned glass and cooked meat assailed them as Cassiel led the way in, Sarga at his side panning left and right with his bolter. Every crew-serf and servitor, every auxiliary and officer, lay dead at their posts or sprawled on the floor. Many had died fleeing, laser burns scorching open their backs with wet pink wounds.

Leyteo grimaced as he followed them in. ‘More insanity. Did they murder each other? For what?’

Cassiel didn’t answer the question, advancing past the command throne to the apex of the bridge. Lying before him on the deck, the shipmistress was a mess of seared skin and the crumpled silks of her elegant cloak.

He looked away and out beyond the grand portal. He saw the arrowhead prow of the Red Tear bathed in fire.

‘Survivor!’ Kaide called out from one of the control alcoves.

The sergeant came closer to find a man slumped in a sticky red puddle. He wore the uniform of a communications officer, second class, and the odour of his blood filled Cassiel’s nostrils. Behind the mask of his battle helmet, the Blood Angel reflexively licked his lips.

‘This one won’t live,’ Kaide said coldly, and the pallor of the vox-officer’s face made it clear the Techmarine was right. ‘Where’s Meros when we need him?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ The sergeant leaned close to the dying crewman. ‘You. Tell me who did this.’

‘The Admiral.’ The word came out in a dry, faint whisper that was almost lost in the constant rumble of the hull. ‘Killed us.’

Cassiel looked back towards the ruined helm controls across the compartment and gave a grave nod. ‘Yes. It looks like she did.’

The officer died without another word and Kaide left him there, rising from a crouch. He surveyed the brutalised control mechanisms with a severe gaze, shaking his head. ‘This was madness. Not a single console remains undamaged.’

‘Can it be repaired?’ asked the sergeant.

‘Aye,’ Kaide replied. ‘But in a span of hours, with a dozen tech-brothers and servitors to the task. This vessel will be spread out over a thousand kilometres of stratosphere long before then.’

‘Are you so quick to discount my ship and her strength?’ The voice brought them all about and then to the bowing of their heads.

The Angel entered the bridge, flanked by two of the Sanguinary Guard and Captain Raldoron. Even in such circumstance, Cassiel’s immediate reaction – and that of all his men – was to kneel and show their master fealty.

However, the primarch eschewed protocol in favour of directness, fixing Kaide with his measuring gaze. ‘Do you know how old this starship is, my son?’

‘I do, Great One,’ said the Techmarine. ‘The Red Tear was part of your father’s grand fleet before the age of the Great Crusade.’

Sanguinius gave a nod. ‘She is the figurehead of our Legion, and her time is not yet at an end.’ His golden armour shimmered as it reflected the distant fires cast across the interior of the bridge, and the Angel picked his way through the debris, moving towards the command throne.

Cassiel saw what could only be grief on the face of his liege lord as the primarch’s gaze passed over the bodies of the dead. The sergeant blinked in shock; the Angel was so far removed from mortals like the crew-serfs, even from the lives led by his gene-forged sons, that Cassiel had always believed he would be above such emotions. Not callous or aloof, but simply…beyond them. To see Sanguinius show even an instant of such regret gave the Blood Angel a new insight into his master’s being. He wondered if he would live long enough to reflect on it.

Raldoron stood with Sarga, peering into a damaged hololith. ‘It’s worse than I thought,’ said the captain. ‘Descent rate is increasing. Void shields are not responding. Several of the auxiliary craft have already made emergency departures, but the landing bays are in flames.’

Azkaellon, the Guard Commander, stepped after the primarch. ‘Lord, I would ask that the order be given to launch saviour pods.’

‘And how many lives would that preserve?’ Sanguinius hesitated over the body of Athene DuCade. ‘The lower decks are still in turmoil. If the escape capsules were launched now, they would be scattered. Some would be trapped in low orbit, others dragged into our wake, still more strewn across whatever lies below the clouds of Signus Prime.’ Kaide nodded silently in agreement with his primarch’s bleak estimation. After a moment, Sanguinius gave a curt shake of the head. ‘No. This is my command. Pass word to all who can hear it. Tell them to make for the core decks, the deepest and most heavily protected compartments.’

The Angel knelt down next to DuCade’s corpse and his wings opened slightly, casting a shadow over the woman. The plasma fires from the imminent re-entry lit his white feathers with flickering streamers of crimson and orange.

Raldoron gave a sharp gesture and Cassiel followed it with a nod; in moments, Kaide, Sarga and Leyteo were repeating the primarch’s commands over the vox-bands and intercom channels.

Cassiel watched Azkaellon as the Angel stood up. ‘This ship will be torn apart,’ insisted the commander. ‘If not by the force of the descent then dashed against the landscape below.’

‘No.’ Sanguinius did not grace his officer with a look. Instead, he walked to the helm console and laid his hand upon a plaque forged from bronze and gold. The panel was bolted to a podium supporting the ship’s etheric compass, and it bore the seal of Terra and the Emperor. The engravings certified the Red Tear’s service to the Imperium and the Legiones Astartes. ‘No, I will not accept that. This vessel has carried my banner through war and peace alike and never faltered. She has served this Legion for centuries. She will not fail us now.’

Then the Angel did something that none of them expected. He closed his eyes and bowed his head, the fires beyond the great portal casting him in the dancing light of an inferno. ‘I salute you,’ he told the ship, meaning every word. ‘And now I ask of you a single boon, old friend. Carry my sons through this trial. Take us to the heart of our enemy.’

The tremble in the deck became a quaking, became a rolling, shifting turn. Cassiel’s gaze was drawn to the hellish light blazing through the bridge deck portals.

Ahead, Signus Prime filled his vision.

The battle-barge dived into the interface zone between space and world, and became a blazing crimson comet. The Red Tear was enveloped in a cowl of raging gas and torn plasma, flames longer than city blocks lapping at the dagger-tip bow and down the boulevards of vox-towers, gun batteries and warkeeps.

Ablative armour across the outer hull was sacrificed in sheaves of glittering fragments, peeled away in fiery embers that broke apart and crumbled into white-hot dust. The insane heat flowed like water, peculiar convection currents washing it over the vertical planes of the flagship’s fuselage. Layers of space-hardened pigment puckered and boiled away, crimson sigils and proud etchings of name and purpose searing into blackened, meaningless streaks. Pennants made of flex-steel evaporated, becoming sketches of themselves, then nothing.

Here and there on the outer surface of the hull there were things that had been deposited by the enemy’s intruder ships to wreak petty havoc on the vessel. These minion-creatures – simple-minded predator things from the warp-deeps brought into this reality – burned and shrivelled in the firestorm. The meat-puppets they were bound to turned to ash and their undying anti-souls shrieked back into the immaterium, banished and gone.

Metal buckled and armourglass bubbles crazed and cracked as the heat grew more intense. The Red Tear was deep in the passing, committed to the full length of the fall. The firestorm of re-entry ripped at the ship in frenzy, peeling back long curls of heat-deformed plasteel like shavings of wood from a carpenter’s plane. Even as the blade-shape of the ship knifed through the outer atmosphere, the fires of the screaming sky gained entry to the inner decks and laid waste. Corridors that ran for kilometres channelled waves of burning atmosphere, pushing a shrieking roar of overpressure out before them. Legionaries and crew-serfs alike perished in the blaze; the latter died immediately, the former suffering a slower end thanks to the aegis of their power armour. Death-black cinders and roiling smoke followed the fires. Secondary explosions blasted craters in the surface of the deck, where volatiles or ammunition stores were touched by super-heated air and excited to combustion. Trains of fire burned all around the warship as its overtaxed systems struggled to lock down compartments and trigger suppression systems.

The Red Tear broke through into the uppermost reaches of Signus Prime’s ionosphere and continued to fall. The flagship’s thrusters were dead, but autonomic systems in the vessel’s gravity control matrices managed a sluggish reaction to the descent. There was no way to stop the battle-barge’s plunge, but every iota of power in the system turned to arresting it as best it could. Great humming arcs of electrostatic energy flashed and snarled, fighting the immutable, inescapable pull of the planet below.

Brief, brilliant aurorae radiated out from the winged metallic shape, forming patterns and colours that no natural event could ever hope to duplicate. Radiation scintillated and faded, unseen and unremarked. The air thickened and grew dense, the silence of space suffocated under a growing, thunderous bellow as the craft’s hypersonic velocity tore open the sky. Unnatural clouds that swirled like muddy water parted in a churning swell as the Red Tear broke into them.

The haze that shrouded the planet clung to the world in a sickly cloak, wreathing it as the stink of death would adhere to the body of a dying man; but the Blood Angels ship was ripping it open, for the brief moment of its passage forcing the cloying yellow mist to branch around it.

Such was the force and speed of the falling craft that in its wake the displaced air created instances of pressure inversion. The clouds rushed in to fill the emptiness and sounded great clarions of thunder, sky-quakes so loud that they carried to the surface far below. Micro storm cells were called into being all around the flagship as it blasted through the cloud deck and across the stratosphere. Here, windborne swarms of bat-winged daemons and other flying horrors spat and yowled as the falling ship blew through their aerial domain, buffeting them with the shock.

The Red Tear’s path across Signus Prime was a burning line in the murky sky, marked by a rain of fragments torn from its hull. Like a behemoth avian of ancient legend, it exploded from the lower reaches of the turbid clouds and blazed over the tall mountain ranges of the planet’s single giant super-continent.

Under a slaughterer’s sky weeping crimson and black, the fire-borne warship made its final descent. The starship’s burning shadow swept across denuded hillsides and over the husks of raped settlements, briefly eclipsing towers of smoke from kilometre-high funeral pyres and hellish monuments erected by fools unaware of what powers they were courting.

The teeth of pinnacle peaks rose up to rake the underside of the vessel as the ground came ever closer. Obsidian mountains slick with the black blood of the earth crowded the ship’s glide path, the tallest of them clipping the great ventral sail extending down from the Red Tear’s underside. Stressed beyond all imaginable tolerances, the adamantium fin cracked along its length and spat flames. The cruiser bays were ripped apart under the trauma of the glancing impact and the sail ripped away. Thousands of tons of plasteel and ceramite became a torrent of burning wreckage, beheading the mountains beneath and laying a slick of debris across an area as large as a city.

With a great and ragged wound bleeding fire across its belly, the flagship dropped towards a swath of long, low prairie that seemed to reach to infinity. Before the invasion came to foul this world, this place had been known as the Heartlands – a landscape of great natural beauty and endless abundance.

There was nothing of that left now, only endless blasted wastes of blood-soaked mud, and the skeletal remains of petrified trees beneath a burning, ashen sky. These were the Plains of the Damned and they embraced the Red Tear’s violent arrival.

The earth shook and cracked as the flagship slammed into the rolling desert. The bow was a sword point and it ripped open the dead ground, forcing hills of polluted mud and broken stone aside. Velocity bled away from the vessel in ripples of heat lightning, searing the landscape and igniting hundreds of fires. Cut in the path of its motion, a valley of blackened, seething sludge extended out behind the Red Tear, a terrible new scar opened across the face of the planet by the violence of the landing.

And with a long, final howl of tortured metal, the flagship of the primarch Sanguinius came to rest in the blasted wilderness. In a cradle of flames and vaporous mist, the vessel groaned as it found balance under its own weight. Scattered out behind it for leagues were pieces of itself, lost in the fall or torn free in the final crash.

Broken, fallen, but undefeated, the Red Tear had defied its enemy and honoured the wishes of the Angel.

Raldoron blinked dust from his eyes and rose to his feet with a snarl, shoving aside a piece of adamantium plating that had crashed to the deck from the ornate ceiling above. All around him, metal moaned and cracked as it settled. The deck was canted at a slight incline, but they appeared to have made planetfall relatively intact. He smiled briefly at the cool estimation of the situation.

He tasted the acrid stink of burned plastic at the back of his throat as he pushed through the debris that had come adrift in their plummeting descent from orbit. Here and there, his battle-brothers were picking themselves up from where they had fallen. The last, shuddering collision with the surface had thrown them from their footing, putting the sons of Baal down among the dead crew.

All but one of them.

The Angel stood before the compass podium, one hand upon the broken device, the other at his side. His wings jutted straight out from his back, furled like white sails. Sanguinius had ridden the ship all the way down, his feet set firmly, and never moved from his place, staring out through the great oval portal across the bridge as though he were daring fate to knock him down.

Fate, it seemed, had not risen to the challenge.

Azkaellon threw the First Captain a glance as he helped Zuriel to his feet; the look was unreadable. He turned away.

The primarch’s hand lifted from the compass and Raldoron saw that the metal there had been deformed by the Angel’s superhuman grip. His master strode towards the oval window. The eye of the bridge was cracked and broken, and a cold wind came stealthily through the gaps in the shattered armourglass, bringing with it the odour of death.

Sanguinius stood at the portal and his lips moved. Raldoron did not catch the words, but he saw the intent in his master’s eyes. A question, he decided. But to whom?

He drew a breath. ‘My lord. We live still.’

‘Indeed.’ The primarch’s manner shifted, and something troubling was pushed away from the surface, to be eclipsed by a strong and confident aspect. ‘It will take more than that to break us, Ral.’ He placed a hand upon the captain’s pauldron. ‘We are angels all; when we descend from the sky, worlds tremble to witness it.’

Azkaellon, however, did not seem so convinced. ‘Master, the battle in orbit rages still. Without the Red Tear’s guns, the fight may not so easily go to our brothers.’

‘This tide will not turn against us,’ Sanguinius insisted. ‘I need not dream that reality to know it. Raise the vessels above, name the Covenant of Baal as the new command ship and tell them to fight on.’ He closed his golden gauntlet into a fist. ‘I want the skies of Signus to be ours.’

‘And this, my lord?’ The Guard Commander gestured out at the desolate lands ranged out around the crash site.

The Angel’s face broke into a smile. ‘This? My son, the winds of war have delivered us to the heart of our enemy. This place will be our beachhead. Our castle keep from which to strike at the fiends who dare oppose the Imperium!’

The hard edge of sheer will in the primarch’s words made new steel grow inside Raldoron’s heart. He felt his hands contract into fists, heard the distant rush of blood in his ears.

‘For days now we have walked with caution across the Signus Cluster, encountering the inexplicable and the monstrous,’ said Sanguinius, and it was as if the words came from Raldoron’s own thoughts. ‘The creatures infesting these worlds have toyed with the Blood Angels for long enough. My patience is at an end.’ He looked down at the fallen crewmen. ‘They struck at the weakest of us, the ones who gave their lives to serve the Legion even though they were not fortunate enough to be remade by my father’s gene-tech. This tactic is a coward’s mark, my sons, and it will not endure.’ The primarch pointed out into the blasted distance. ‘They wait for us in that wilderness. They believe they have cut us deeply, that we are unprepared for whatever foul manner of warfare is ranged against us.’ Then he laughed, strong and powerful and daring. ‘They do not know us.’

Within hours, the Red Tear was no longer a starship. The battle-barge became a fortress, a vast island of burned red metal in the middle of the dead lands. The warriors of the Legion secured the vessel and assessed the damage. What could be used for war was made priority, and what could not be saved was discarded. The survivors of the human crew were few; many had died in the fires and the impact, but more from the ultimate effect of the psychic malaise that had infiltrated their minds. They simply died of fear, hearts seizing in their chests as they crossed into the dark shadow of this forsaken world.

Signus Prime’s sky seemed to hate the very idea of the Blood Angels daring to set foot upon its blighted surface, and a slow, steady rain of burning brimstone fell from the pregnant clouds above. Sulphur stench and hot, searing winds raged across the landscape, carrying needle-sharp grains of abrasive sand.

The word from orbit came sporadically at first. Cruisers and frigates were lost up there, unseen by the eyes of the primarch. The hell-ships were met in force and the line of attack broken; the mutant craft fled back to the safety of the thick debris belt. So began a game of strike and counter-strike, strike and fade, as Imperial ships hunted the turncoat barges in a sky full of razors.

A message from the Ignis told them that the fleet had begun a systematic barrage against the shoal of wreckage, intent on grinding it all into radioactive dust. Nothing would be allowed to escape Signus Prime.

The Angel had smiled coldly; he knew that the creature Kyriss and its minions did not wish to leave this place. Their wish was to have the Legion come to their gates, and now it had been granted. It mattered not if Athene DuCade, in her last panicked moments of life, had been directed by their sinister hand or by the madness that had infected her. The sons of Sanguinius were here, and war like no other would walk with them.

Meros felt an odd, uncomfortable sensation at the back of his skull. A faint loss of balance, although it could never have been that; no, more that now-familiar sense of wrongness that sat poorly with him.

He looked up at the dark, seething clouds and felt it keenly. The planet did not seem correct, and in a manner that was not easy to put into words. It was as if he were looking at the creation of a crazed artist painting in shades of blood and fire across a sallow canvas, an image born of fantasy rather than reality.

The great open arena where he stood only compounded the sense. Gathered in a loose formation, dozens of legionaries in full battle armour cast their faces to the alien sky, looking out across the towers and crenellations of the grounded starship. All of them were armed and ready – no, eager – for combat.

It seemed strange to be here, atop one of the warkeeps along the spine of the Red Tear. Meros had never stood upon the hull of the great ship before, and to do so under this sky instead of the black, airless void of space was stranger still. Already a sprawl of defensive revetments and trenches was being cut around the ship’s girth. Landers had been deployed, along with lines of the ground vehicles that remained operational. The IX Legion was digging in.

A cross-section of officers and battle-brothers from the Three Hundred had gathered, some from contingents already aboard the flagship, others newly arrived aboard Stormbirds and Hawkwings from the fleet elements in orbit.

Meros felt out of place, and for the second time. If anything, this was more extreme than the moment when he had been brought forward in the lithocast chamber to present himself to the captains and commandery. He was truly walking among the most lauded heroes of the Blood Angels, and it was done without circumstance or ceremony. For a moment, the Apothecary dared to think of the officers at his side as no more than fellow warriors, Baalite and Terran-born sons united in their fealty to the Angel and the Emperor… But he could not.

In all his life, Meros had never felt so inconsequential. The armour and weaponry of the warriors around him was magnificent with honour sigils and marques of tribute. Even in their regular battle plate, they walked like champions out of high legend.

The moment passed; it was difficult to maintain the emotion after what he had witnessed, and the grim mood that clouded his thoughts as the black stormheads clouded the sky returned once more. A bleak temper was cast across the face of every Blood Angel assembled. The others had heard only fragments of what had transpired in orbit, and the primarch had gathered them so that they might know the fullness of it.

The Angel wanted his sons to hear him speak, not through the haze of a hololith but in person where they could look upon his face and know it to be true.

Armour-clad, his golden gauntlet cast into amber by the morose light of Signus, his master pointed at the Apothecary. ‘Tell them, Brother Meros,’ he commanded. ‘Tell them what you saw.’

Meros hesitated, and his gaze found Kano, who stood at Captain Raldoron’s side. His friend gave a slight nod, encouraging him to speak; but the reaction was not kind. With care and clarity, he relayed what he had seen from the portal gallery aboard the Red Tear in the moments before the enemy horde had boarded the flagship by brute force. It was not the description of the freakish monstrosities that the legionaries had dispatched which caused disquiet, but the actions of Tanus Kreed and the Dark Page.

‘Did you witness Kreed’s vessel firing on the attackers?’ The question boomed from the vocoder block of Brother Cloten, a Dreadnought warrior from the 88th Company.

‘No,’ Meros told him. ‘I saw only the heels of his ship as he turned and fled.’ It was impossible to keep the bitterness from his voice. ‘The retreat of the Dark Page left the Red Tear vulnerable. There was no mistake about it.’

‘This medicae was not on the vessel,’ Cloten grated. ‘He does not know what took place there!’

‘The cut-flesh speaks the truth.’ Helik Redknife stood, arms folded across his chest. ‘I saw it too. Kreed ran from the field of battle.’ The Space Wolf turned his hard eyes on Azkaellon. ‘Tell me that is not so, Guard Commander.’

Azkaellon’s hard, hawkish face stiffened. ‘It is as Brother Meros says. The Dark Page deserted us in our moment of need. The Encarnadine tracked the ship into the debris zone and lost sight of it. They did not answer any communications. At no point did Kreed’s vessel trade fire with the enemy.’ He frowned. ‘The foe ignored it completely.’

Harsh words were exchanged; many of the assembled warriors found it difficult to accept that a brother Space Marine – even one from another Legion – would so blatantly abandon another.

‘There are dark works at hand here, my sons.’ Sanguinius said, his voice carrying over the keening winds. ‘And they seek to challenge us.’ He spoke to them of the creature that called itself Kyriss, of how it had dared to manifest in the Angel’s sanctum and offer him battle, posturing and goading. ‘We will make war across this tormented world, if we must. And this being I will see to its grave. We must cut off the head of the snake, kill this abomination Kyriss and end its reign.’

‘Still we speak of “abominations”...’

The words were a low growl, and some of the warriors moved aside to see who had spoken. Captain Amit stepped forwards into the middle of the arena to face his primarch. ‘Why do we not call it what it is, my lord? Can we not say the name?’

‘Remember your place, Flesh Tearer,’ warned Azkaellon, but Amit did not acknowledge him.

‘I will say it if you will not,’ he continued, his eyes never leaving those of the Angel. ‘Daemon.’

A ripple of voices moved through the assembled men, and Meros heard the familiar, arch tones of Annellus. ‘That name is for children’s stories, a relic of old mythology and legend banished by the Emperor’s illumination!’

Amit rounded on the Warden, stabbing a finger at him. ‘Do not deny what you saw with your own eyes. These things we are fighting are not the nephilim, they never were! And they are not alien, they are beyond that.’ He looked around, glaring at the others. ‘Any one of you, I defy you to tell me you do not sense it too. Nothing spawned from our universe could encompass these horrors, and we forswear that to our cost!’

‘You have made your point, Amit–’ began Sanguinius.

‘No,’ he snapped, daring to speak over his master. ‘No, my liege. I have not.’

The Sanguinary Guard Mendrion rocked off his stance at the primarch’s side and stepped up to chastise the captain, but Sanguinius’s hand held him in place.

‘I have more to say,’ Amit intoned. ‘And many will not wish to hear it, but in the name of Baal and Terra it must be voiced!’

Meros felt his blood run cold as his primarch’s angelic visage became as hard as carved marble. ‘Speak then, my son.’

Amit nodded, and Meros saw something in the captain that he had never seen before: a moment of doubt, of sorrow. ‘My fears about Signus Prime have been proven right. This place is a trap for our Legion. We have been assailed by lies and shadows since we first set sail.’ He shot a brief look at Kano, then away again. ‘And Kreed’s duplicity in leading us to it can mean only one thing. We have been betrayed.’

‘Kreed might lack courage,’ said Raldoron, breaking his silence. ‘But he has no reason to lead us to ruin.’

‘You limit your thinking, First Captain,’ Amit replied. ‘Tanus Kreed is not the architect of this. He’s a follower, not a leader.’

‘Erebus?’ Azkaellon said the name without thinking.

Amit shook his head. ‘I say look higher still, brothers. Who sent us here?’

‘Choose your next words carefully,’ said the primarch, becoming very still.

The captain gave a grunt of humourless laughter. ‘You know that is not my way, master. I must say what I believe, and I believe the Warmaster sent us here with a lie on his lips, with full knowledge of what he–’

Gold armour flashed like lightning and Meros recoiled at the crackling shock of metal on ceramite, the deep rush of white wings snapping against the air. Suddenly Amit was sprawled on the hull with a new impact crater on his careworn armour and Sanguinius standing over him. The Angel moved so fast, the Apothecary had barely registered the movement, sweeping in and knocking Amit down with the pommel of his great sword. The red blade now came about in the primarch’s hands, and the tip rested upon the captain’s bared throat.

‘You will beg forgiveness for casting such aspersions on my brother Horus,’ he spat, his expression thunderous, ‘and then I will cut this armour from you and mark you for punishment.’ The icy rage with which the threat was delivered robbed Meros of his breath.

‘I-I will not,’ Amit managed, blood flecking his lips, his full measure of courage spent in that moment. ‘The daemons knew we were coming. Who told them?’

‘Kyriss knew your name, lord,’ said Raldoron quietly. ‘He knew us.’

‘My brother would not betray me!’ Sanguinius shouted the denial, and the wind caught the words. ‘A betrayal of one is a betrayal of all, and that would be an affront to our father! Horus is loyal, and Lorgar may be wilful but he would never defy the Emperor. None of us would.’

‘Not so, Great Angel.’ Redknife took a step forwards. ‘Such acts have already been committed.’

The primarch turned, bringing his blade to bear on the Space Wolf. ‘No riddles, son of Fenris.’

Redknife bowed his head. ‘My brothers came here to watch you, my lord. On the Wolf King’s orders, in the Sigillite’s name. To report if you were to stray, as others have strayed.’ He looked up. ‘As the Crimson King has strayed.’

‘Magnus?’ Complex emotions crossed the primarch’s face, and no warrior dared speak. A moment of disappointment flashed in Sanguinius’s eyes. ‘He broke his word.’ It was not a question.

A palpable sense of shock washed over the Blood Angels at the enormity of such a prospect. It seemed impossible to comprehend: the fraternity of the primarchs should have been beyond the base human potency of such sentiments, and yet as Meros listened with his heart thudding in his chest, as he looked upon his master, he knew this was truth unfolding before them.

Like a dagger of ice, an instant of perfect recall cut across the line of his thoughts. It seemed like a lifetime ago, but it had only been weeks since the battles on Nartaba Octus, since the eldar soulseeker-round in his gut that had almost cost the Apothecary his life. Meros’s hand fell to the place where the scar lay across his belly.

In the near-death that had followed, inside a Legion sarcophagus as Meros struggled to survive against the telepathic alien poisons in his blood, a strange and powerful vision had come to him. Another Blood Angel, familiar and yet unknown, fighting at his side.

The phantom’s final word to him had been a name, spoken like a warning. Like a curse of the darkest order.

Horus.

The Apothecary’s reverie shattered like glass and suddenly he returned to the moment. All around him, every warrior was speaking at once, arguing vehemently over the implications of Amit’s suspicions and the bleak possibilities of Redknife’s revelation. He saw Annellus and Cloten in fierce disagreement, Raldoron staring off into the distance as if bereft, Azkaellon denying it over and over, Nakir and Carminus in grave concord.

Then thunder came on an angel’s wings.

Sanguinius, his fangs bared in fury, gave a snarl and rolled his great sword around in an arc of shining metal that hummed through the heavy air. He brought the blade down with ground-shaking force, embedding the tip in the scarred and blackened adamantium of the Red Tear’s hull. The mighty weapon rang like a struck bell, releasing a clear and perfect chime that echoed over the wasteland. He released his hand from the hilt and let it stand there, vibrating with the force of the resonant blow.

‘No,’ he told them, and it was command enough that for one moment Meros felt it might stop the turning of the world beneath their feet. The Angel looked at each one of them in turn, and the noble splendour of his face was changed; the aspect of the seraph became the severe bearing of a warlord. ‘Whatever truth hides from us now, whatever truth has been hidden… It counts for nothing on this day, in this place.’ Sanguinius reached down and unlocked one of his gauntlets, casting the armoured glove to the deck.

Raldoron and Azkaellon were the first to do the same, and within moments every warrior on the deck had followed the Angel’s gesture.

‘Draw your blades,’ he told them, pausing to offer his hand to Amit so the captain could regain his footing.

Meros pulled his chainaxe from the mag-lock on his back, and all around him he saw Blood Angels drawing combat knives or unsheathing battle swords. An orchard of naked steel glittered in the dull sunlight.

Sanguinius gripped the bared edge of his great sword and squeezed. Rich, bright crimson flowed from his palm and down the length of the blade. Meros nodded and gripped the razor-sharp tungsten teeth of his axe. His battle-brothers all drew blood, droplets of red spattering the hull, flowing together and merging. It was the tradition of the chalice, but writ large and held upon the edge of a killing blade.

‘This is our vow,’ said the Angel. ‘We will do what must be done here. Fight and win. That is all that matters.’

For now. Sanguinius did not say the words, but every one of his sons heard them.

FOURTEEN

The Plains of the Damned
To the War
Bloodthirster

Kano walked across the landing bay, picking his footing with care. He edited the pain of each step from his thoughts by the force of his will, taking the white heat and containing it in an impregnable box. The figurative container was brimming, though, and all the actions of the neurochemical glands in his bio-implants and the drug philtres he had been dosed with did not stem the flow of agony. Kano was walking on blades, enduring it with stoic, iron calm.

The fleshy hulk that had attacked him in the hull spaces had come upon him with sheer force of mass, cracking his armour and threatening to flatten him under its weight. His warplate, fractured from head-to-toe and near useless, had been stripped from him and sent to Metriculus’s metalworkers in vain hopes of repair – but the masters of arms had many other tasks to attend to and Kano doubted he would be garbed in anything other than duty robes for the foreseeable future.

The armour had been ruined saving his life, but still it had not been enough to preserve him fully. The crushing bulk of the monster had strangled him like a giant constrictor, breaking many of his bones despite the dense metallic content of his gene-altered skeleton. Minor organs in his torso had burst, requiring surgery to excise and replace. By all rights, the Blood Angel should have been in the deep torpor of a recovery sleep, but he had refused to activate his sus-an membrane. He could not afford to be out of this war.

And yet, as he walked through the masses of warriors preparing to disembark, he knew that he already was.

‘Emperor’s blood!’ He pulled back his hood and turned to find Meros advancing towards him from out of the shadow of a Phobos-class Land Raider. Sergeant Cassiel and the rest of the squad were assembled at the vehicle’s drop-ramp, preparing their weapons for deployment. His friend’s expression was severe. ‘Brother, have you mislaid your senses?’

‘I…’ His words died in his throat. Kano lost all momentum for what he was about to say.

Meros saw it. ‘What?’ he asked. ‘Are you going to lie to me? Tell me you are whole and well and ready to meet the foe?’ The medicae shook his head. ‘Perhaps others might believe you, but I know you best. I saw that fiend’s attack.’

‘I should be dead,’ Kano retorted. ‘I came to thank you for saving my life, but now I don’t think I’ll bother.’

‘We’ve paid and repaid that debt to one another more times than I can count,’ Meros shot back. ‘You’re not coming with us.’ He shook his head.

‘You don’t give me orders–’

‘I do now!’ The medicae almost shouted, drawing the attention of others. ‘I asked the Master Apothecarion about your injuries. He still thinks you’re lying at rest in the infirmary!’

Kano’s gaze dropped to the deck. ‘I can’t stand idle,’ he hissed. ‘Meros, I just can’t. You don’t know what it was like, to be in physical contact with that warp-spawned thing.’ Venom laced every word. ‘I heard its voice. It sang to me.’

Meros’s annoyance faded. ‘I heard nothing… But then, I imagine I do not have the ears with which to listen, yes?’

‘Yes,’ Kano replied. He said nothing for a moment. The roar of Hawkwings landing out in the staging zones beyond the open launch doors echoed all around them. A troop of Terminators was marching into the haze outside, the deck resonating with the collective drumming of their armoured feet.

‘What did it say to you?’ Meros glanced up as a flight of Bullock-pattern jetbikes sped over their heads, the warriors in their saddles matching the crimson of their blunt prows.

In that instant it knew my name. Kano closed his eyes. It told me it was one of the Gida’Ljal, the spawn of the Ruinous Powers. ‘It made promises to me,’ he told his battle-brother. ‘About how we would all die, unless we surrendered.’

The other legionary snorted. ‘That’s all? If I had a single Throne gelt for each time that threat was aired, I could buy my own galaxy.’

‘You don’t understand,’ Kano said, through gritted teeth, trying to find the words to explain and failing. ‘I have to be there. Something is coming and I… We have to be ready to fight it.’

‘We?’ Before Kano could say more, Meros leaned in. ‘Brother, listen to me. I know you won’t take to your rest, not now, not at the very moment this battle truly begins.’ He prodded his friend in the chest. ‘Even if you are not fully mended. That’s why I vouchsafed you to the Master Apothecarion, told him you did not require the sarcophagus and sleep to heal.’

‘Ah.’ Kano gave a weak smile. ‘I had wondered. Thank you.’

Meros’s expression became severe. ‘But if you do something foolish and perish, then don’t damn well thank me for it.’ He prodded him again. ‘You’re not coming with us. You’ll stay here, defend the Red Tear. Say it.’

At length, Kano gave a weary nod. ‘I will.’

Meros did the same and turned back toward the Phobos. He took two steps and paused. ‘You’re right,’ he said without turning. ‘We will need you in this fight. All of you. No matter what the edict says.’

Raldoron was met by the sight of a ring of golden seraphs as he entered the arming hall. Azkaellon and the rest of the Sanguinary Guard stood at equidistant points around the low podium in the middle of the chamber, where the primarch was attended by his servitors. The duty gear the Angel had worn about the ship was being prepared for war, pieces of the ceramite being removed and replaced with battle kit tailor-made for this combat environment. As each element of Sanguinius’s armour was removed and refitted, so Azkaellon and the guards did the same, mirroring their master with solemn care.

The First Captain did not have the luxury of such finely-wrought wargear. His was only a suit of Mark IV plate, and while it was excellently maintained it seemed simplistic compared to that worn by Azkaellon. Although he did possess ornate pauldrons and a winged armet for rare occasions such as blade-moots and exhibition wars, they had not seen use since the passing of the Legion at the Ullanor parade, and he wondered if they ever would again.

The primarch’s armour was brass and gold, it was awe and majesty, cut and beaten into heavy sheets to be draped across a warlord. His angelic wings lay about his powerful shoulders in cowls, the curve of them resembling more the pinions of a gigantic hawk than a seraph. The decorative rings and chains that normally adorned the feathers were gone, leaving them unfettered and ready to spread wide.

Amid the shimmering golden greaves and warplate, ruby discs cut through with carved droplets of black sapphire gave proud sign to the Legion’s chosen sigil. Laurels and engraved battle-markers hung from the Angel’s belt, and he had his carnodon cloak bound to him with ropes of threaded carbon-fibre and gold. Raldoron’s eyes were drawn to the red metal of his master’s great sword, which was presently being cleaned and prepared by a Techmarine.

Sanguinius looked up and beckoned Raldoron with a nod as the last piece of armour snapped into place. ‘You are dismissed,’ he told the others.

Without a word, the Sanguinary Guard led the procession out of the hall, and the captain felt Azkaellon’s questioning gaze on his back.

‘We are ready, then?’ said the Angel.

‘The Legion awaits.’ Raldoron nodded, removing a pict-slate from a pouch on his belt. ‘Captain Redknife requested permission to join us in the fray, and I granted it. The fleet elements in orbit report the situation is stable, but contested. We do not yet have void-superiority, but then neither does the enemy.’ He tapped the display to activate it. ‘Our scouts have reported in. We have located what appears to be a single, massive stronghold several kilometres to the north.’

‘A single stronghold,’ repeated the primarch. ‘Ral, the colonial agency census mentioned six settlements alone in this quadrant.’

‘Indeed. I sent scouts towards those coordinates. All gone, my lord. Not even ruins remaining.’ He offered the slate. ‘This is all that still stands.’

Sanguinius took the device and studied it, paging through the aerial images of the enemy fortress. He raised an eyebrow. ‘Why are these picts so poor?’

‘Interference with the optical systems of the monitor birds we sent to over-fly the target.’ He paused. ‘The drones came back… different. I had them put down and burned.’

‘Difficult to estimate the size,’ said the Angel.

‘The central spire is approximately three kilometres high,’ Raldoron explained. ‘Laser ranging refused to give a consistent estimate. It’s almost as if the building isn’t fully there.’ He had pored over the images himself, until a strange, creeping discomfort in his gut forced him to look away. The stronghold resembled an ancient cathedral of tall, narrow cones and massive chapel arches. Around the central tower there were four smaller spires, then a ring of eight more. The high angle of the pict from the monitor bird showed a clear geometric pattern to the architecture, but the base of the structure was shrouded in a peculiar pale haze that glowed, illuminated by a reddish glow from thousands of misted windows. The construction of the great cathedral was odd, its surface mottled as if it had been built from improperly finished stones.

‘A lance cannon shot from orbit would test the reality of this place without question.’ Sanguinius spoke as if it were to himself.

‘They cannot see it from up there,’ Raldoron told him. ‘I voxed Galan on the Covenant of Baal, asked his gunners to make a sounding for possible bombardment. He returned contact asking me why I wanted a bald patch of desert turned to glass.’

‘It’s here,’ said the primarch, ‘as clear as…’ He stopped, frowning at the blurry images. ‘Well. Perhaps not.’ He handed the slate back. ‘This was never going to be a war about holding high ground and sniping from distance.’ Sanguinius’s face twisted in a sneer. ‘That’s not what we do, not who we are.’

Raldoron swallowed and ventured a thought. ‘The creature Kyriss knows that. If this is a trap as Amit said, that place is a lure. They’re waiting for us in there.’

‘I know,’ said the Angel. ‘But a foe who thinks we do not see that is a foe we will break upon his own hubris.’ He walked to where the sword was resting and picked it up as if it weighed nothing at all. Sanguinius looked at his own reflection in the blade, and Raldoron saw a glimpse of his troubled eyes. ‘Once I step out of this room, we are committed, old friend. We march to battle again.’

‘We’ve done it a hundred times before, master,’ said the captain. ‘It is the crusade.’

‘Is it?’ The Angel turned to face him. ‘Nothing about this mission has been what it purported to be. Our enemy unknown to us until this day, hiding behind a lie. The forces ranged against us, twisting the possible like threads of silk… And then the terrible question Amit brought to voice.’

‘Brother Amit always takes to the extreme,’ offered Raldoron.

‘He does,’ said the primarch, ‘and it is why I keep him close. My savage son is unclouded by concerns that occupy others too greatly. As I and my brothers are shards of my father’s will made manifest, so you as my sons are shards of mine. So Amit says what no other will dare to say.’ It seemed like an age before Sanguinius spoke again, and the weight of his words made Raldoron’s breath catch in his throat. ‘Could my brother have turned his face from my father?’

‘Why would Horus do such a thing?’ The captain blinked. ‘Why would he send us out here, into this madness?’

‘To keep me isolated, so I might not dissuade him from some foolish choice?’ said his master. ‘He has been distant ever since he fell on Davin. Words between us were no longer warm and comradely. I paid it no mind, I thought it a hold-over from his injuries…’ He smiled ruefully. ‘It is a great shock to be brought to the edge of one’s mortality. More so for one such as Horus.’ The smile faded. ‘In my mind, Ral, I play a cruel game, a torment upon myself. I imagine that Amit is right. And I imagine the full scope of what that will mean.’

Raldoron had kept his doubts buried, but now they returned with force and he struggled to accept the dark possibility they represented. If Warmaster Horus had sent the Blood Angels to Signus knowing full well what they were to face, if he had done this with the collusion of Lorgar and his Word Bearers… then two Legions now stood in treachery’s shadow. And perhaps more, he thought. The Thousand Sons, already in rebellion for their own cause? The Dark Angels or the Alpha Legion, both ever seeking their own agendas? Who would side with the Warmaster, if it came down to schism?

He shook off the bleak thoughts before they could gain momentum, and he found the Angel watching him. Sanguinius nodded grimly. ‘Yes. It pulls at one’s reason, doesn’t it? More than the strange phenomena we have encountered in recent days.’ He sighed, and Raldoron saw that fleeting sorrow once more. ‘I have regrets, my son. And I fear that there will not be time enough to undo the fate that awaits us all.’ Then the instant passed, and Sanguinius brandished the great sword. ‘We will fight the battle in front of us and then return to seek out Horus. And I will know the truth in that moment.’ He saluted with the blade. ‘Give the command. We go north. To the war.’

From the flanks of the Red Tear, a rush of windblown sand kicked up into the air as flyers and transports and the boots of thousands of Space Marines moved forth across the blasted landscape of Signus Prime. Predator battle tanks and grav-attack vehicles, speeders and jetbikes formed the tip of the formation, while mobile carriers took heavy support units, Dreadnought talons and Terminator divisions by the hundred. Matching their numbers, Blood Angels squads in serried rows advanced at a swift march. They broke out towards the distant enemy stronghold, the dull sunlight flashing off bared blades and ready bolters.

Assault units buoyed on screaming thunder-jet backpacks ate up the distance in long, loping jumps powered by flashes of yellow fire – and at their lead, the elite companies marshalled around the gold and white of the primarch and his honour guard.

Sanguinius drew his sword, and a full-throated cheer rippled down the length of his army like a great wave breaking across a shore.

The enemy answered by opening the gates to hell.

From the walls of the distant cathedral-city, out of the thickening miasma of the cloying white haze, an army of the unknown advanced across the Plains of the Damned, and the bleached sands turned black in their footprints. A host of battle the like of which had never been fought by humankind revealed itself. It had no aircraft, no armoured vehicles, no machines of war in the way that a warrior of the Legiones Astartes would think of them. Instead, this army had beasts borne out of black legend. Monsters and fiends, for there was no other way to describe them. Manticores and chimerae, hellions and harriers, ogres and trolls, succubae and death’s-heads – hundreds of thousands of dark spirits ripped from countless generations of terrifying legend, the spawn of the fears of the human heart cast from soiled meat and corrupted bone. Living, screaming, baying for the blood of the Blood Angels.

The warp’s great army outnumbered the warriors of the Legion by thousands, even with the representation of battle-brothers from almost every single company of the mighty Three Hundred. At the fore, running wild and mad at the behest of the beasts, there were the last living remnants of the people of Signus. These ones believed that they were, in some arcane manner, blessed. These were men and women who had given themselves fully and completely to the Ruinous Powers, many before the full invasion from the warp had even begun.

Some of them had kept their dark cults secret for generations, hiding in bleak places and smothering the foul light of their beliefs in the face of the secular truth of the Emperor and his Great Crusade. Imagine their joy when the emissary of the night had come to them and told them to prepare for a new rebirth. Their illegal religion was suddenly blazing anew across the planets and moons of the Signus Cluster.

When the strange and the fearful came, they knew what it was, when Bruja came in his carriage of lies, they knew. They were happy.

These were the men and women who had led their unheeding families, their neighbours and comrades like sheep to the factories retooled to be slaughterworks. These were the ones who drank deep of the bile of newborn daemons and willingly accepted the invasion of warp spawn, not just into their universe and their worlds, but into their flesh.

These were the willing vassals of Kyriss’s army, who wanted more than anything to be ridden like mounts, to give themselves to become skin-proxy to undying predators from the immaterium. And with this in mind, and songs made of forbidden words on their lips, they ran forth to choke the guns of the Blood Angels.

The enraptured cultists and turned psyker-slaves had guns and arcane weapons, blades and shatter-bombs and a hundred other ways to kill and maim. A horizontal rain of bolter fire and shrieking plasma met their advance and cut them down, ripping flesh into ribbons or ashing it with greasy chugs of meat-smoke. The warriors of the IX Legion took first blood on Signus Prime, as was their right and their intent. They committed to the fight without hesitation; it had been long enough, and they were hungry for it. Too much skulking in the shadows, too much waiting and watching and weathering attacks from the hidden. The Blood Angels unchained their controlled fury and released it by waves, battling the tide of spite and frenzy.

Ranks of Terminators, combi-bolters howling, cut down the second and third wave of the cultists, thinning their numbers still further. Rocket salvos from hundreds of man-portable launchers briefly darkened the sallow sky as their smoky contrails arced overhead and fell into the enemy deployment. Rippling black spheres of smoke and fire gouged craters in the dead sands and consumed everything within their reach.

Most of the cultists died in thrall to their obscene madness, reduced to dust and flecks of bone; those rare ones that did not perish were all immediately taken by base intelligences from the warp, little-minds no more advanced than animal apex predators found on any one of thousands of colonised worlds. Flexing and stretching in this new existence, they remade the meat they wore into innovative forms that would please their masters and disgust the eyes of men.

The attack elements landed with crashes of ceramite against stone, weapons snarling as they fired into the throng of the foe. The primarch bounded to the top of a low rise, swinging his blade to cut through the neck of a yellow-skinned fiend; the creature resembled some merging of insect, bovine and human, a whipping scorpion’s tail quivering as its fleshy head fell to the dust. Azkaellon and Halkryn were at his sides, their Angelus bolters blazing righteous fire.

Slits opened in the ground nearby, and from beneath the dead sands a buzzing, writhing cloud of shimmering black motes emerged. Swarms of dark battle-flies were vomited into the air, the sound of their myriad beating wings harsh and grating on the ears of the legionaries. They dallied over the dead to feed, then swept down towards the Blood Angels.

Sanguinius did not need to give voice to the command; his warriors had already been made ready for such an attack. The Angel simply pointed, and his legionaries did the rest. Lines of high-pressure flamers and plasma guns turned on the swarms and spouted infernos into the air. With a noise like human screams, the insects perished, and krak grenades were sent into the vents in the earth to seal them shut.

The primarch came about as the sound of snarling, canine fury met him. From the fog of war came beasts that resembled dogs, but ones created by the mind of a tortured madman. These great flesh-hounds were dripping with fluid, as if they had been skinned alive, and spines of sharpened black bone emerged from their torsos. Eyes red and bright as lasers glared out over fanged maws filled with an impossible number of teeth. Each hellhound was the size of an unarmoured legionary, and they threw themselves at the assaulting troopers, biting clean through ceramite or clamping their monstrous jaws about the heads of those too slow to avoid their death-leap.

The Angel speared one, running it through to half the great sword’s length, then bifurcated another before the first had even slid apart from his blade. Azkaellon bolted forwards, and jammed the muzzle of his wrist-gun into the neck of a hellhound that had knocked down a warrior from Lorator Squad. A single bloodshard round beheaded it and the body fell away. Incredibly, it still had animation, walking around in circles. Mendrion came from out of nowhere and stamped it into a red slurry.

The waves of attack gave no quarter, and with each surge new and more unspeakable horrors joined the freakish mass blockading the smoke-shrouded cathedral. Next came flying things, the furies that resembled bats or hawks or some abhorrent, reptilian-like fusion of the two. Sanguinius and those with jump packs across their backs rose into the air to meet the airborne horde, gun and blade flashing as plasteel met flesh over and over. Polluted blood and pieces of meat rained down on the engagement below in cascades of wet gore.

A wing of jetbikes blew through the mass of the aerial fight, their heavy bolters hammering, swiftly followed by a chariot on droning grav-motors. A legionary on the open platform panned a beam cannon across the sky, immolating any of the furies that strayed into his fire zone. Bodies fizzed and melted.

A dozen of the creatures fell on the winged primarch at once, hoping to take him by surprise, but he twisted in the air, his wings extending to their full reach. The pinions slammed into the creatures and knocked them aside; with the sword and the golden fingers of his gauntlet, Sanguinius cleaved bodies and crushed throats. He let gravity take him back to the ground, and there a keening wail broke around him.

The Angel turned to see a lithe figure of what resembled female proportions, taller even than he, moving across the sands in steps that resembled a dance. The body of the woman-form was draped in shimmering silks and her head was lost in the gloom of a hood. Thin, corpse-pale arms emerged from the diaphanous robes, their hands pressed to the hidden face. Sanguinius was briefly reminded of the Acolyte Kreed’s astropath, but he knew without doubt that poor Corocoro Sahzë was long dead. This creation was something far more foul.

It howled like a widow, a poisonous lament-song oozing into his ears. Then, from the depths of the robes, other identical arms emerged – one more, then two, then four. Each fingertip ended in a tiny human eye, each palm had a mouth with which to scream. The widow’s limbs flexed and spun, opening in gestures of embrace. Tears flicked from the spread hands, and where they landed they burned like acid.

Halkryn snarled with pain as a fleck of the fluid caressed his vambrace and sizzled through the gold sheath; another warrior, a son from the 48th, died screaming as the corrosive tears ate away his face and into his skull. Others fell with similar injuries, brought low by the tears of this witch-thing.

‘No,’ spat Sanguinius, and vaulted forwards, his mighty blade turning in a wheel of red. Lightning from distant guns flashed off his armour as he closed the distance with the widow. It screamed from its cowled face and biting mouths, fingers growing pearlescent talons with which to slash and slice. The Angel cut away the flesh-hounds that gathered in packs to bar his approach, even as the screaming creature danced and writhed across the sands, trying to stay beyond his reach.

Then he was upon the widow, and the red blade rolled in his hands, becoming a rising and falling arc of shimmering plasteel. The Angel severed the claws in one great sweep, six stumps spurting oily matter; the hands fell to the dust and skittered away like panicked spiders. He crushed them beneath his boots as the creature at last showed its face to him. There, beneath the hood, was a skein of pallid flesh covered with human eyes and devoid of all other features.

Sanguinius grabbed a fist of the shining silks as it turned and tried to flee, pulling the widow back off its sinuous legs. He drew his ornate infernus pistol and pressed it to the creature’s neck. ‘Weep no more,’ he said, and executed it with a single shot.

He stepped away from the kill and cast about, finding his Sanguinary Guard close at hand, each engaged in the killing of another such obscenity. Clawed seductress daemonettes and more of the hoofed fiends were coming at their lines, whooping and hollering in unnatural chorus. The lines of battle between the Blood Angels and enemy were mingled now, the clash surging back and forth as the opposing forces battled for supremacy, gaining and losing ground from moment to moment.

The primarch gave a cold smile, feeling the charge of battle-anger ignite deep inside him, sensing the same deadly rage in the hearts of his warriors; the Blood Angels were pressing back the freakish defenders of the great stronghold, breaking their attack with ruthless, unflinching martial prowess. Whatever the origins of these bestial horrors might be, they could die all the same – and the sons of Sanguinius knew how to deal death like no others.

For an instant, his gaze fell again upon the hellish citadel erected on the blighted landscape, and he recalled the words of the creature Kyriss. The Cathedral of the Mark. That had been the name the monster had given to this place, and true to that description there was a sigil of immense size cut into the towers that showed itself to the Legion. Again, he saw the star of eight as burned into dead Phorus, visible among the wreckage on Scoltrum, etched into the hulls of the hell-ships over Signus Prime, marked on the countless numbers of boneless corpses they had come across since the falling of the veil.

‘The bones…’ A cold, slaughterhouse wind swept over Sanguinius and his wings flexed, rising in the gust. He was aware of Azkaellon and Zuriel coming to his side, their armour flashing.

‘My lord?’

‘The bones,’ he repeated, and now the primarch was sure of what he saw. He nodded towards the arching, rough-hewn towers of the blood-smeared cathedral, a grim understanding settling in his heart. ‘Look, Azkaellon. The mystery of the millions dead is now answered.’

The Guard Commander scowled as he came to the same understanding. ‘I see it, master.’

The Cathedral of the Mark had not been constructed from stones and mortar, nor ferrocrete and plasteel. Every metre of its towers, every span and archway was built out of bleached human bone, cemented with fat and gristle. The skeletons of dead Signusi citizens, drawn from every planet and moon in the cluster, from common child to elder noble, gathered here to become the raw material for this atrocity.

‘What black heart could ever conceive of this?’ Disgust choked Zuriel’s words.

‘You will know,’ vowed the Angel, ‘when I cut it from the chest of our foe.’

They deployed from the Phobos under cover of the Land Raider’s heavy lascannons, the searing white spears of light sizzling through the misted air and into the defences of the enemy.

The daemons. Meros had trouble pushing the name from his thoughts. It had lodged there like a splinter and he could not expunge it.

‘Forward!’ shouted Cassiel, aiming with his plasma gun. ‘Forward for the Ninth and the Legion!’

The rest of the squad echoed the sergeant’s cry and stormed from the shadow of the tank, joining the advance of their company into the fray. Up ahead, Meros caught a glimpse of Captain Furio brandishing his honour-shield and the power sword that was his signature weapon. The Apothecary had his chainaxe revving and ready, his bolt pistol cocked and loaded.

Sarga had his helmet off, his hair loose in a wild mane, and his teeth bared in a snarl. He grinned at his comrade, pulling away as he drew his bolter to his shoulder. Nearby, Leyteo and the Techmarine, Kaide, were doing the same, pacing their first few shots into the enemy line. They were a handful of warriors among many thousands, a single element amid phalanxes of red-armoured legionaries; but still the battle seemed like it belonged to them alone.

Meros joined his brothers, peering through the tele-optics of his helm to track the oncoming rush of a gnarled, horned fiend, its claws snapping and tail whipping angrily about. The target lock seemed to slide off the creature as it moved, unable to gain solid purchase. He grimaced and put a trio of bolt shells into it with dead reckoning, blowing off a limb with a lucky hit.

The beast released a strident, whinnying skirl and beat its hooves towards him, lowering its head and the barbed, dripping stinger on its tail. Clouds of soporific pheromone spray misted the air, jetting from glands on the creature’s back. It moved faster than he expected, butting aside legionaries in the rank ahead of him. Black, pupil-less eyes glared at Meros, and the legionary knew it wanted to kill him.

He kept firing, and suddenly the shouts of his pistol were joined by the voices of a dozen more bolters. Unable to halt its headlong charge, the fiend ran into the kill zone and was blown apart.

Meros threw a glance over his shoulder to see who had aided him and found a skull-mask glaring back. The Warden, Annellus, spared him a nod; standing with the warrior in black were Redknife and his Space Wolves, the muzzles of their guns still smoking.

The captain walked past and gave the dead monster a desultory kick. ‘They die easily enough. Stinks like spoiled meat, though.’ Already, the fiend’s flesh was softening, becoming gooey and molten. A strange, perfumed vapour rose off it, curling away into the air as if something were escaping from the prison of its cooling corpse. The body decayed with sickening rapidity, like all the other enemy dead. Robbed of the grotesque life-energy that animated them, they disintegrated almost immediately. It almost felt like it wasn’t a kill at all.

‘Stay with the advance,’ snapped the Warden, and Meros moved with the group, his battle-brothers cresting a low ridge a short distance ahead.

The shaven-headed Space Wolf, the one with the skin covered in runic tattoos and arcane symbols, shook a knurled staff in his hand and said something in Fenrisian. The words were unclear but the tone revealed enough. A warning, he thought.

Meros followed the skald’s gesture and felt the ground tremble under him. Through the mist, a massive shape easily the girth of a Rhino transport was approaching, lurching from side to side on thick, flexible legs. Light blinked off dirty, blood-smeared brass. It moved fast, advancing by bounds.

The thing resembled a deep ocean cephalopod, but that was only Meros’s mind grasping towards the nearest logical equivalent in his thoughts. Thick rounded body segments slick with mucus protruded at wrong angles through plates of metal strapped about its girth, and there were odd numbers of legs that stamped and cut the ground. Vestigial wings and quivering antennae buzzed at nothing, and its powerful bulk swung this way and that, knocking down warriors with violent flicks of motion. Blood Angels went flying as it ploughed into them. It did not have a head and neck; the amalgam of bilious skin and muscle ended in a stump, and on that wedge of meat there were dozens of lop-sided mouths with dagger teeth and beards of stinger-fronds.

It was suddenly upon them, ploughing through their advance, and Meros leaped out of its way. He fired as he ran, unloading the rest of the shells in his pistol clip into the glutinous flanks of the monster, and when the slide locked back, he made desperate cuts at a flailing tentacle-leg with the braying head of his axe. Oily matter choked the spinning teeth and the limb was cut, dropping to the sands to slither and twitch where it fell.

Meros was aware of one of the Space Wolves nearby, but then another sinuous feeler broke the skin of the creature with a wet pop and lashed out at them. The Apothecary was hit and he saw the world turn around him. He struck the ground and felt gore spray across his face. He scrambled back to his feet, spinning about to see the beast pull the unlucky Space Wolf apart, ripping off a leg and an arm as a callous child might pull the wings from a fly. He shook off the blurring of his thoughts and heard the flat concussion of a bolter firing on full automatic. A few steps away, Sarga shouted in wordless rage as he poured shells into the snapping, hooting mouths of the creature. Great chunks of sizzling, rotten meat blew out of the creature’s torso as the mass-reactive rounds punctured it and exploded inside dense, gelatinous flesh.

But Sarga didn’t see the other leg-snakes swarming up towards him, lost in the flash and fury of the bolter’s shrieking muzzle flare. Meros shouted his name, but it was too late. One tentacle struck like a serpent, coiling about Sarga’s thigh; another, skin at the tip peeling back to reveal a serrated bone arrowhead, came up behind him and plunged down into his neck.

Blood fountained from the wound, from Sarga’s lips, and his body stiffened. The tentacle lashed and spun him about, thrashing inside the cavity of his body before letting him go. Meros’s battle-brother went down on his chest, the sand beneath him quickly becoming rusty mud.

The white light of a lascannon shot came from somewhere else in the Blood Angels attack line and burned a crater in the flanks of the monster. It screamed loud and high, then rolled away, dragging itself back towards its own kind on what limbs it still had. Meros let it go, running to Sarga’s side, turning him over. His comrade’s face was a ruin of cuts, his grinning mouth now a savaged parody of what it had once been.

And yet he still lived, although the span would not be long. Sarga’s eyes flicked to the Apothecary as Meros bent over him. He spoke, and pink spittle frothed from his ragged lips. ‘Brother,’ he managed.

A shadow fell over them, and somehow Meros knew who it would be.

‘His wound is grave,’ said Annellus, with an executioner’s solemnity.

Meros paid no heed to the Warden and bent low over his fallen squadmate, the sounds of close battle fading from his ears. ‘Brother,’ he said, giving voice to the most difficult task of his cadre. ‘Do you desire peace?’

Sarga nodded, and it was an effort. ‘I… will live on,’ he said, the words almost a question.

A slender silver needle – the medicae carnifex – slid soundlessly from Meros’s medicae gauntlet. ‘You will live on,’ he told his brother. The Apothecary placed the point upon Sarga’s flesh where it would make the mercy kill most swiftly, and did the deed cleanly. The legionary died with a low gasp then there was the business of recovery, and Meros set about it with mechanical, careful precision. In moments, he had harvested Sarga’s gene-rich progenoid glands from his corpse and secured them for later return to the home world.

Sarga’s genetic legacy would survive. Still, that was hollow comfort to his comrade, as Meros stood up, locking his sorrow away.

Annellus had watched him through the whole process. ‘The time to mourn our brothers will come later. For now, take solace in the fact that he gave himself in service of the Legion, in the Emperor’s name.’

The colourless platitude ground on Meros’s choler and he turned on the Warden, an angry riposte forming on his lips, but he never uttered it.

A colossal impact sounded across the battleground, as loud as the concussion of a field cannon; something huge had fallen from the sky amidst the deepest concentration of the fighting. Meros looked towards the clash, glimpsing the flicker of angelic wings and golden armour.

Smoke was rising in a thick black pillar, and in the churn of it, the Apothecary saw glimpses of a towering form, of massive dragon wings, barbed black horns and chains of shimmering silver.

Meros broke into a run, sprinting towards the leading edge of the battle line, obeying the raw primal instinct that told him that he and all his brothers would be needed to meet this new foe.

Every warrior on the Red Tear’s battlements bled anger and frustration into the auras of their thoughts to such a degree that Kano could sense it even without trying. He walked stiffly away from the warriors in the hastily-assembled missile pit, trying to put their thoughts out of his mind. Grim-faced, he marched along the northern face of the grounded battle-barge, watching the light of the distant engagement.

Kano knew without looking back that the legionaries at the cannon were brothers of the 221st Company, and they looked upon the duty of guarding the base with the same dislike as he. The warrior also knew that it would take little for him to press deeper, draw their names and memories from their surface thoughts. The skill and power were still inside him, even without the guidance of his psychic hood to harness it. The encounter with the hell-creature, the horror of its mind-touch on his psyche, had reminded him of that.

He hesitated, reaching out an arm to steady himself on an exhaust vane. The optics of his helmet could easily bring the fight to him if he wished to use them, but he had no need. The telepathic farsight he had once used in the Emperor’s name would do far better, it would place him there in the thick while his physical form remained here.

Kano had that power, and more. It seemed foolish to deny it. Foolish–

‘No!’ The denial snapped from his lips and he shook the thought away. Where had this sudden doubt come from? After so many months in obedience to the edict, after swearing to Legion and primarch never again to use his preternatural skills, why now did Kano find his resolve beginning to crumble?

He closed his eyes and withdrew into his own thoughts. It is this place, he told himself. These worlds. They were tainted by forces that hid behind the curtain of the visible. Insidious powers worked upon him, even as he stood here. Perhaps the daemon-thing on the ship had deliberately let him live for that very reason. Perhaps it was the whisper-voice on the vox, forever there even when comm-links were disconnected.

‘I will not give you a foothold,’ he said to the air.

As if in answer, a kind of silence fell about him. Not the death of sound, not so literal – but a sudden tranquillity in his thoughts, a stillness that he had not known before.

‘My lord?’ A woman’s voice. ‘You are Brother Kano?’

He turned to find a slight, pale female with henna-red hair and a fearful look upon her face. Standing behind her was a loose group of humans, clad in cast-off crewman’s clothes and other scraps.

‘You shouldn’t be out here,’ he said immediately. ‘It isn’t safe.’

‘It’s not safe anywhere!’ spat a gruff, thuggish man. Kano eyed him and tried to gain a read, but he felt nothing. It was like losing a sense, but not so shocking or painful, only peaceful.

‘I am Tillyan Niobe and we are the survivors from Scoltrum. Brother Meros spoke of you,’ the woman went on. ‘He told me you would keep us safe.’

It is her. Kano’s eyes narrowed. The silent aura was centred upon Niobe, as if she were the eye of an inverse storm, and suddenly it was clear to him. He could read nothing of her, only a psychic void that drew in the telepathic hush like a black hole trapped starlight.

‘Tillyan,’ he said. ‘Do you know this word? Pariah?’

Her brow furrowed. Was she about to lie? It was difficult to be certain. ‘No, lord. I don’t understand–’

‘I do,’ he replied. ‘Do you know why you survived while all others did not?’

She blinked. ‘The daemons did not see us.’

He shook his head. ‘They did not see you.’

Sanguinius beheld a beast.

Eldritch ebon smoke coiled around a muscled torso of angry red flesh, the twitching chest and flexing arms barely contained by coils of brass links and battered bronze armour. Wicked black horns rose from an ever-snarling face that was the very expression of feral hatred, bared fangs yellow and dripping open to the air. The arrival had come like a comet, riding a plume of ash from the ruined sky above, and yet the primarch instinctively sensed that it was a creature of the underworld rather than the heavens. He had seen the old books of lore that filled the secret libraries of his father’s palace; he knew the myths of brutes and devils from the superstitious past of humankind. The humanoid that rose up before him was the dread of those long-dead men, more real and more terrible than they could ever have imagined.

It spoke, leering at the Angel. ‘Have you enjoyed the match so far, golden one?’ The voice was like bubbling magma. ‘So many pieces spent and yet so far to go before we reach the endgame.’ It cast a sly look at the dead ranged all around them, the bodies of legionary, cultist and monster alike. ‘But then, we both adore the taste of blood, do we not?’

‘You speak as if you know me,’ growled the primarch. ‘But I see only a monster to be killed.’

‘Recognise me, then, Sanguinius of Baal.’ It laughed. ‘I am Ka’Bandha, Bloodthirster and general of Khorne, blessed is his hate.’ The creature gave a mocking bow. ‘And we are brothers.’

Meros emptied his pistol into a pack of screeching furies and reloaded, vaulting impact craters in the blood-soaked sand as he closed on the core of the battle. He skidded down an incline and staggered to a halt. A cluster of warriors stood with weapons ready, many of them legionaries of Raldoron’s First Company. He saw the captain and the gold-armoured Sanguinary Guard, packs of Terminators from Squads Saevin and Mecallus, and before them the crimson form of Venerable Leonatus, banners snapping from the Dreadnought’s adamantium flanks.

All of them were waiting, and across the span of the battle line the Apothecary saw the enemy array in similar pause. Packs of black-furred dogs and the lizard-wolf hellhounds he had already encountered panted and pawed at the mud, alongside crested humanoids with horned skulls and rusted swords. The ravagers grunted and salivated, kneading the grips of their blades in anticipation of their master’s command.

Their master. It shocked Meros to look upon the hellish figure, this Bloodthirster. He heard it speak, felt the tremor in the air at the beating of the dark wings across its back. For a moment, it seemed as if a nightmarish mirror had been held before the Angel, and this black reflection exposed as the polar opposite to all that was noble and good in him.

‘Why do you fight us?’ it asked, cocking its head, looking at the casualties of war. ‘We are alike. We each know the joy of bloodshed. The sweet taste of the kill.’ The creature took a step forwards, brandishing its weapons – a lengthy whip of coiled brass and an axe that seemed fashioned from the jawbone of a leviathan. ‘Khorne is power beyond measuring. Chaos is the end-state of all existence. You resist and merely prolong the inevitable.’ The stone-grind of the voice set the Blood Angel’s teeth on edge, as if he could hear it through the resonance in his bones. ‘Even your Emperor-Father knows this. It is why he hides from us. It is why he is afraid.’

Meros saw the lightning-flash of anger in the primarch’s eyes, the barb striking home; but then Sanguinius smiled. ‘Get out of my way, animal, or I will cut you down,’ he told the beast. ‘I will deal only with your master, the one called Kyriss.’

The stygian smoke wreathing the daemon rippled with sudden anger. ‘That sense-whore is not my master,’ it raged. ‘I answer only to Khorne! I am the warlord of this place!’

‘You are nothing to me,’ said the Angel, and he attacked.

Star-forged metal struck iron-shod bone with a thunderous crack. Sword and axe crossed one another, throwing out fans of sparks. The daemon was fast, quicker than Sanguinius expected, twisting the weapon and reversing the swing. The axe slashed low, cutting through the ground towards his legs.

The Angel vaulted backwards into the air and spread his wings, sails of white feathers crackling as he spun about his axis, dancing out of range of the blow. He turned the red blade in his grip, and with martial grace traced the tip across the beast’s howling face. It cut deep.

The primarch landed solidly, but gave Ka’Bandha no time to recover. He intended to keep his promise. The Angel bolted forwards, but the daemon was ready for him. The brassy whip shrieked, tearing through the air towards his torso. Sanguinius’s wings snapped close to his shoulders and he ducked low, the barbed lashes passing over his head. Still moving, still leading with his sword, he jabbed wide, forcing the bestial warlord into defence.

Ka’Bandha roared and refused to sway, instead bringing the axe up to parry each probing attack, giving the Angel no point of entry past his guard. They were in the heart of the melee now, the battle around them screaming full-throated as lesser daemons – the harriers, devil-dogs and ravagers – fought legionaries, Dreadnoughts and Terminators.

Sanguinius’s innate agility gave him an edge against the Bloodthirster’s raw brutal power, but they were well matched and by turns each scored small, significant wounds upon the other. Feathers caught by the snap of the axe fell away from the Angel’s wings as they circled and charged one another.

With a thunderous bellow, Ka’Bandha reeled back and threw out a blow with his whip, the fanged tips cracking as they arced towards the primarch’s face. Sanguinius pivoted, faster than thought, and caught the barbs in his free hand. The lash writhed as if it were a living thing, coiling around his wrist, cracking the ceramite sheath of his gauntlet.

He gave a violent tug and pulled the daemon off balance, leading a hammer-blow punch with the pommel of his blade that shattered tusks and drew torrents of Ka’Bandha’s black blood.

The beast stumbled backwards, at first hissing, then laughing. ‘You fight well,’ it said, spitting out broken teeth. ‘No ephemeral has ever cut me before. But I cannot be bested. Why do you try? Join us instead! You are a creature of blood as much as I am… You already walk the scarlet path, little angel, we both know it. Come witness Khorne’s full glory, embrace what lies within you. You could be so exalted, a champion.’

Sanguinius sneered. ‘First the other one, now you. Are all your kind so in love with the sounds of your own voice?’ He slashed at the creature, knocking it back, drawing an angry yowl.

‘A curse on you, then!’ spat the daemonic warlord. ‘If you refuse my offer, then know this: I will destroy all that you hold dear and plague your sons for as long as your Legion exists!’

‘That is no threat,’ said the primarch. ‘My sons will always be ready to kill your kind, until the death of the last star in the heavens!’

Ka’Bandha gave a wordless shout of anger, shouldering aside a stalled Rhino, flipping the armoured transport onto its roof. He exploded towards the Angel, howling like a banshee.

A figure in golden armour with wings of silver flashed at the edge of the primarch’s vision, and to his horror he saw the Rhino come down on Brother Lohgos, crushing him into the ground and killing him instantly. Sanguinius shouted in fury, feeling a palpable jolt of phantom pain as his trusted honour guard died.

He felt the death as though it were a piece of his soul cut away and burned like paper; he felt every death. The shock of it, distant or close, weak or strong, but always there. Each time a son of Sanguinius fell, it was like a cut upon his flesh, a feather torn from his wings.

Did the others feel the losses of their sons so keenly? Did Dorn or Vulkan? Magnus or Perturabo?

Horus?

Ka’Bandha came at him, arms wide, intent to flatten him into the dust. The Angel closed the gate on all other thoughts and threw himself into the air, letting his wings unfurl. He easily avoided the daemon-lord’s wild assault, but only for a moment. The beast had wings of its own, and they opened in kind, beating a clarion as black smoke swirled around them.

It came up after him, and they collided, brass and bronze clashing with gold and ceramite. Sanguinius raked his weapon across the creature’s chest, cutting deeply. He hacked at Ka’Bandha’s wrist-guard, forcing the daemon to lose its grip on the bone-axe.

They twisted in mid-flight, raining blows upon one another, each punch landing with enough kinetic force to send out thunder-cracks of displaced air. Sanguinius felt armour that had weathered a thousand wars fracture and split beneath the deadly impacts of the daemon warlord’s strikes. Ka’Bandha’s foetid maw opened wide and snapped at his face, hellish eyes bereft of all but fury and bloodlust boring into him.

The combatants were spinning back towards the ground now, falling uncontrolled towards the raging battle below. Gravity had them in its grasp, and even the Angel’s mighty wings could not arrest the plunge.

Instead, he gave in to it. With a growl of effort, Sanguinius pulled on the chains about Ka’Bandha’s thick throat and closed the distance between them. Before the daemon could react, he had buried the full length of his sword in its chest.

With strength borne of pain, the creature swatted him away and they parted company a split-second before striking the ground.

It was the Angel who stood first. Bloody and panting, he rose and drew up his sword, even as Ka’Bandha writhed in the mud, barking out sounds of frenzied agony.

He advanced, raising the red blade to find the killing blow.

‘Wait,’ Ka’Bandha’s clawed hand lifted, but the primarch did not halt. ‘Before you strike, know this.’ The daemon pulled itself to a kneeling position, clutching at the ruined meat of its torso. ‘We will never lie to you, little angel. That is not the way of Khorne. We are the truth of blood, and that truth is, Horus has betrayed you!’

And for one, fractional moment, a greater pain than any other touched the heart of Sanguinius. His sword dipped, his vision clouded. ‘No,’ he insisted. ‘No!’

It was enough; Ka’Bandha moved like lightning, the barbs of his whip coming from out of nowhere. Striking like vipers, the lashes cracked against the primarch’s legs with monstrous force and crushed them, knocking him to the ground. The Angel’s cry of agony echoed across the battlefield.

The daemon’s laughter smothered the sound. ‘You defied me, and now I will give you a wound that will forever fester,’ he vowed. Bolter fire from squads of Blood Angels coming to their master’s aid whined off his brass armour, but he paid no heed to them.

Sanguinius fought against titanic waves of agony, grasping for his fallen sword. The beast had turned his kinship with Horus against him; his uncertainty forged the moment of doubt, the careless instant that allowed Ka’Bandha to strike him down. ‘Try if you will!’ he spat.

The daemon’s face twisted in amusement. ‘You misunderstand,’ it told him, gathering up its fallen axe. A baleful light, a glowing crimson mist, formed around the cutting edge. ‘I know how to cut you deeper than any blow ever would.’

There were hundreds of legionaries storming across the mud, righteous anger propelling them forwards, burning with the need to avenge this attack against their master. Sanguinius felt the emotion coming from them in waves. He saw their faces, heard their names ring in his ears. At the lead, steadfast Nakir, his captain of the bold 24th Company; and with him Gravato and Madidus, Perada and Ferveus and Eremin and Carrick and countless more, each of whom he knew like a son.

‘No!’ He tried to warn them off, his wounded legs resisting him as he attempted to stand, but Ka’Bandha was already running into them, conjuring a red fire from the air, a haze that burned like pure fury.

The daemon’s axe rose; and when it fell, a new crimson sun came to life in the middle of the battleground. A ragefire broke, and in the halls of his mind, a father heard five hundred of his sons perish at once.

Then darkness claimed the Angel, the backlash of psychic shock spiralling after him into the abyss of his soul.

‘This will not end well,’ said Captain Thoros. The words were almost a whisper, more the escape of an ill-concealed thought than an actual utterance.

Raldoron glanced at his pale-skinned companion and halted in the middle of the rough, black-walled lava tunnel. ‘Brother?’ he prompted.

Thoros hesitated and his sallow cheeks took on a flicker of colour as he realised his error. ‘Forgive me, First Captain. I spoke out of turn.’

‘Speak your mind if you will,’ Raldoron insisted.

The other officer shook his head. ‘Not here.’ He glanced around the volcanic passageway. ‘Not now.’

Raldoron wavered on the cusp of making it an order, but Thoros beat him to it. ‘The transports need to be prepared for the Angel’s departure,’ he said. ‘I’ll set to the task.’ Before he could say more, Thoros set off down a branching passageway, heading towards the landing quadrant that had been cut into the volcanic ash fields beyond the cinder cone that rose above them.

The First Captain frowned, and walked on. He passed servitors and warriors from other Legions, all of them engaged in the matters of withdrawal from the surface of Nikaea. None of them had reason to remain now.

The function of this place was at an end, and Raldoron wondered what would happen to it after they were gone. The gargantuan volcano had been tamed by the power and technology of Imperial might, the living rock and roiling magma cut back and dammed so that the Emperor and his sons could come into the heart of this place and walk the spaces within without threat of destruction. There was something bluntly symbolic about it, a deliberate and engineered statement to all who had come here. No matter how powerful, unknowable and furious the elements of nature might seem, the Imperium could tame them at a whim.

But was that hubris? Once the legionaries and their servants were gone, the field generators and gravity-walls would be deactivated and Nikaea’s burning mountain would assert its strength once more. The rocky chambers cut by melta-beam into domicile, anteroom and amphitheatre would be engulfed by lava, reclaimed by the fires. It would be as if no one had ever set foot here.

But even if Nikaea remained untouched, the shockwave of what had happened here would change everything else. It was not an exaggeration, Raldoron reflected, to suggest that the words spoken on this day would affect every other world in the Imperium.

At first, Raldoron had been honoured to accept the duty of accompanying his primarch to the Emperor’s gathering; Azkaellon had, predictably, not seen the sense of it, but the Angel knew it would mean more to arrive among his great brothers not just with the golden seraphs of his Sanguinary Guard, but among the host of his most elite warriors. Raldoron’s pride swelled; the chance to represent his Legion and his company in the presence of several primarchs and the Emperor himself… Many Blood Angels went for centuries without ever having such an opportunity.

He felt differently now. The glory of the moment was tarnished by a bleak cloud of ill-mood that permeated through every chamber, repeated in the eyes of every face he saw. Raldoron had hoped Nikaea would be a place of concord and unity, as the Emperor wished. Instead, he felt the sword point of division had been laid here. Legionaries were guarded now, more so than before, even within his own Legion, as Thoros’s example clearly showed.

In the aftermath, the first vessel to leave was the Photep, the warship that belonged to the primarch of the Thousand Sons. By unspoken rule, the protocol was that it should have been the Emperor’s conveyance, but the Imperator Somnium still lingered in high orbit. No one spoke against Magnus the Red as he swept from the amphitheatre, his mien as crimson as his name. The First Captain remembered the moment clearly. His gaze had turned to his primarch, and Raldoron recalled the brief sorrow he saw in Sanguinius’s eyes.

Raldoron had seen the Angel show that face before. On Melchior, when confronted by Warmaster Horus; and in his sanctum aboard the Red Tear, on the day he had confided a great secret to a handful of his chosen sons.

Magnus was gone, and vanished in his wake was the gift that he had first brought to the Legiones Astartes. It was the Crimson King, in partnership with the Angel and the Khan, who had originally gathered to bring the ideal of the Librarius to the Legions. Magnus, Sanguinius and Jaghatai argued for – and won – a place for psychics within the Legions. The Librarians made the suspect powers of witchery into weapons of war… and for a time that had been enough.

Many, who were not yet willing to accept the use of shackled psykers as Navigators and astropaths, took discomfort at the idea of psychic warriors. Some Legions eschewed the principle in its totality, others bordered on open hostility to the concept. In the end, it did not matter. What had been seen as a boon was gradually recast as a weakness, a threat, a vector through which the vagaries of the warp might unbalance a Legion.

They brought Magnus the Red to Nikaea to challenge him for his reckless exploration of the depthless halls of the immaterium; they spoke of secrets not meant to be known, of vile sorcery and paths to ruination taken by avaricious and unwary minds. In the end, it had been less for the questioning and more as a trial of the Crimson King’s intentions.

Magnus was gone, and so were the Librarians. Raldoron heard the words of the Emperor’s decree with his own ears. ‘It is my will that no Legion will maintain a Librarius department. All its warriors and instructors must be returned to the battle companies and never again employ any psychic powers.’ With that edict given voice, the demand could not be un-made. It was done.

Thoros was right. The day had not gone smoothly, and these events would not end well. Even a blind man could have reckoned the resistance of the Thousand Sons to the orders from Magnus’s father, and while it was anathema for Captain Raldoron to even consider defiance of an Imperial edict, he knew that others would not be so circumspect.

And what of my master? He asked himself the question as he passed through a fork in the tunnel and approached the chamber that had been set aside for use by the IX Legion. What are the Angel’s thoughts on the Emperor’s choice?

The warriors at the great copper doors saluted the First Captain and gave him entrance. Inside, he did not find answers, only more questions.

‘Is it true?’ Captain Amit turned towards him, pushing through the half-dozen servitors in the process of packing up the primarch’s travelling gear. ‘Tell me that it isn’t true, Raldoron.’

The other officer scowled. ‘The command is to be obeyed,’ he snapped. ‘Had you been up there, you would have heard the Emperor say as much himself.’

‘But I was not,’ Amit replied. ‘I was commanded to stand sentinel at this chamber. And perhaps with good purpose. At first I thought it was because I am not so elegant in my dress uniform as Thoros, but I wonder now if it was to quiet my tongue!’

‘You think too much of yourself, brother.’ Raldoron’s irritation came to the surface and he ran a hand through the stubble of hair on his head. He found a wine jug and goblets that had not yet been stowed for transit, and helped himself to a generous measure. ‘No one dares raise his voice in the Emperor’s presence.’

‘That is it, then?’ Amit demanded. ‘We go with the Angel back to our ships and then to the crusade at hand, as if it is of no matter?’ He snatched the jug from Raldoron and took some wine for himself. ‘And what will we say to our battle-brothers when we pass word of this to them? Magnus has looked upon books he should not have read, so now our Librarians must sacrifice themselves? I have two psykers in my company, legionaries I have fought alongside, who I trust! What becomes of them now?’

‘You exaggerate.’

‘Do I?’ Amit prodded him in the chest. ‘I have no doubt our lord will welcome his warriors into the fold anew, without their hoods or with them. But what of the others? Dorn, for example? Have the Imperial Fists ever failed to take a command to the bitter end of its definition?’ He shook his head, looking away. ‘Tell me you are not torn by this diktat, brother. Imagine if I came to you and forbade you your sword or bolter, then pressed you to battle nonetheless. What would you do?’

‘I’d fight with what was left to me. Tooth and nail, if need be.’ He put down his goblet. ‘This command is for the good of the Imperium. And your words verge on courting open censure!’

Amit eyed him, ignoring the warning. ‘Lexicanium, Codicier, Epistolary. Those are not just words, Raldoron, ranks and status-markers that can be discarded out of hand and make no difference.’ He pointed at him. ‘The titles you hold – First Captain, Chapter Master, the Blooded… Strip those away and you would still be unchanged. But without the power of the psykers among our weapons of war, the Legiones Astartes leave themselves open to attack. I cannot be the only one who sees this!’

‘The benefits are outweighed by the hazards of opening a mind to the power of the warp,’ Raldoron countered. ‘Such things can drive a man to madness…’ He trailed off, and unbidden, a painful memory pushed to the surface of his thoughts. Suddenly he was recalling Brother Alotros, lost on Melchior, his sense of self shattered. Alotros, and the handful of others who suffered the same fate. Had it been the dark shadow of the warp that had pulled them from their reason, or something deeper?

Amit did not notice his moment of reverie; behind him, the copper doors were swinging open once again. ‘I am not convinced. I struggle to understand why the Emperor has made so arbitrary a decision.’

‘My father has never once been capricious throughout the millennia of his existence.’ Sanguinius entered the chamber, delivering the words evenly and without reproach. Raldoron wondered if he had heard everything that had been said; and then realised that it did not matter. He was the primarch; he would know.

Amit bowed with Raldoron. ‘My lord, I chose my words poorly, that’s not what I meant–’

‘Yes it is,’ said the Angel. There was something darker about his manner, the First Captain noted. Sanguinius always had an air of the numinous, the distant, about him, but here and now he seemed almost distracted. ‘You said exactly what you meant.’

It was a rare moment to see the Flesh Tearer of the Fifth Company silenced like an initiate rebuked by his mentor, but no such admonishment came. Instead, the Angel looked back and forth between the two warriors and considered them.

‘Ral,’ he said to the First Captain. ‘Shall I tell you why I keep Captain Amit close at hand?’

‘I have wondered on occasion, master,’ ventured Raldoron.

‘You,’ Sanguinius told him, ‘you I keep near because you are close to the hearts of my sons as the stone is to the sand. Berus is High Warden because he knows our lore and our Legion’s soul as though it were a living being. Azkaellon leads my Sanguinary Host because he distrusts everything and suspects threat in all places. But Amit…’ He paused. ‘Captain Amit will always speak his mind, never hesitating, even if he knows full well it courts reprimand.’

‘You may be assured of that until my dying day,’ Amit noted.

The Angel nodded once. ‘But never forget. The Emperor’s word is law, and his will be done. The Decree of Nikaea is now Imperial commandment, and we will respect it as such. The Librarians will be re-integrated back into the tactical ranks. They are still legionaries. They will make me proud no matter what weapon they carry into battle.’ He turned to look at Amit and fixed him with a steady, unwavering gaze. ‘And as for whatever challenges fate puts to us after this day… The Blood Angels will deal with them as they come.’

Raldoron accepted this in silence. His doubts, however, did not lie quiet.

FIFTEEN

Temple of Bones
Ignition
An Act of Defiance

Tanus Kreed’s path was tiled with the crowns of a hundred thousand skulls, each one smoothed and polished as if it were a careworn cobblestone on the street of a fringe world. His footfalls gave off a peculiar echo in the halls of the cathedral; the density of the walls gave the sound a brittle timbre.

The noise of the battle outside could barely reach them here. It was far away, a dull rumble like the breakers upon a distant shoreline. Bolt-fire crackling, screams and hell-shrieks resonating – it was a fitting ambience.

He ran the fingers of his gauntlet over the arches and pillars rising high over his head to support the conical roof. Bunches of long femurs surrounded by ribcages rose up in clusters to form the shape of the pillars, each secured in place by the tiny rods of phalanges from children’s hands. Jaws and spines formed porticos, butterfly hips dressed the cloister walls, and the skulls went on forever. Sightless eye sockets glared out at the legionary from above and below, some lit from within by plasmatic torchlight.

The great bone temple was a magnificent creation, he reflected, a devotional work that dwarfed even the greatest monuments the Word Bearers had erected to the Emperor, when they had still called him master.

Kreed coloured at the thought of that. Lorgar and his sons had laboured so long in service to the Urizen’s aloof and uncaring father, and for what? They had believed so strongly in his greatness, courted the truth of his divine nature in all their acts and wars during the Great Crusade. The XVII Legion had put whole worlds to the sword for daring to defy the Emperor, and more had been set to work to build works to glorify him.

Then the betrayal at Khur happened, and all eyes were finally opened. It began with the obliteration of Monarchia, that perfect tribute to the Emperor, and it ended with Monarchia, the wasteland where Lorgar was chastised for his blind love. His zealotry denied, spat upon. Tanus Kreed had been there. He had seen it happen.

In the aftermath, was it so surprising that the Bearers of the Word had realised that there was a greater truth to be borne? A Word not of a mortal pretending and denying his way to godhood, but of real gods, real powers with the touch of ruin and chaos at their fingertips?

‘Acolyte?’ Captain Harox was at his side, waiting. Kreed hadn’t noticed that he had halted. He said nothing and resumed his pace, listening to the echo, feeling the build-up of silent energy in the dank air. This place, this Cathedral of the Mark, was the kind of monument they should have been creating all along. All it took was the greatest betrayal to make that clear.

The lofty, vaulted corridor widened, presently becoming a circular atrium, and two great curtains made of tanned human skin parted to allow Kreed and Harox entry. One wall of the chamber was a circular mandala of thin limb-bones that mimicked the frame of a chapel’s devotional window, and ruddy light leaked though it, staining the yellowed shades of the uneven walls. In the middle of the floor was the entrance to a shaft that ran the height of the tower, the edges of it spiked like a maw. Skeletal arms and hands formed a ring around the sheer edge, and an unsettling azure light emanated from deep below. There was a great blood fane down there, Kreed understood, a sacrificial altar like the ones on Kajor and a dozen other annexed worlds. So much pain and anguish had been poured into it that a hole had opened into the immaterium; the light was a trickle of the non-space of the warp, bleeding into this dimension, and it enticed him to come closer, to reach for it…

Kreed forced himself to look away. More tapestries of agony, flayed skins of different ethnicities sewn together to make artistic forms, hung from the walls. Thick hawsers that resembled tanned leather threaded with horsehair were strung here and there, rising up through the mouths of skulls to suspend a glittering, indistinct shape in the ruddy gloom overhead.

Kreed did not glance up, however. His attention could not be drawn away from the pair of creatures that stood in the middle of the atrium, posturing and spitting at one another like a pair of fighting animals.

It was a shock to see the winged, horned monster fully revealed in all its maleficent glory. What the acolyte had only glimpsed a fraction of in its ghostly manifestation aboard the Dark Page was now here and real and immediate. Everything about it threatened to overwhelm him, from the brimstone stink of its body to the fuliginous aura that moved with its every step. The Bloodthirster saw Kreed and broke off, cocking its head to study him.

‘The messenger,’ sneered Ka’Bandha. ‘I had thought you fled.’

‘No,’ he replied, turning away a moment to wipe an errant trickle of blood from his nostril. The same pain, the same pressure he had felt before, tightened around his thoughts. Kreed resisted, pushed through, refusing to buckle, even as he saw Harox at his side suffering the same and faring little better.

The other creature defied any description. Its soft, pink body resembled human flesh of flawless, silken perfection. Kreed imagined it as the expression of a naked nymph-like form pulled and twisted through a shroud of surreality until its handsome flawlessness had been corrupted by the bloom of new limbs, crustacean claws and a monstrous head that was more horned bovine than humanoid. The rapacious gaze it laid upon him made the warrior feel somehow soiled.

‘See how it shows more bravery than you, scion of Khorne,’ hissed the other daemon. ‘It did not abandon the battle after striking only one blow.’

The bat-winged creature blurred and slapped the goat-face with the back of its clawed hand. ‘Question my resolve again and I will send you back to Slaanesh speared by iron.’ Ka’Bandha prodded its opposite in the chest, making it squeal in pleasure-pain. ‘I’ll hurt you so you won’t enjoy it, Kyriss.’

The other creature picked itself up and gave a demure curtsey. ‘Your promises excite me, Bloodthirster. I only wish we had time to explore them together.’

Ka’Bandha snorted in derision. ‘Messenger. Have you come to watch the endgame? Above, the void-war is fought to a standstill, and down here the tide of battle turns in upon itself.’

‘Sanguinius laughed at your offer of fellowship.’ Kreed dared to say the words, regretting it instantly when Ka’Bandha advanced angrily towards him, seizing upon the implied insult. The acolyte stood his ground. ‘The Warmaster was right. The Angel is too pious, too enraptured by his father-god to ever consider going against him. His loyalty runs deeper than you could ever reach.’

Kyriss gave an arch snort. ‘Anyone can be turned, if one knows where to apply the correct pressure. Even a primarch.’

‘The Angel must fall and never rise,’ intoned Ka’Bandha, repeating the words that Horus had said. ‘Without him, his sons will embrace the scarlet path.’ The daemon laughed, fangs clashing. ‘I have set this in motion. Sanguinius has been struck from the battlefield, and his precious Legion are leaderless and enraged. They will soon give in to their baser instincts. The cry of blood for blood’s sake screams in their ears.’ The creature’s jaws flexed in sympathetic hunger. ‘Only I can understand the glorious release of bloodlust, and only Khorne can share that with them. I smell it on them, messenger. They are so very close.’

Kreed imagined that moment; the Blood Angels stripped of their sanctimonious, arrogant nobility, the armour of their hauteur dirtied by mindless, animal rage. A fitting degradation for the favoured of the Emperor, he thought.

‘They will burn in the fires of their own fury,’ growled Ka’Bandha, relishing the thought of it, ‘and it is then that they will kneel, if only for the taste of more blood.’

‘You make it sound so easy!’ Kyriss snapped. ‘But I should expect nothing less. Your intellect is as brutish as your tactics, Bloodthirster!’ The gangly daemon stalked around the pit mouth on spindly, sculpted legs. ‘It is I who have prepared the way for this, I who marshalled the whispers of the aether and the unlocking of the sorrows of Signus!’ Kreed watched it flex its body in unnatural ways. ‘This flesh I took as my vessel from the Davinite priest was remade just as I remade truth and terror and fear on these worlds.’ Clawed hands clacked angrily together. ‘While you sharpened your blades and looked for things to kill, it was the emissaries of Slaanesh that opened the way. Mine were the cults that arose here, not yours, warrior of Khorne! I planted the seeds for the witch-cabals on Ta-Loc, Kol and a dozen other outposts. I led their psykers to the slaughter. I answered the summons!’ Kyriss stamped its taloned feet on the bones beneath them. ‘Remember that!’

The creature turned on Kreed and pointed a long, thin finger at the Word Bearers. ‘Ka’Bandha is not master of the Signus Cluster, ephemeral, no matter how loud he may beat his sword against his armour. And neither is your mortal Warmaster. I am.’

Kyriss’s arms all rose, as if in supplication, towards the dull light entering the chamber from an orifice at the pinnacle of the conical roof. Kreed’s eyes followed the gesture, compelled by the silent demands of the daemon’s motion.

‘In the name of the Book,’ muttered Harox, ‘what is that?’

Kreed looked up and he beheld the object that he had, until now, been unable to see. It had been cloaked from his vision, he realised, hidden behind some kind of glamour cast by the daemon Kyriss’s presence.

There, suspended by four of the thick skin-and-hair hawsers through pulley-weight mechanisms made of hip-bones and cogs cut from spinal columns, a huge frame of burnished, dirty brass sheathed in misted crystal swayed gently to and fro. Lit by a malignant blaze within, a livid crimson mist alike to the one that had coated Ka’Bandha’s battle-axe frothed within its confines, spilling out in coils of hissing, spitting noise. Now that he could see it, now that Kyriss had revealed it to him, the Word Bearer felt a wave of emotion fall from it, passing through his body like particles of radiation. The mix of potent feelings made him falter, robbing him of his balance for a moment before he could recover.

Kreed shook his head as the sensation passed. In a split-second he had felt a powerful melange of sensations, and the ghost of them echoed in his head like a haunting refrain from a half-heard melody. The timpani of deep, rolling agony; the carillon of heart-lost sorrow; the strident strings of despair; and louder than all, almost drowning them out, the heavy, thunderous brass of a pure and undiluted fury.

‘Behold the ragefire,’ spat Kyriss, leering at the sorcerous device. ‘A magick of the senses, captured and corralled. Weaponised. Did you feel it, ephemeral? Even the sight of it amplifies the baser nature of those so exposed.’ The daemon pointed at Ka’Bandha’s huge axe. ‘The blow struck against the Angel’s warriors was so tainted by this power. The kill-force of their deaths was magnified a thousand-fold… enough to shock their primarch into a fathomless sleep, where he will remain until the Ruinous Powers no longer wish it.’

Ka’Bandha grimaced. ‘Foul psi-magick. It sickens me that I must be in its aura…’

The fragments fell into place in Kreed’s thoughts. ‘Without their master, the Blood Angels will descend deeper into their own fury… And if Sanguinius rises once they have torn through all false veneer of their dignity–’

‘It will break the little angel’s spirit,’ said Kyriss, grinning hatefully.

Meros looked, but he did not see.

It seemed to him that he was in what had once been a corridor aboard the Red Tear, a wide passage the width of a hive-city boulevard. A great swathe of the outer hull was gone, torn away by the battle-barge’s headlong fall from orbit and catastrophic crash landing, and now the corridor had become a gallery open to the elements. Caustic sands and ash blown on Signus Prime’s howling winds pooled in the lee of support stanchions. Fingers of light from the primary star and its companions threw a sombre cast over everything.

Meros was here and he was not here. He felt as if a part of him was still out on the battlefield, rooted in the mud and fire, as if some fragment of his spirit was lodged there while this flesh and bone vessel had been ripped away.

Each time he tried to think anew, tried to move forwards, the horror of what he had witnessed cycled back through his thoughts and tortured him as he relived it.

The thought was like a raw, unhealed wound. The Angel fell. He remembered the weight of his bolt pistol and his chainaxe. Heavy, but not restrictive, powerful and ready to kill. The snarl on his lips as he stormed forwards to be in the primarch’s radiance as the battle was joined. Cassiel off in the distance, firing and culling the maddened hordes of turncoat Signusi. Captain Nakir, a call for war on his lips, heard over the bubbling growls of the devil-dogs and screeching cries of winged furies.

There, before him, Sanguinius and the Bloodthirster trading barbs and then titanic blows that cracked the earth. It would have been easy to become distracted, to behold that glorious duel to the exclusion of all else.

Meros remembered cleaving the skull of a bat-winged daemon, the ripe stink of the ichor that spattered from the killing wound. The fight taking him away to a place where only attacker and defender existed. When he looked up again, shaking tainted blood from the spinning teeth of the chainaxe, he saw the Angel strike a lethal blow upon the Bloodthirster–

The Angel fell.

Meros closed his eyes. He wanted to be wrong. He wanted to unsee what he had seen.

The whip of barbed brass, striking his liege lord in a moment of supreme betrayal. Sanguinius, his face contorted in pain, crashing to the ground. Meros remembered losing all sense of self-preservation, of doubt, simply breaking into a headlong charge to come to his master’s aid.

But then the red fire, and the blinding sweep of the daemon-lord’s axe. The cataclysm as it descended into the mass of hundreds of Blood Angels, all of them storming forwards with the same intent as Meros.

He had been looking at Brother Gravato when the monstrous battle-axe landed its blow. A bolus of incredible energy, liberated from nothingness, exploded across the ranks of the warriors.

The Angel fell, and my brothers perished.

An inferno of hate crashed in the wake of the blow and suddenly hundreds of legionaries were gone. Flesh and bone, adamantium and ceramite, obliterated by a power beyond reckoning. Bodies burned to cinders, armour crushed to blackened fragments, legionaries Meros had known well erased from the face of the galaxy in a single heartbeat.

And the greatest cruelty of it was the sharing of their deaths. Meros felt them all ending at once, felt it in his blood and his bones, a shock that shuddered through him and every other son of Sanguinius. If the Apothecary had believed in such a thing, he might have said that it burned a hole through his soul.

He fell to his knees, struggled, stumbled back into a run. All he could see was the primarch, lying in a shallow crater. The Angel’s wings were curled about him like a white shroud, his flesh deathly pale.

Meros’s hearts seized in his chest. Sanguinius lived, but he was lost to them. The Apothecary reached out to touch his master’s face and felt the flutter of warmth; in that moment the shard of fear that had pierced him – for it was that emotion and no other – became fire and fury. Deep in his psyche, Meros was aware of something breaking, a chain shattering, a barred door ripped from its hinges. The shock touched something primal and deadly in him, and he knew without question that every warrior who shared his bloodline was experiencing the same thing.

‘Get back!’ Strong arms shoved him away and he fell against the mud. The gold armour of the Sanguinary Guard surrounded him, gathering around their lord. Azkaellon looked stricken, his eyes wild. ‘Protect the primarch!’

Meros remembered standing up, glimpsing Raldoron at the run, the First Captain’s warplate smeared with polluted vitae. The pale cast of astonishment on his face. ‘We must fall back to the flagship,’ Raldoron shouted, ‘Regroup!’

The Apothecary lurched back towards his fallen commander, forcing away all thought of what had happened, concentrating on the moment. ‘I will aid him,’ he began. It was his calling. It was what he was trained to do.

The Angel fell. And so did I.

The buzzing of a teleport beacon sounded close to his ears, but Meros paid no heed to it. He reached for the primarch once more as emerald lightning engulfed them.

And now he looked, and he saw.

In the infirmary, a dozen Apothecaries crowded around the comatose form of Sanguinius, trying every method to recall him to wakefulness and failing. He had watched for a time, his body still shaking from the rematerealisation trauma of the wide-sphere teleportation effect, repeating what he had seen to the stunned disbelief of the warriors who had stayed to defend the Red Tear.

In a way, all of them had known the moment it happened. Not just those on the battlefield, but here in the grounded flagship, and doubtless those up high in orbit, among the endless flashes of las-fire that marked the ongoing space engagement.

Meros leaned forwards and held on to a broken guide rail for support, as if the deck beneath him were pitching like that of a galleon in a storm.

When the air deadened around him, he knew who had come.

‘Did they kill him?’ asked the woman, a sob caught in her throat.

He shook his head. ‘You should not be here, Tillyan.’

‘How could they kill him?’ insisted Niobe, demanding an answer like a needy child.

‘The Angel is not dead.’ Meros ground out the words through gritted teeth. ‘But he has… fallen. Into a deathless slumber. The shock…’ He faltered, unable to frame his thoughts. ‘I don’t know how.’

But that was not entirely true. He suspected.

At first, when word had come to him of the suicides and mental breakdowns among the crew-serfs and remembrancer contingent in the fleet, Meros had considered the possibility of a disease vector as the root cause. A virus of the mind, something that left the genhanced untouched but infected the common human. Now he wondered if the cause was non-corporeal in nature. It was no secret that the energies of warp space could ruin a man exposed to them, just as the glare of a sun would burn out eyes or radiation contaminate unprotected flesh. The stench of the warp was on these monstrosities, these daemons. If they corrupted and tainted the matter of the world as Meros had seen them do, then it would be within their power to cast a malign influence over minds unready to resist them.

He remembered poor Halerdyce Gerwyn, terrified by the sight of the immaterium, afraid to sleep for fear of what he would see in his dreams, finally driven to seek suicide in his search for peace of mind. The action of Meros’s catalepsean node implant had enabled him to go without stasis-sleep since before the flotilla had arrived in the Signus Cluster. If I embraced sleep now, he wondered, what would I see?

And a far greater question loomed larger. What if the Legiones Astartes are not immune to such powers?

‘He’s trapped,’ Niobe was saying. ‘And without Sanguinius, we will all die here.’

The woman’s words lit a sudden, towering anger in Meros’s chest, and he rounded on her with enough speed to make her cry out in fear. ‘Be silent!’ he roared, his choler turning to rage out of nothing. ‘Get below and stay there! Now! Now!’ In that moment, all he wanted to do was swat her aside, crush her fragile meat into pulp against the broken bulkheads.

Niobe fled, and Meros’s surge of fury ebbed with her, dissipating as quickly as it had come.

He grimaced and took in a long breath, reaching deep inside to quieten himself.

He did not succeed.

The battle was spiralling towards madness.

Brother-Sergeant Cassiel dropped into cover behind a grounded speeder; the contra-gravity flyer had been swatted from the sky by a hybridised horror that merged the characteristics of a gigantic hornet and a battery of scimitars. The crew died in the impact, but Cassiel’s squad had avenged their deaths with plasma fire and a cascade of frag grenades. For all the sheer, sickening presence of these so-called daemons, they could still die if you poured enough fire into them. This single grim fact was all the veteran had to hold on to. Everything else was crumbling around him, coming apart like wet sand.

The din of blind guns and the crash of claws and blades came from all sides. Unit cohesion was gone. Communications from squad to squad were a mess of overlapping channels and broken protocols, and then only when the vox could actually be coaxed into working. In the past hour, Cassiel had received a dozen conflicting orders, some from the same voices only moments apart. His company commander, Captain Furio, had ordered an advance and then a retreat, on both occasions missing out vital code phrases to authenticate his directives. It was either a ruse or a failure of will. Either option was unthinkable.

Thick smoke that ran black and crimson engulfed the battle zone, cutting visibility down to almost nothing; and yet at odd moments the clouds would part as if they were part of a staged performance, if only to show the legionaries the towers of the great temple of bones looming large in the distance. The inertial mag-compass display in Cassiel’s helmet was constantly shifting, making it hard to find a heading. In annoyance, he had torn it off and thrust it into the hands of Kaide, the Techmarine, demanding he repair it. Kaide insisted the helm was working perfectly.

Leyteo dared to peer over their cover and snipe off a trio of rounds at a black dog-beast that came towards them barking and snarling. It died in a mess of innards, and Cassiel swore that he could see a twinkling mist dissipate from its cooling corpse.

The sergeant rested against the speeder wreck, his heavy backpack pressed to the steaming metal. He checked his ammunition and scowled. It was enough for now, but he had no idea of how long it would be before resupply. Cassiel considered picking up a weapon dropped by one of the cannon-fodder zealots, but the gun was for human hands, and it would be a like a toy to a legionary; that, and the fact that the grip was coated in some kind of perfumed slime that seemed to exude from the weapon itself. He glanced around at the dozen or so other Blood Angels who held their places around the wreckage. All were sullen and withdrawn, offering nothing.

A cold, steady drumbeat of dread was working its way through Cassiel’s thoughts, and he could not stem it. He had seen the great winged creature, the Bloodthirster, sweep across the face of the suns as it passed over them, diving back towards the bone cathedral. The shadow it cast was not just the absence of light, but an eclipse of sense and reason. In the moment he had fallen under its darkness, the veteran had never felt so alone, so isolated from his battle-brothers. For a legionary it was a little-death with a horror all of its own.

Under it all, the echo of the shock had not faded. Cassiel had not spoken of it to Kaide or Leyteo, at first because they were knee-deep in killers but later because he had no words to express it. The sergeant didn’t need to ask if they had felt it too – one look into their eyes and he saw the mirror of his own hollow gaze. A great, baleful firestorm had burned briefly away in the heart of the fighting, and Cassiel had heard death-screams in the singing of the blood in his ears. He did not know what it meant.

Footsteps drew them all to their guns as a battered youth in scout armour staggered out of the smog and into the midst of the group. His gun was clogged with blood and viscera where it had been used like a club, and there were deep claw-cuts across his face and neck, wounds that did not seem to be clotting. The scout bore the sigil of the 72nd Company, barely visible through the impact dents on his chest plate.

‘Ho, brother,’ said Leyteo. ‘Where is your squad?’

The scout ignored the question. ‘He’s dead,’ said the youth. ‘It killed him. I saw it.’

‘Who?’ Kaide asked, but Cassiel’s throat tightened. He instinctively knew what the youth meant.

‘No,’ snapped the sergeant. The shadow was falling over him again. ‘No! The Angel lives! He cannot be killed!’ Cassiel grabbed the scout by the gorget and pulled him off-balance. ‘You are mistaken!’ he bellowed. ‘Say it!’

‘No,’ came the reply. The scout offered no resistance, and that made Cassiel’s fury burn even hotter. In that moment he felt his control slip away and he readied his fist to strike the youth with a blow that would crush his skull. ‘No,’ he repeated.

‘Stay your hand!’ The command was a rough shout, and a figure in black came forwards through the mist, brandishing the sparking rod of a crozius. Legionaries stood back as he approached, and Warden Annellus’s scowling helm surveyed them all with grim intent. Cassiel released his grip, but his fists went tight with unspent hatred.

‘Hold, brothers,’ Annellus insisted, casting around. ‘Our master lives. I know this for fact.’

‘How can you?’ demanded Kaide. ‘The vox is contaminated by enemy signals and subterfuge. There has been no word–’

‘I know here!’ The Warden slammed his fist against his chest. ‘You all felt the…’ He paused, struggling to find the word, ‘…the darkness pass, didn’t you? And even now, the echo of it claws in our minds.’

Cassiel nodded. He couldn’t deny it. There was a malaise out here, working on all of them. Silent and unseen, stoking their rage with every passing moment.

‘We have to get away from this place,’ muttered the scout.

‘No,’ said Annellus, removing his helmet so he could look them in the eyes. ‘There is nowhere we can go that this will not touch us. If we falter or lose focus, the enemy will use it against us.’ His eyes flashed. ‘So pity their mistake, my brothers. They took the worlds of weakened men by coward’s subterfuge. They fail to understand that now it is the Ninth Legion they face instead.’ The Warden raised the crozius. ‘They seek to enrage us? They have done so. But it will be these monsters that pay the price for daring to unchain our hate!’

A roar of approval erupted from Cassiel’s lips, and the echo of it came from all the legionaries about him.

It served to mask the doubts, for the moment, at least.

The wind moaned through the shattered armourglass of the command deck’s portals, carrying with it the skirl of gunfire and other, less identifiable sounds from the distant battle. Captain Raldoron held the wireless vox-augur to his ear, listening to the device as it scanned back and forth across the tactical communications channels, struggling to find something to lock on to. Every signal was the same – a wash of bubbling static that at first seemed random, but after a moment’s scrutiny became a pattern like mocking laughter or atonal hymns.

Raldoron’s patience snapped and he spun about, hurling the device across the bridge with such force that it exploded into fragments against the far bulkhead. The mute servitors working at makeshift repairs to the command consoles paid no heed to the captain’s moment of unexpected fury, but there was no mistaking the judgement in the eyes of Azkaellon, who had chosen that moment to enter the chamber.

The First Captain glared at the Guard Commander, daring him to make comment, but Azkaellon seemed only weary. The expression seemed out of place on the warrior’s hawkish face, and it told Raldoron all he needed to know about the primarch’s current state.

‘The Legion is in disarray,’ he said, after a moment. ‘The battle in orbit fares little better than the melee on the wastes. Signals are erratic and garbled. Entire companies are out of contact or else ignoring direct orders to disengage and fall back.’

‘I cannot blame them,’ Azkaellon said quietly.

Raldoron’s eyes narrowed. ‘This is not who we are. There are reports of legionaries killing everything in their path, fighting without heed or direction. It is wrong! The Blood Angels are not Russ’s dogs or Angron’s feral savages!’

‘No,’ said the Sanguinary Guard, his hard tone returning. ‘We are worse than them, for we hide it beneath our noble guise. We keep our fury chained. Small wonder then, that it burns brighter when finally given release.’

The captain strode angrily across the command deck, shaking his head. ‘You excuse this?’ He jabbed his finger towards the broken windows and the wasteland beyond. ‘The enemy wounds us and so we lose control in a heartbeat? I say no!’ He drew close to Azkaellon, his words rising into a shout, his fists clenching. ‘Is that the Angel’s way, brother? Is that what he would want from his sons?’

‘Look to yourself,’ he shot back. ‘We all feel the wrath, every son without question.’

Raldoron’s rising anger robbed him of words and he turned away with a hissing snarl. The captain smacked his armoured fist into his palm, grinding ceramite against ceramite.

Azkaellon fixed him with his cold, steely gaze. ‘We must decide now how we shall proceed, you and I. With Lord Sanguinius laid low and the Council of Angels scattered, it falls to us to take joint command of the Legion.’

The First Captain was stopped dead by the Guard Commander’s statement. He was right, of course. But still it felt like disloyalty to say it aloud. ‘Very well,’ he said, biting out the reply.

‘The primarch is the Legion is the primarch,’ said Azkaellon, repeating the words that were laser-etched in High Gothic about the neck-ring of his golden armour. ‘His life must be preserved over all else. We must remove him from the malign influence of this foul place, fight our way free of the Signus Cluster.’

‘You want to run?’ Raldoron could not keep a sneer from his words. ‘This ship cannot lift. The Techmarines in the engine halls have only just managed to place the reactor core in quietus. You would have us leave the flagship behind for the enemy to pick clean?’

‘Evacuate the primarch to another vessel,’ Azkaellon went on. ‘Unshackle the core. The Red Tear’s death was not prevented, only postponed.’

‘And what of the legionaries left behind?’ snarled Raldoron. ‘There are not enough auxiliary craft to take them all, even if we could pull them back here!’ He prodded the Guard Commander in the chest. ‘You callous bastard! You would sacrifice our own?’

Azkaellon met his anger with cold defiance. ‘There is much I would do for the life of Sanguinius. I deem you or I, or any brother who wears the crimson, expendable, if it means the Angel lives on! And I defy you to find me one warrior among the Legion who would not willingly cut their own throat to save him!’

‘I won’t allow it!’ Without conscious thought, the First Captain’s hand fell to the brass hilt of the power sword at his hip.

‘That choice has never belonged to any of us.’

Raldoron shook his head, anger building anew. ‘The Angel gave his orders. It is our duty to fulfil them or to die in the attempt. Signus must be purged! His will be done!’ The sword sang as a measure of its length emerged from its sheath, and by reflex Azkaellon reached up to draw the glaive encarmine from his back-scabbard.

The two warriors froze, their raw fury straining for liberation, blades singing as they drifted towards deadly release.

Raldoron experienced a flash of black, abyssal dread – and he unclenched his hand, letting the sword drop back into place. Azkaellon warily did the same, and they stood glaring at one another, slowly reeling in their ire.

At length, the Guard Commander spoke. ‘Whatever sorcery happened out there, whatever arcane power has been employed, it has touched us all, those proximate and those not. A fire has been kindled, Raldoron. It may consume us.’

‘How?’ He asked. ‘How could they know?’

Neither of them needed to speak of the flaw; both had been there on the day long ago that Sanguinius had brought them to secret counsel, where he had revealed the sorrow that haunted him. The dark potentiality of a red thirst buried in each and every one of them, now dragged to the surface by… what? Magick and witchcraft?

‘If we cannot escape this place, we will succumb.’ Azkaellon frowned. ‘Look at us, brother. Fury is eating at us from within. It is only a matter of time before we become no better than the berserkers we dispatched in battle. We will fall into the company of death.’

Raldoron closed his eyes, and saw armour painted over with ink-black.

When he opened them again, a third figure was standing at the broken hatchway, clad in heavy robes.

Before either of them could speak, he reached up and pulled back the hood over his head. ‘First Captain. Guard Commander. I would speak.’

‘You are Kano. The once-psyker.’ Azkaellon gave him a grave look. ‘How long have you been listening to our words?’

‘Long enough.’

‘What do you want?’ snapped Raldoron, distrust evident in his eyes. ‘This is no time for distractions.’

‘A number of my brothers have gathered,’ said Kano. He saw the two warriors share a look, both of them immediately understanding that he meant more by that word than just his fellow Blood Angels. ‘Some from the battle, some down from orbit.’

Azkaellon eyed him. ‘You summoned them?’

Kano shook his head. ‘We came because we knew we were needed.’

‘Too late,’ Raldoron said bitterly.

‘No,’ said Kano. ‘Not yet.’ He looked from one warrior to the other. ‘Azkaellon speaks the truth. A shadow falls across every legionary whose heart is Blood Angel, and that darkness has a source. I have seen it.’

‘By witch-sight?’ The captain challenged him to answer.

‘Does it matter, lord?’ Before Raldoron could reply, he pushed on. Kano put aside all doubts in his mind, concentrating on what he knew to be true, what he believed was right. Nothing else mattered now. Kano knew that with cold clarity. If there was such a thing as fate, then his would turn on the next words he spoke. ‘The temple of bones holds the heart of the daemon’s power in this world. If it can be found, it can be destroyed. The Legion will be freed from its own fury.’

The First Captain glanced towards the ruined oval portal. ‘A battleground of madness lies between us and that objective. An army of monsters from the soul of all nightmares and our brothers caught upon it.’

‘It would be a crossing through hell, aye,’ said Kano.

Azkaellon studied him coldly. ‘And what of the Angel? What have you seen for him?’

‘I can revive him.’ Kano said the words aloud for the first time, and he knew in his hearts that is was no vain hope, no idle boast. ‘We can revive him.’

‘The psykers…’ Raldoron was grim-faced. ‘If Sanguinius was felled by the power of the warp, then by the same he could awaken.’

Kano nodded, fully aware of the door he was about to open – not just for himself, but his entire Legion. ‘These daemons are the spawn of the immaterium, and only by like powers can their influence be broken.’

‘That’s not all that will be broken,’ grated Azkaellon. ‘What of the Nikaea Edict? The command of the Emperor of Mankind? Are we to go against him, and the rule of Terra? It will make us traitors!’

Raldoron turned a solemn gaze upon his comrade. ‘Then so be it.’

SIXTEEN

Witch-minds
Red Ghosts
Threads

‘This will be dangerous,’ said Ecanus. ‘Some of us will die.’ He ran a hand over his bare scalp. His skin looked pallid in the sombre light of the medicae chamber.

‘And yet still we came.’ Brother Deon stood behind him, keeping to the shadows. Deon’s face was always hidden in the gloom of his hood, only one small sliver of his ruddy complexion visible to the rest of them.

Kano found himself nodding. ‘None of us are ignorant of the price this will exact.’ He looked around the room at the seven other warriors who stood in a loose group, some in their battle armour, others in duty robes. They all shared a single trait: a look in their eyes that belied a deeper truth.

We all saw the red angel, the angel of pain, Kano thought. And we all fear what it means.

There was only one face missing, and the absence nagged at him. The Rune Priest Stiel was nowhere to be found. Kano was aware that Captain Redknife and his Space Wolves had gone out to join the advance on the Cathedral of the Mark, but that had been before the shock of the primarch’s fall. He had hoped his cousin from the VI Legion might stand with them in this act, but Kano had no idea if the dour Fenrisian was still alive.

‘We’re wasting time,’ said a rough, urgent voice. Novenus, the eldest of them, stood with his head bowed and his long, steel-coloured hair in an unkempt mess about his armoured shoulders. The old warrior’s armour was dusty and spattered with bloodstains that had yet to dry. He had walked in from the wastes with an empty bolter in his hand, leaving behind his brothers of the 57th Company to heed the unspoken call.

Before him was Sanguinius.

The primarch’s mighty frame, still armour-clad, lay across a cruciform operating stage under a battery of auspex arrays and illuminators. His wings, spread out beneath him, gave the impression of a great drift of snow holding him up, but the flawless white was marked with black scars of fire damage and the stark ruby of spilled blood.

His repose was not the tranquil solemnity of the dead, but a darker sleep tormented by agonies that only the Angel could know. Sanguinius’s gallant aspect was acted upon by subtle tells of deep pain. His face was that of a dreamer snared by nightmares.

Brother Salvator, a rail-thin and vigilant legionary from the 269th Company, stared at his master. The three long scars that went from his jawbone to his temple were livid. ‘I see this with my own eyes and I still cannot believe it.’ A few of the other warriors nodded in agreement. ‘How was this done, Kano? The Angel cannot fall! He is a titan, with strength to shrug off the blows of any foe!’

It was Ecanus who answered. ‘This day Sanguinius does not suffer a wound to his flesh. He suffers the wounds to ours.’ He turned to Salvator. ‘Brother, our primarch is the soul of the Blood Angels. It has always been thus. We ride in the wake of his glory. But that path goes both ways. He feels our pain, as only a father could.’ He looked away. ‘And this is the result.’

‘The creature, Ka’Bandha…’ began Kano. ‘The blow it struck was nothing of this world. There was a power to it, a warp-taint.’

Novenus nodded. ‘Aye, I saw the uncolour of that baleful fire in the sky.’

‘Five hundred battle-brothers dead, in the time it took to swing an axe blade.’ Kano let that sink in. ‘Captain Nakir and the sum of the bold Twenty-Fourth, all dead, and more with them. Sons from a dozen other companies. All murdered because they dared to come to their master’s aid.’

‘A whole company, gone. It was no happenstance,’ Ecanus added. He nodded towards the Angel. ‘This was a calculated act, to take him from the field and throw us into disarray.’ He shook his head. ‘The storm of anger that rages out there would not have gained such power so swiftly if Sanguinius stood with us.’

‘Then we must wake him,’ said Deon. ‘Bring him back to us.’

Kano nodded and beckoned his brothers forward. One by one, they took up places in a ring around the primarch, each legionary taking a moment to prepare himself. It would be difficult at first; without their psychic hoods to regulate and channel their preternatural abilities, the gathering of former Librarians would need to call on the fullness of their strength of will to work together in meta-concert.

‘We open the path together, but only one can take this journey,’ said Novenus.

‘I will go,’ Kano told them. Carefully, he reached out and placed his hand upon the chest plate of the Angel’s armour. ‘I will bring him back.’

‘And so we do this?’ Salvator demanded, eyes widening. ‘We break oath and no brother here questions it?’

Kano shot him a look. ‘What could be said, brother? Each of us knows full well the import of what we are about to do. There is no room for doubt.’ He paused. ‘Fraternitas. Legio. Pater. Imperator. That is the order of our loyalty, and it will always be so. If I live beyond this day, I will gladly face the Emperor’s judgment on what I do now.’

A ninth figure entered the chamber, standing across the threshold to block any attempt to leave. ‘We will all face it.’ Azkaellon’s golden armour glittered like the blade of the bared glaive encarmine in his mailed fist. The point of the sword clanged against the deck. ‘You will do this,’ said the Guard Commander, ‘and I will watch you. Know that any sign of actions untoward… of witchery… will see your head taken from your neck.’

Kano closed his eyes. ‘We begin,’ he said.

Meros glanced over his shoulder at Captain Raldoron as they picked their way along the twisted corridor. ‘She will not agree,’ he told him. ‘She is not a soldier. She cultivates plants.’

‘We are all at war now,’ came the reply. ‘You saved her life on the agri-world. She trusts you. Convince her.’

‘I fear that coin has been spent,’ he admitted. ‘When last we spoke, I terrified her.’

The heavy footfalls of their power armour echoed off the Red Tear’s damaged walls, and the broken deck plates shifted alarmingly. The lower tiers of the massive battle-barge were a warren of compacted wreckage and debris. Precious few compartments were still whole and with power.

‘Then terrify her into compliance,’ Raldoron replied. ‘Believe me, if I could drug this civilian into docility and carry her in a gun-case, I would.’

‘It doesn’t work that way,’ Meros said, almost to himself. They had arrived at the sanctuary, and both of the Blood Angels bowed low to step in under the slumped archway of the cargo hatch. The single battle-brother standing sentinel threw them a nod, but said nothing.

The space beyond had been a long, wide tankage for water when the Red Tear was operational, but now it was an atrium of curved walls and suspended baffle plates, the only indicators to its former contents the patches of rust on the walls.

Humans filled the compartment. Many of them were injured; almost all of them were crew-serfs or indentured servants in drab ship-suits and the crimson-flashed uniforms of the Legion auxiliary. A handful, who stood out like withered tropical flowers amid parched grasses, were what was left of the fleet’s remembrancer contingent. Meros glanced at them; in the turmoil he had forgotten about the artists and the scribes, and he felt a pang of sympathy as their petrified faces turned towards him. He pitied them. They had no comprehension of the world they had been thrown into.

The remembrancers shied away when he came close. Meros’s gaze raked over the men and women lying under rough blankets or huddling together for safety. And there he found Halerdyce Gerwyn, his face pale and his breathing thready, staring up at the bulkhead above. Meros moved to speak to him, then thought better of it. There was little he could do for the sequentialist.

‘What is that?’ He turned to see Raldoron addressing a group of people who sat in a circle around a heating pod. One of them – the man Dortmund – had a small book in his hand, a crudely-printed thing of red ink on translucent paper.

Dortmund had been reading aloud when they entered, and now he held the tome to his chest as if it would protect him. ‘It is a collection of stories,’ piped the youth. ‘Words of courage and faith. Meant to inspire in times of hardship.’

Raldoron’s lips thinned. ‘That won’t be enough,’ he said, and they moved on.

The humans could not hide their fear, as much as some of them tried. Meros could literally smell it on them, his enhanced senses picking out the chemical scent-triggers in their bodily odours. He tried to imagine this moment from their viewpoint, but it was hard to frame his thoughts in so limited a fashion. Meros had the benefit of being set to his task of battle, without pause to ruminate on what greater meaning events might have. On a deeper level, he was aware that the circumstances of the Signus Cluster mission would have far-reaching consequences not just for the fleet, or his Legion, but for the Imperium in totality. If he halted, allowed these questions to rise to the fore, then perhaps he too would know something of the dread these people were experiencing.

But he could not dwell on thoughts of sedition, of brothers turning against brothers. He had to fight the battle in front of him. And then the next. And the next.

They found the Niobe woman with a few of the other survivors from the Stark Dagger. She flinched when she saw the Blood Angels and shrank back.

Meros raised his hand. ‘Tillyan. I am sorry. Before, in the corridor… I forgot myself.’

She nodded warily. ‘It’s all right. I understand.’ That seemed like a truth. ‘You could not know. This was all new to you.’

‘You didn’t see what happened when the daemons came,’ offered Zhomas bleakly. ‘We too thought we could fight. At first.’

Meros saw the perpetual sneer of the one called Hengist as he approached them warily. ‘No surprise,’ spat the criminal. ‘Even the great Legiones Astartes can’t beat these hellspawn!’

‘That remains to be seen,’ said Raldoron, silencing him.

Meros’s brow creased. He wasn’t used to dealing with civilians, with the ordinary ranks of humanity. They had social codes and ways of conduct that he did not understand – and this was a moment of import. He sighed. ‘Niobe, your gift…’

Her expression altered in an instant, becoming guarded. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘You do,’ he corrected. ‘It doesn’t matter how you were able to conceal yourself from the black ship tithe for so long, that is not important.’

Zhomas caught the words black ship and physically recoiled from Niobe’s side. ‘You… You’re a psyker?’

‘I knew it!’ Hengist released a shout. ‘I knew there was something wrong about her. Didn’t I say? Didn’t I?’

Raldoron aimed a finger at the man, and after that no one else dared to offer an opinion.

‘I’m not a witch-mind,’ Niobe said, in a small voice. ‘I don’t know what this pariah word means.’

‘It means we need you,’ Meros told her. ‘You have a rare ability. It’s how you survived, how you managed to escape. How it was the succubae did not see us.’

‘No.’ She was shaking her head.

‘We are going to lose this war.’ Meros said it aloud and heard a ripple of panic spread across the chamber. The blunt truth felt oddly liberating. ‘Unless we can kill the thing that started it. You will help us do that.’ He hesitated. ‘I’m not offering you a choice, Tillyan. None of us have a choice.’

It seemed like an age had passed before she gave a shuddering nod. ‘I’ll come, if you keep me safe.’

‘I will try.’ He offered her his hand, and she reached for it. Her slender fingers were barely long enough to wrap around his palm.

Meros shared a glance with Raldoron as they moved back across the silent chamber with the woman at their side. The other survivors stared at Niobe with expressions of shock, fear and disgust; he wondered if they understood that by taking her, he had removed the only thing protecting them from the predations of the daemons. Every mortal in the sanctuary would be prey to the madness now.

‘This way,’ he said, leading Niobe away. Raldoron remained a moment, speaking quietly to the legionary on guard.

Helik Redknife was not a stranger to the feral beast that lurked in men’s souls. He had seen it in himself too often, knowing that such a thing was real and had great power. Many believed that the Wolves of Russ were nothing but that force, wild and undisciplined, but those who thought so did not know the sons of Fenris. To recognise that bestial self and fight war with it, to shackle it to the needs of the great murder-make, required a degree of control no mere barbarian could ever manage.

Until this day he had not witnessed the sight of that feral power let slip in any other Legion but his own, but it was here, all around him, in the eyes of every Blood Angel he came across.

At his side, Brother Valdin held his bolter close, absently fingering the charms dangling from its fore-grip. ‘Still nothing over the vox,’ he reported.

Redknife nodded, glancing at the Rune Priest walking ahead of them. Stiel was bent low, tracing his fingers through the dry dirt at his feet. The war-fog around the Space Wolves had a peculiar stink to it that clogged the nostrils of the legionaries and the mist seemed to deaden the air as well, making sounds waver. It was becoming increasingly difficult to make sense of what was going on in this hellish landscape.

The noise of war was all around them, the crashing of guns and the bloody ruin-sound of bodies opening to the sky; but the captain could not tell if he heard the defeat or the victory of the Blood Angels. Those sons of the Angel they had encountered since the disorder began paid them no heed. To a man, the warriors of the IX Legion seemed interested only in bloodletting and violence.

Stiel had put words to it. ‘The fall of their primarch has released a red ghost upon them. I taste nothing but rage in the air.’

Redknife gave a solemn nod. He could understand. If Russ were laid low by the blade of an enemy, would the Space Wolves react any differently? But it sat wrongly with him. All Helik knew of the Blood Angels was of a Legion that bore little resemblance to this. They fought now with a ferocity that would give even a Blood Claw pause.

‘Over there.’ Valdin pointed, and Redknife saw a large group of figures in crimson armour gathered in a wide defile. He moved towards the formation, even as the Rune Priest broke into a sprint.

‘No,’ Stiel called out a warning. ‘Keep back. They are not–’

His words came too late. Some of the Blood Angels had seen them, and they were turning, gathering to face the Space Wolves. Redknife counted at least three times the number of his squad, and he felt the weight of threat hanging in the air.

Wet blades glistened in the hands of the other legionaries. These were no common combat knifes, but custom weapons crested with barbs, more akin to the flaying blades of a butcher. The Wolf Captain halted, his hand on his sword, waiting. He did not need to look towards his skald to know what would come next.

Some of the Blood Angels were crouched, and as they came to their feet, Redknife saw they had been bent over the bodies of the dead; the last of the insane zealots sent by the beast-creatures to bog down the assault force.

The warriors had removed their helmets, and their faces were smeared with crimson, great tides of it that had cascaded down their chins and across their armour. The Space Wolf’s teeth bared in shock and the Blood Angels did the same, fangs wet with glistening red.

The odour of torn flesh came across them and Redknife found his voice. ‘What is this?’ he demanded.

A legionary in war-damaged armour, a malevolent cast to his bearded, scarred face, came forwards. He carried a flaying knife in his hand, and a trickle of blood from its tip painted a line across the dust behind him.

Amit. The Wolf Captain knew the warrior’s name. He searched the Blood Angel’s eyes for any kind of recognition and did not find it.

‘You take the blood of the enemy?’ said Redknife. ‘That’s not your way.’

‘You don’t know us.’ Amit’s reply was a low, feral growl. ‘What are you?’

‘We are kinsmen…’ Valdin offered, stiffening.

Amit glowered at them, panting like an animal. ‘Lies.’ A shadow fell over his gaze. ‘We are betrayed. You have always been against us. You all betrayed us!’

‘No.’ Redknife raised his hand, sensing the moment slipping away from him. ‘Listen to me, cousin. Look past your fury.’ But even as the words left his lips, he knew it was too late. In Amit’s gaze, Redknife saw a bleak, furious cast that he had known only once before – when he had the ill-fate to cross paths with the warriors of the Wulfen. There was nothing he could reach for – no reason, no sanity, only pure inchoate rage.

‘Death to traitors!’ bellowed Amit, exploding forwards with his blade singing through the air.

Redknife felt a wash of hot crimson spatter across his face as the Blood Angels captain cut Valdin’s throat with his first blow, his warriors boiling over the broken landscape in a murderous frenzy.

The Space Wolf drew his sword and cursed the fate that had brought him to this moment, cursed the creatures that had set this madness in motion, cursed Warmaster Horus for daring to pit brother against brother. But more than that, he cursed the fact that it had been right to send him here.

He lost sight of Stiel in the thrashing clash of blades and gunfire, as the Blood Angels of Amit’s company fell upon the Space Wolves with a wrath that was as fathomless as it was unstoppable.

And so we die here, he thought bitterly, as legionaries he would call kin overwhelmed him with ferocity borne of madness, and the Allfather’s great dream dies with us.

The Stormbird flashed over the battlefield, fast and high, describing a ballistic arc towards the enemy stronghold.

At the aft drop-ramp, Raldoron stood grasping a stanchion, his other hand pressed to the armourglass of a square window in the hatch. Grimly, he watched the abnormal clouds over the war zone swirl and drift against each other, parting now and then to reveal glimpses of the cratered, blood-smeared earth below.

Sparks of light that could only be muzzle flashes underlit the haze in strobes of white, but there was no coherence to them. The First Captain’s tactical skills enabled him to read any conflict like a map, swiftly picking out lines of attacker and defender, patterns of force and counter-force. He did not see that here, however.

There was only a wavering procession of red, broken in places, thickening into a mass in others. The army of the IX Legion, moving inexorably across the Plains of the Damned, drawn closer by the passing of the hours to the foot of the great affront that was the bone temple.

This was what they had been reduced to, then. The Blood Angels, once proud and vigilant, now remade, as undisciplined as wildfire. The best and the brightest of the Legiones Astartes had become less an army, more a mob baying for the blood of those who had wounded their father.

And the worst of it was, Raldoron empathised. Some fraction of him wanted to be down there with them, to lose himself in the scarlet hell of frenzy. There was a purity in it, he reflected, a kind of clear truth to the want for battle, battle and nothing more.

This has always been part of us, he thought. The Angel knew it. Now it is unmasked and threatens to engulf every one of his sons.

He looked away, his gaze finding the woman Niobe. She sat in an acceleration couch, bundled with straps into a seat built for a Space Marine, too big for a human of her slight frame. She was lost inside a vest of Imperial Army flak armour, far too large for her. Someone had given her a laspistol and she held the holstered gun, belt, strap and all, in her lap as though she did not know what to do with it.

Raldoron’s lips thinned. He had already decided it was best not to think of her as a living being at all, but as a piece of hardware. A fragile device to be protected. A tool. The captain did not expect her to survive once they made touchdown. He only hoped it would be long enough to gain them entry into the Cathedral of the Mark. After that, he considered that the lives of every member of his strike team would be measured in minutes, at best.

Raldoron wondered at the immeasurable talent Niobe possessed. It could not be seen, or heard or touched, but he couldn’t deny that he felt it. Just being in close proximity to the woman, he sensed the strange dead-air texture that Meros had spoken of. But most noticeable was the way she calmed him, calmed all of them. He glanced over at the Apothecary, saw Meros with Sergeant Orexis, Cador, Racine and the others. All of them, they were set to their tasks, preparing for the fight ahead.

They were not distracted, not chafing at every tiny little annoyance. They did not think a slight hid in every word or deed. He and his legionaries did not knead the grips of their weapons and look upon the war below as if they were hungry for it. Raldoron frowned. It shamed him to admit that he too had been touched by the shock that had laid down the Angel. If they could not find the heart of this assault upon their will, as Kano had predicted, he dreaded to think where the path to fury might take them.

A black shape blurred past the window, to the aft of the Stormbird, and Raldoron’s head snapped up, his musings immediately forgotten.

Out there a flock of furies – winged patchwork things, humanoids of livid-red flesh with clawed hands and barbed black wings – wheeled and turned in the wake of the aircraft. The creatures acted strangely, for long moments howling and clawing at one another as if they were in distress, annoyed beyond measure at the mere presence of the Blood Angels aircraft.

Then they attacked.

Their hideous gargoyle faces crowded the window as dozens of them swarmed over the fast-moving Stormbird, talons biting into the fuselage as they clawed at the hull and pulled at the stabiliser flaps. The aircraft bucked and dropped sharply. Raldoron saw a cluster of the beasts ground into bloody gobbets as they forced themselves into the intakes of the drop-ship’s engines, clogging the turbines within.

He snatched up his bolter and kicked at the hatch release switch, swinging the drop-ramp open even though they were thousands of metres above the ground. Tainted air screamed into the troop bay and Raldoron opened fire, picking off the creatures that flitted through his narrow field of vision across the Stormbird’s tail. A group of furies tried to gain entry through the yawning hatch, but the First Captain cut them down with a concentrated burst of bolt rounds, blowing them into the blood-misted slipstream.

The hull vibrated and the cloudy horizon banked sharply as grey smoke and engine components burst into the air. Raldoron swore a curse as the Stormbird’s wings dipped and it began to spiral towards the ground.

They fell short of the projected landing point by a good measure, and the Stormbird collapsed as it hit the thick mud, wings cracking with the finality of the impact. Small fires began inside the troop bay, filling it with black smoke. Meros disengaged from his restraints and vaulted across the compartment to where Tillyan Niobe was curled in a foetal ball, and he ripped away the tether web holding her in place.

‘Are you hurt?’ She managed a weak shake of her head. ‘Then move.’ He placed his hand on the flat of her back, and propelled the woman towards the yawning hatchway.

Outside, the noise and the stench of the battleground assailed them. Niobe coloured at the sensations, picking her way across the shallow, blackened crater formed by the Stormbird’s landing.

Meros looked up as Raldoron vaulted on to the top of the downed aircraft’s hull. The First Captain cast around, his bolt pistol and power sword in his hands, attempting to get his bearings. A moment ago, their path towards the enemy stronghold had seemed clear, but the fog of war was mercurial and ever-changing. To the Apothecary, it seemed as if they had flown for hours and still come no closer to the Cathedral of the Mark.

He followed Raldoron’s gaze. To the edges of Meros’s sight, there was only war, the unfolding combat between the strange forces of the enemy and the furious ranks of the IX Legion. He tasted a mist of vaporised blood at the back of his throat.

A shape flashed over his head, and Meros spun about, pulling up his gun. A gangly creature, taller than a legionary, landed atop the Stormbird and collided with Raldoron, the two of them tumbling into a roll as it knocked the captain onto the slope of a fallen wing. Cloven hooves clattered against the plasteel hull and claws raked at the First Captain’s armour.

Raldoron slashed blindly with his sword and the blade flashed, a lucky cut beheading the beast in a fountain of blue liquid. Niobe baulked as the beast’s head spun into the mud before her.

Meros grimaced. It was somehow still alive. A slavering, wide-jawed mouth in a skeletal face, an elongated skull rising high into a bony cone and great antler-like horns of dirty ivory. The face opened its maw and a long, purple tongue uncoiled, probing towards them. The Apothecary fired a bolt round into the middle of the forehead, blasting it apart in a welter of bone and gooey matter.

‘A bloodletter,’ said the woman, turning pale and gulping in air. ‘That’s what they call them.’

‘More!’ shouted Orexis from close by, as Raldoron scrambled back over the wreck to join them.

Packs of the lesser daemons crowded in around the crashed aircraft, and these ones carried glowing hell-blades that sizzled cherry-red with heat, like pokers drawn from a fire; yet they did not attack immediately. Instead, the bloodletters prowled around an invisible perimeter, snapping and hissing, occasionally daring to venture close before releasing atonal yowls of distress. The creatures swiftly focused their attention towards the woman, pinpointing her as the source of their anguish.

‘They know it’s her,’ Meros muttered. The ethereal null aura centred on Niobe was anathema to these warp spawn. ‘She pains them by fact of her presence.’

‘Not for long,’ said Raldoron. Even as he spoke, the creatures were closing the circle, steeling themselves to resist. As one, they broke into a charge and fell upon the squad.

Brother Cador died beneath three hellblades, each monstrous sword piercing his torso from a different angle. Meros glimpsed his body burst into flames and burn inside his armour. The Apothecary shoved the woman back against the wreck and fell into a fight with two more, gunning them down, using the chainaxe to finish the job.

But for each one cut or shot there was another beast rising to take its place. Meros counted his rounds, fearing they would be overwhelmed and die beyond the sight of their target.

A new roar – mechanical, heavy and dangerous – drowned out his doubts. Over the lip of the crater came a smoking, war-scarred vehicle on four grinding caterpillar tracks; the Mastodon was designed for deployment of full squads into the middle of combat zones, but this one had seen better days. Much of the armour plating had been melted away by baleful fires and many of the sponson guns were hanging broken and useless.

Legionaries rode atop the vehicle as it drove over the packs of the bloodletters, scattering them so the Blood Angels could pick them off. Those too slow to run became twisted flesh, foul bodies bursting under the spinning treads.

Meros saw a figure in black armour emerge from the vehicle: Annellus. The Apothecary’s spirit leapt to see his trusted brother Cassiel at the Warden’s side, but the emotion faded when he saw the veteran’s bleak, hollow-eyed gaze.

‘Warden!’ shouted Raldoron. ‘Our thanks. Your aid was–’

‘We’re not here to aid you!’ spat Annellus, growling out every word. ‘We are here to kill!’ His declaration brought a yell of agreement from Cassiel and the ragged group of legionaries aboard the transport. ‘Either join us or get out of our way!’

Raldoron gave Meros a glance, then beckoned the woman Niobe to him. ‘Annellus,’ he replied. ‘I’ll forgive your lack of respect this once, but never again.’ He strode to the Mastodon and mounted the vehicle in one swift leap. ‘This machine, your legionaries, you are under my command now, understand?’

The Warden came at the captain, threatening him with his sparking crozius. ‘You flee the field and then return to give me orders?’ He waved the rod angrily in Raldoron’s face. ‘I kept these battle-brothers alive while all around us turned renegade and gave themselves to fury! I resisted–’

Raldoron backhanded Annellus across the face and put him down on the hull of the transport. It was not an act of anger, but of control. ‘You resisted,’ the captain agreed, ‘but not well enough.’ He offered the Warden a hand, and gingerly Annellus took it. ‘But now we have an opportunity. A real chance to strike back; instead of letting this madness eat away at our control like a cancer.’

Meros helped Niobe climb into the transport. ‘She can keep us safe.’

Annellus’s face showed first annoyance, then confusion, and finally a reluctant acceptance. ‘Forgive me, First Captain,’ he replied. ‘My temper was beyond me… I meant no disrespect.’ His gaze bored into the woman. ‘This one. She is a witch, then?’

‘A pariah,’ corrected Raldoron. ‘And the key to our attack.’

Cassiel met Meros’s gaze and gave a shallow nod. ‘Brother,’ he said. ‘We feared you had been killed when…’ He trailed off, the silent fear in his heart left unspoken.

‘Sanguinius is not dead,’ Meros told him.

‘We saw him fall,’ said Kaide, grim-faced, not daring to believe.

‘The primarch lives, although his wounds are great.’ Raldoron spoke loud enough for all to hear. He pointed towards the towers of agony visible in the distance. ‘But if we do not destroy that edifice, then all lives – the Angel’s and ours – will be forfeit.’

Kano screamed, giving voice to a pain that went beyond the physical, beyond the corporeal. His body was gone, forgotten to him. It was only his psyche that contained him, and the essence of Mkani Kano was in agony.

He was a fragment of glass propelled on a wave front, brittle and easily destroyed. He was ash in a storm, disintegrating. He was paper, touched by an inferno. The ex-Librarian reached deep within himself and opened the gates to the power he had kept silent since the day of the edict. Whispers of that force had escaped, now and again, but Kano had never let them go too far, even if there was a part of him that had wanted that release.

Not so now. He drew the full psychic force within him and clad his mind in it, as if it were ethereal armour. Steeling himself, he plunged into the red fog of the empathic barriers imprisoning the Angel’s spirit. Kano felt his brothers at his back, each of them the wind in his sails, lending their might to the task.

Kano screamed, and they all screamed with him. He was aware of seven bright stars flickering about him, one for each psyker who stood in that far-off place aboard the Red Tear, out in the real world.

With a flash, one of the stars burned bright and faded to blackness; Brother Deon was the first to die. He had given his life to take Kano this far, the force of his will spent as the warp-borne curse reacted against the Blood Angels, repelling their attempt to reach their master.

Sorrow engulfed Kano, but he pushed through it, falling deeper. There would be time to mourn the lost when this deed was done, and Deon would not be the last name taken for the Sepulchre of Heroes.

Every step through the red fog was pain, but he could not falter. A dreamscape crowded in around Kano, the head-rush of the endless fall fading into the unreal certainty of ground beneath his feet.

He was in a stygian void, a cavern of impossible dimensions where the only illumination was a sickly band of light falling from a ragged source kilometres above his head. Things wheeled and turned up there, catching the ill glow. They looked like angels of decay and horror. The ray moved across the colossal chamber with the metronomic regularity of a distant lighthouse. Each time it passed over Kano, he felt soiled by it, and he shrank from its touch. The distant stars of his brothers were feeble and indistinct.

Every surface in the cavern was draped with a profusion of cords and threads, some as thin as spun silk, others thicker than the legionary’s arm. The threads ran back and forth, snaking over the ground, webbing the air, one atop another in snared knots. They snagged Kano’s bare feet as he tried to press forwards, pulled at his arms and whipped over his cheeks. The threads were red and they were black.

The red burned his flesh when he touched them, a seething acidic fire that spread fast and hollowed him out inside. It made Kano dizzy and furious; it conjured a sudden arid thirst in his gut, a hunger he instinctively knew no meat or drink would ever sate. The black seared him with cold harsher than the breath of space and rang a bell-chime echo in the depths of his self; it pulled at an old, directionless anger that was borne of something primal and amorphous in the human soul. A rage waiting to be unleashed.

And there he came upon the Angel Sanguinius. His primarch hung suspended like some hunter’s trophy or the art of a cruel sculptor, the web of threads holding him high above the ground. Cords pulled him with wings spread and arms wide in cruciform posture, his face tilted back to bear the pitiless sweep of the light.

Kano climbed, ignoring the pain in his hands and feet, pulling himself up over and over. The ascent went on for days or seconds, time stretching away from him. Then Kano was at the Angel’s side, and with no blade to cut the threads he pulled and uncoiled the black and the red, cursing in frustration as he tried to bring freedom to his master.

‘Lord, do you hear me?’ he gasped.

Sanguinius’s eyes snapped open and there was only an ocean of crimson staring back at him. Before he could react, the primarch’s mouth split in a snarl, baring bright, sharp fangs.

The Angel pulled Kano into a brutal embrace and bit savagely into the flesh of his neck, piercing the artery. Blood, rich and red and heady with the stink of iron, flowed in a great, unending outburst.

SEVENTEEN

No Turning Back
Cursed
Visions

The Mastodon raced across the war-torn plainsland, rising and falling over blast craters and shallow vales, fording stagnant streams choked with human dead and other, less identifiable remains. Ahead of the transport, the glistening bone towers of the Cathedral of the Mark grew larger, looming across the sky, their barbed points raking the bilious clouds.

Meros was at a broken gun-slit where a shattered lascannon had been mounted; the device was a ruin of torn parts and heat-slagged crystal, too cumbersome even to form a decent club if ripped from its pintle. Foul air gusted in through the breaches in the Mastodon’s armour, and he peered out, catching flashes of the fighting all around them.

He saw fury, not warfare. Battle was an ordered thing. Even the close combat that was the speciality of the Blood Angels was a rational and calculated action forged from focus of skill and years of training. What Meros witnessed out there was more akin to the fray of gladiatorial combat, an undisciplined wildfire of warriors moving against anything that dared to stand against them.

Every legionary he laid eyes upon was lost in the thick of their own personal hell, reason far behind them and blood-thirst in full control. He saw battle-brothers he knew, good warriors and proud legionaries, drenched from helm to boot in fresh gore and hungry to take more of it. Seeing it close at hand for the first time, Meros was horrified, and yet he was not shocked. To accept that such a furious heart beat within his chest and those of his kinsmen was not impossible. Perhaps he had always known that this potential was there, glimpsed in the darkest moments and the blackest of rages.

The enemy dead littered the battleground in numbers beyond his reckoning, and ahead of the unkempt berserker advance, the ranks of daemon-things were falling back in clusters. They retreated as the Blood Angels closed a red noose about the temple of bones, the beasts dying in droves.

For all the hollow, empty sense it gave Meros to see it, the sons of Sanguinius were winning the battle for Signus Prime. And all it had taken was to plunge them into the depths of despair.

He wanted to shout to them, to bellow the truth into the vox-channels. The Angel lives! Our father lives! But would they heed it even if he did? The blow that felled Sanguinius, the strike that killed five hundred legionaries, had brought something to the surface that would not be so easily silenced.

In the next moment, his reverie was forgotten as a horde of daemonette cavalry crested a rise and bore down on the transport. Their mounts resembled skinned brood-fowls, blind steeds with heads that were nothing but snapping mouths.

Meros shouted a warning and killed the first of the mount-beasts with two rounds into its centre-mass, exploding it in a concussion of purple meat. The rider went down, trampled into the dirt by her companions. Then they were flanking the Mastodon; their bony claws snipped off chunks of flapping armour as if it were paper.

The Apothecary fired again, but the damaged sponson took up too much of his aim arc and he cursed. Meros turned away and found himself falling in with Leyteo and the Warden as they shouldered open the long gunnery hatches on the transport’s roof.

There was no option but to bull their way on through the enemy lines; the Mastodon could not afford to slow down, for fear that the slower enemy units would catch them and overwhelm the transport’s meagre defences. The mighty engine roared and spat promethium-laced smoke as they thundered onwards.

Leyteo went down on one knee and began a steady pattern of aim-shot-repeat, leading his targets to blast the nymph-like riders out of their saddles. Annellus wielded his crozius, the crackling power field around the winged tip spitting as he swung it in fizzing arcs. He shouted eager defiance to the sky, and Meros gave him room to engage the daemonettes that dared to vault aboard the fast-moving crawler, engaging the riders who dodged Leyteo’s pinpoint shots. Engaging the mag-locks in his boots to secure him, Meros leaned into his attack and steadied his pistol with his off-hand, making every shot he fired a kill.

Behind his helmet, his jaw was set in grim determination as he fought, but Meros could not deny that a trickle of bloodlust was forming in his hearts, slowly gaining power. Even with the Niobe woman at close hand, it was hard to resist the need to kill that permeated the very air itself. The closer they came to the cathedral, the worse the sense of it became. He thought of Annellus and Cassiel, caught up in the same turbulent emotions.

He blinked, and his distraction cost him a kill. One of the succubae sprang from its mount, sending the hapless beast to its death beneath the Mastodon’s track cluster. She clattered on to the hull using her claws to punch holes in the plating, then coiled and sprang at the black-armoured Warden. Meros shot at it a moment too late, the mass-reactive round deflecting off the deck with a crash of detonation.

In his zeal, Annellus had not engaged the boot-magnets in his armour to hold him fast, and the daemonette batted him off balance with one of her huge arthropod claws. The blow was hard and connected across his helmet. Ceramite cracked, metal splintered, and the skull-mask twisted off him and tumbled away. Revealed beneath, Annellus’s face was streaked with blood and fierce with anger. Before he could stop himself, the Warden lost his footing and vanished over the back of the Mastodon’s engine compartment, the creature leaping after him with a shriek of joy. Meros twisted in place and emptied the rest of his pistol clip into her back, killing the creature in mid-air.

The Apothecary unlocked and slid towards the rear of the shuddering vehicle. He saw Annellus back on his feet from where he had fallen, rising as the succubae riders whooped, disengaging from the vehicle to surround him.

‘Warden!’ he shouted, his voice hissing over the vox. Meros called out to the Techmarine at the controls. ‘Kaide! Bring us about, Annellus has fallen!’

‘No!’ The Warden bellowed the word at the top of his lungs. ‘Don’t stop for me! To the tower, get to the tower!’ He spoke again, but Annellus’s words became a string of animalistic shouts. As the distance between him and the aura of Tillyan Niobe increased, so did his fury overwhelm him. Meros saw the daemonettes charging, heard the crash of his bolter. Annellus leapt at the closest of the succubae and brought it down in a gush of polluted blood.

‘We go onwards,’ said Raldoron over the vox.

Kreed listened to the orchestra of murder beyond the walls of the Cathedral of the Mark and closed his eyes. The music of it was strange and powerful to him, and it stirred emotions that he had long thought dead inside him. The acolyte’s life had once been a tapestry of passionate joy and fulfilment at his work in his master’s name; then there had come the years of doubt and uncertainty, and now the renewal and rebirth in new purpose. But it was still a difficult time, and there was much to be relearned. Kreed wanted it more than he could express: the thought of taking a place in the Gal Vorbak, of wedding oneself to the mightiest of powers… That inspired him in a way that nothing in his life ever had. But he could not deny he had reservations. Not doubts, because those were things for weaklings. Concerns, perhaps. Matters he wished to understand before he took that final step.

He pushed past Captain Harox, who had wisely decided to maintain his brooding silence, and moved from the edge of the chamber. Kreed knew that the powers of the warp were so much greater than the mere meat and blood of beings like himself, and in the merging with one of them he might gain the kind of mastery that the serpent Erebus enjoyed. But as he watched the creatures Kyriss and Ka’Bandha goad one another, he wondered. They are not superior, Kreed thought. They’re like us. He smiled; this pleased him. When the time came, he would use that understanding to control his new power.

‘My serviles are all but extinguished,’ said the king-queen, wavering as it circled the pit in the floor. ‘I lavished so much upon them, and you have spent their lives in hours!’

The great Bloodthirster cocked its bull-head in callous amusement. ‘Their deaths oil the cogs of war’s engine,’ he rumbled. ‘What else are they for, indolent?’

Kyriss’s clawed foot stamped in bitter annoyance. ‘No, no, no! This is not the way! These cults, thrice-blessed in worship to Slaanesh, are not yours to squander. What kind of victory is this, killer? It is not only my loves that die, but the beasts of your army as well! Tell me, will the Blood God be pleased that you give up his minions so easily?’ The androgynous daemon waved its talons at the great circular window, and the battle raging beneath them. ‘Our serfs perish in their droves and you stand here and watch it happen. I turned these blighted human nests to the glory of the Ruinous Powers not for my own amusement, but for the promise of a greater victory. A larger plan in the Long War. Not for this!’

‘I know,’ spat Ka’Bandha, irritation marbling its tone. ‘I know what you were told.’ It leered towards Kreed with a mouth full of barbed fangs, as if daring him to offer an opinion. The Word Bearer kept his silence, waiting to see how the confrontation would play out.

‘Nothing seems to stop them, they are enraged beyond measure. Why do you let these Blood Whelps approach so closely?’ Kyriss demanded. ‘Your legions fall back and fall back. Soon these abhumans will be at our gates!’

The Bloodthirster released a hollow growl that might have been an attempt at a sigh. ‘Very soon,’ the winged beast sneered. ‘Pleasure-laggard, fool and wastrel. You are blind and stupid!’ Ka’Bandha hawked and angrily spat a plug of black matter against the bone floor, where it bubbled and frothed.

‘What is it doing?’ muttered Harox, breaking his silence at last.

‘Don’t speak,’ said Kreed.

‘You think your perverse games and little dramas are the fulcrum for the war, but you understand nothing.’ Ka’Bandha shook a fist at the pink-skinned creature. ‘You hide here in your palace, but I have been out there. I traded blows with this man-prey.’ The Bloodthirster’s feral jaws opened in a predatory smile. ‘And I tell you this. The “legionaries” die hard. I’ve tasted their fury, and I know they will not be beaten by force of arms alone.’

Kyriss made a negative noise. ‘You actually admire these ephemerals.’

Ka’Bandha ignored the reply. ‘The difference between us, coxcomb, is that I know how to defeat them.’ The daemon let its long tongue flick out and trace over its teeth, once again casting a jaundiced eye towards Kreed. ‘The sons of the Angel will be undone by their own flaw, and they will come to it drenched in the blood of their enemies. If we must sacrifice an army, a whole world for that, it is a price that shall be paid.’

‘And Sanguinius’s death is the key…’ It was a moment before Kreed realised that he had spoken.

The androgyne Kyriss turned on him, snarling. ‘Insolent insect! That is not our masters’ plan!’

‘No,’ said Ka’Bandha, a breaking-stone chuckle crackling inside its broad chest. ‘It is not.’

Raldoron gave the order to abandon the Mastodon when the transport became fouled in a nest of writhing tentacular masses at the foot of the bone temple. The Blood Angels deployed from the vehicle in rough order, forming into squads with wary, grim precision. The captain spared the woman Niobe a look. Her face was smeared with soot and she stumbled along at Meros’s side, sweating as she tried to keep pace with them.

Raldoron caught the Apothecary’s eye and nodded towards her, reminding him of his obligation to keep the pariah alive.

Huge crowds of aberrant creatures milled around the base of the massive cathedral in roaming packs, the flesh-hounds and the harriers snarling and barking at one another as they waited for the final attack to come.

Quick and clean, the legionaries advanced up a shallow incline towards the walls of ragged bone. The glowing haze was at its thickest here, the fog making it hard to see anything beyond a few metres distance. Preysight and light-modified visual settings through the optics of Raldoron’s combat helmet were no improvement. The sensors in his warplate constantly gave off erroneous data and filled the vision blocks with heat bloom. In the end, in irritation, he twisted off his helm and snapped it to the magnetic clasp on his hip. Without the breath grille to filter the tainted air, the thick, cloying odour of it gathered at the back of his throat. It tasted greasy and foul, like burned, spoiled fat left too long on a griddle.

They avoided the larger groups of the creatures, but it was necessary to quickly terminate smaller packs of the hellhounds that came sniffing after them, their low, nasal whines cutting the fog as they reacted to Niobe’s presence.

Pausing in the shadow of a broken spar of rockcrete, the First Captain scanned the tower rising up above them.

‘You do have a plan?’ Cassiel made the question sound like an accusation, and Raldoron’s first instinct was to rebuke him for his tone. Instead he held his tongue. The veteran went on. ‘Or do we just walk in through the gates of this abomination and ask to be taken to their leader?’

‘Orexis has cutting charges,’ he replied tersely. ‘We’ll make our own damned doorway.’

‘Does he have enough to bring this bloody place down? I doubt it.’

Raldoron glared at the sergeant. ‘Just follow orders, Cassiel. Leave the rest to me.’ His hand slipped to the pouch on his belt and he tapped it lightly, making sure that the targeting beacon secreted within was still there. The device had been placed in his hand by Azkaellon before he left the Red Tear, and he remembered the Guard Commander’s severe expression as he explained how it would function, if the need arose.

He looked up into the sky, and saw only the sallow clouds. Somewhere up there, set in position at high anchor away from the slow burn of battle that still raged on in orbit, the Scarlet Liberty was drifting with its bow aimed at the planet, lance cannons primed and missile batteries loaded and ready. Although the starship’s targeting sensors were blinded by the unusual atmospheric effects of Signus Prime’s corrupted skies, they would still – it was hoped – be able to see the beacon’s trace should Raldoron activate it. If triggered, in less than ninety seconds a hail of death from above would fall upon his location and obliterate everything – daemons, legionaries and the mysterious source of corruption Kano had spoken of.

That was the last-ditch plan, at least. To begin with, Raldoron had hoped it would not come to that, but now as he neared the objective, he wondered if it would simply be better to push the button now and let fate choose for them. This war, it had all become too supernatural for his liking, too mythic and surreal.

He frowned, annoyed at himself, and shook off the thought.

‘Captain!’ From nearby, Meros called out to him in a low hiss. ‘You should see this.’

Raldoron broke cover and moved fast and low, dodging between the ruined stubs of walls. The rise where the beasts had built their great temple was uneven, dotted with irregular patches of stone and broken roadway. The captain realised that the remains of a city lay beneath his feet, the buildings and streets cut back to almost nothing, threshed to their roots like crops cut by scythes. The Cathedral of the Mark was built on a mass grave, on a world that was littered with them.

Raldoron approached the Apothecary. Niobe was crouched close at hand, half-hidden in the shadow cast by Brother Racine, who stood with his bolter to his shoulder.

A trail of thick, dark blood crossed the dusty ground and pooled in the lee of a twisted stone pillar. Despite the cloying cocktail of rank odours on the breeze, the captain’s senses picked out the texture of a familiar trace: the blood of a legionary. The heavy, metallic smell was distinct and unpleasantly familiar, a scent-memory embedded in the recall of a thousand battles.

But not that of a Blood Angel. This too he knew instinctively. Meros moved and revealed the body of a warrior in steel-grey armour, the pelt of a great canine wrapped about him, the off-white fur now clumped with the vitae that had saturated it.

The Rune Priest’s body lay slumped against the pillar, a blade just out of reach where it had fallen from his numb fingers. His injuries were ugly: his throat was ragged and open, rough cuts and savage bite marks across his neck and face. The telltale points of sword strikes were visible all over his armour, each one deep and crusted with wet scabs. The legionary had dragged himself away across the wastes, leaving a ruby trail in his wake as his bio-implants had tried and failed to stem the tide of blood loss.

‘This is Jonor Stiel,’ said Meros. ‘He was Redknife’s battle-brother.’

Without warning, the Space Wolf’s eyes snapped open, as if he had been at rest, only waiting for someone to speak his name. Fresh jolts of fluid jerked from the murderous neck wound and crimson spittle foamed from his lips, soaking into his pale beard.

Raldoron stepped back in surprise as Meros drew up his medicae gauntlet, the mechanism whirring as he selected a drug philtre. But even as the Apothecary did so, the First Captain knew it was a hollow gesture.

The look of pure, unadulterated hatred in Stiel’s eyes was chilling. He glared at Meros and spat full in his face. The act was done with a cold, measured force of will and Raldoron suspected that the Space Wolf had been clinging on to his last skein of life just long enough to execute it.

Even as the light faded in his eyes, Stiel said something in the guttural, hard-edged vowels of his native tongue, a string of what could only be the most base and odious invective his people could voice.

‘He’s cursing us,’ said Raldoron, watching the Space Wolf die. ‘He blames us for this.’

‘You speak his language?’ said Racine.

‘I don’t need to.’

The Rune Priest’s body stilled, and Meros reached out to close his eyes. The Apothecary looked towards the captain. ‘His wounds–’

Raldoron silenced him with a shake of the head, but the unspoken words echoed in his thoughts. His wounds were not caused by the enemy.

‘Gather the legionaries,’ he told Racine. ‘We move on.’

Halerdyce Gerwyn awoke to screaming, and he was uncertain if the nightmare had ended, or if it had just been renewed in a different guise.

He stumbled from the pallet where he had collapsed what seemed like an age ago, finding the survivors and the ship crew fleeing from the decrepit metal chamber in abject panic. The remembrancer saw people trampled, vanishing as they dropped out of sight, slammed against the metal deck. He tried to resist as the press of bodies surged towards him, but he had nowhere else to go. Gerwyn stumbled and fell into a run with them. To resist would have seen him crushed.

Flowing like a tide, the humans boiled out into the Red Tear’s avenue-wide corridors and broke apart. The crowd went this way and that, desperation in their cries. He saw the old man, Zhomas, swept past in a flash. He was bleeding from a gash across his cheek, and stark fear robbed him of any sense of self.

Gerwyn tried to call out, but he struck a girder support and became dizzy, falling away from the crush long enough to gain some semblance of his bearings.

The corridor where he stood was open to the polluted sky, and in its murky depths he saw winged monstrosities angling down towards them, drawn by the stink of fear. Gerwyn had seen these winged furies before, in the tormented dreams and half-glimpsed visions that he had compulsively sketched on his pict-tablet. He had known even then that those things were real. The mass of them in his thoughts, the weight and facet, such details could only come from something that existed.

It did not matter that they defied nature and reason with their existence; that was what they were. A manifestation of unreality, bursting into this world like a bloom of madness.

Out there, he saw flashes of gold and red, racing to meet the daemons. The Blood Angels. The last legionaries onboard the ship had left them behind, abandoned the weak and the defenceless to rise to the fight. The remembrancer’s gut turned to ice and his legs trembled. He had seen that in the dreams as well, the full number of the warrior kindred possessed by a rage so great that they trampled the very men and women they were meant to defend in their rush to give themselves to battle. Guard Commander Azkaellon’s face ghosted through his thoughts; he had seen an apparition of that grim visage lit by a ferocity burning cold and eternal.

Gerwyn pounded the flat of his palms against his face, muttering denials over and over. If this was real, and the dream was the dream, which was worse? ‘This place is horror!’ he shouted, the words sputtering from his lips, tears streaking his face. The remembrancer felt his will breaking inside him, the fear – the colossal, monolithic fear – crushing him with its weight. He was going to die and there was nothing for him to do but wait for the moment.

Young, strong hands grabbed him by the shoulders and he was shaken roughly. ‘Snap out of it!’ shouted a voice.

Gerwyn looked up through misted eyes and saw the soldier from the Fasadian Infantry, the one called Dortmund. He seemed every inch the raw youth pressed into an older man’s uniform, unready for the dangers of a battle beyond his experience.

‘The trap closes,’ muttered the remembrancer, uncertain of where the words were coming from. ‘This is our end. They have abandoned us to perish.’

‘No–’ began Dortmund, but his words became a sudden, shill cry as his back arched. His eyes went wide as a serrated blade burst from his chest, rusted and dull with the action of many past murders upon it. The weapon was withdrawn, a wet sucking chug of blood going with it, and Dortmund dropped to the deck.

The muscular, thuggish survivor who had come with the rest of the Scoltrum evacuees stood with a dripping knife in his fist. Gerwyn backed away, but the girders hemmed him in.

Over the big man’s shoulders he saw the furies alighting on the spars of broken hull metal, claws and teeth rattling as they were drawn by the scent of blood.

‘This was always how your story was going to end,’ said Hengist, his eyes alight with fervour in the moment before he buried his blade in the remembrancer’s heart.

The daemon Kyriss scuttled across the bone floor with a high-pitched yelp and came at Tanus Kreed in a flash of talons and noise. Harox was drawing his sword, more by reflex than by forethought, coming to his defence, but it meant little. The creature batted the Word Bearers captain away and sent him tumbling over the skull-tiles, dangerously close to the edge of the great pit. Kreed hesitated a moment too long going for his own weapon, and then it was too late. Kyriss’s massive crab-claw snapped open and caught him between its barbs.

‘Pathetic meat,’ it spat. ‘What have you done? You provoke this? Your arrogant godling primarchs dare to leave the path we cut for them?’

Kreed grabbed at the claw, holding it back. It took most of his strength, and he feared that Kyriss could make short work of him if it wished, closing the vice to snip his head clean from his neck. He shot a look at the Bloodthirster, but the other beast merely grinned at the sport of it.

‘Child of Slaanesh,’ growled Ka’Bandha, making the title a mocking slur, ‘you spend so long playing your games upon silken beds and in whispering halls, you forget that the pieces sometimes have minds of their own.’

Kyriss gave a petulant grunt and released Kreed, shaking him off. ‘I am the player of games, not the played!’ it shouted, the rise of its voice screeching off the walls.

‘The obvious escapes you,’ said the Bloodthirster. ‘Our masters wish the Angel to come to our banner, and bring his army into the schism. The Warmaster does not. Open your eyes, fool! The souls of these abhumans are clear even to one as blunt as I! The Warmaster does not wish to stand in the shadow of his angelic brother again! Sanguinius must be killed, and to be killed he must first be broken.’

‘No, no,’ Kyriss shook its head. ‘The Angel comes to us! That was the agreement! With him we have all we need, and the advance begins. That is how it will be done!’

‘Warmaster Horus begs to differ,’ managed Kreed, picking himself up from the ground. ‘I submit to you that no matter how much power you bring to him, you will never rule his heart.’ He coughed, spitting blood. ‘Perhaps your gods did not choose as wisely as they thought.’

‘Silence, animal!’ Kyriss shouted him down, then wheeled to sputter at the Bloodthirster. ‘What pact have you made without me? Speak now! Reveal it!’

‘The Angel will die today,’ intoned Ka’Bandha, drawing his great axe and weighing it in his hand. ‘One wound to fell him, one more to end him.’ He licked the edge of the weapon. ‘It will be sweet. At the end, he will beg me for it.’

Kyriss snorted. ‘He is prideful. He would never submit!’

‘He is brittle!’ Ka’Bandha snapped. ‘We have set his sons to madness and fury. Answer me this – once they have killed every servile cultist and lesser spawn on this blighted plain, what will they kill next? When their bloodlust has been stoked so high that they see nothing but the scarlet path and the red joy of murder, who will die then?’

‘The Blood Angels will turn upon each other…’ The skinless, sinuous daemon said the words with growing relish.

The Bloodthirster’s grotesque snout bobbed. ‘And only the most brutal, the most blood-hungry of them, will survive. The essence of their pure souls burned away until only the mindless beast remains.’ He extended his clawed hand, as if in a gesture of twisted, abhorrent comradeship. Upon the beast’s upturned palm, Kreed saw a complex glyph of angular lines crossing one another; the writhing, burning shape of the sigil hurt him to look upon it. ‘In that moment I will offer them the Mark of Khorne, and they will take it without hesitation. Can you imagine the heart of the Angel in that moment, Kyriss? How his love for his sons will strangle him with a flood of the bleakest despair? His heart will break and the Blood God will have a new army.’

‘And the Angel will weep.’ Kyriss licked its lips, savouring the thought, wavering between his orders and this new possibility. ‘That would be delectable.’

Ka’Bandha nodded, then pointed at the other daemon. ‘Of course, that flesh-proxy you wear will need to die along the way. But your essence will be freed to return to the warp through the meat-death.’

‘What?’ Kyriss’s pinkish-grey flesh flushed red with renewed fury, the pendulum of its manner swinging back towards anger. ‘No! I am no sacrifice for this maggot! I am the mistress-master, high beast and exalted! I did not manifest in this place to be manipulated like some ephemeral. The Warmaster will obey!’

‘You’re wrong,’ said Kreed, finding a new boldness with the words. ‘The Bloodthirster sees it, even if you do not. You underestimate the Warmaster at your cost, daemon. Your champion has plans of his own that you will never be able to control.’

He opened his eyes and rose from his knees, red sand swirling about him with every movement. Kano staggered forwards, and pain was his reward. Each footstep across the rust-coloured stone was knives jammed into his chest.

He marched on his agony, clad only in a hooded fighting surplice. Blood sluiced from his body, fat red droplets of it tapping out a cadence across the stonework, painting his path.

So much blood. Could the body hold such a volume? Kano was wet with it, the slow and constant flow from the seeping punctures in his throat. I should be dead. The stream was steady as rainfall. It should have stopped. It should stop! The healer implant, the organ of Larraman, was failing him. The wounds should have clotted and closed by now! Kano had never bled for so long. He did not understand why he was still alive. He did not understand where he was.

Out beyond the arches of the endless cloister he saw a burned, post-nuclear desert and, closer to hand, the towers of a fallen citadel and the broken stubs of shattered statues. This was Baal, the home world of the Blood Angels, and he was walking the ruins of their fortress-monastery.

But that was not so. Baal thrived! The fortress was intact and whole, the Legion strong and steady–

But not here. In his bones, Kano felt an uncountable weight of ages, a span of time and distance so broad he could not measure it. The bleak sky over his head was filled with dying suns and only a handful shone brightly, clustered as if watching over him.

This was not now, he realised. He was looking into an age unhappened, a vision of a remote tomorrow ten or twenty or a hundred thousand years hence.

Is this all that will remain of us? The question chilled him. Ruins and dust?

The nerves in Kano’s bare feet caught fire and he staggered back, glancing downwards to find the source of the pain. There, snaking away along the unending cloister, were two thick ropes of heavy, woven silk. One black, one red.

He stooped awkwardly to gather them up, flinching at the pain that coursed through his hands at their touch. Hissing, Kano pulled at the cords and threaded them between his stiffening fingers.

I have to follow. He was here for a reason. I have to see. He was here to see something. To find someone.

The bright stars dazzled his eyes. He looked up at them and felt his world turn suddenly, inverting, the walls of the stone arcade becoming drenched in blackness.

Through the far arch the red rock became dark metal whorled with quivering, ever-shifting glyphs. The passageway had changed. Now it was a portal into a different place, a scene that sickened Kano to observe it.

A ship, a throne room, a mad lord’s lair. He saw a baleful eye with a slit black pupil against a blood-crimson field and beneath it a great portal looking down upon a world that could only be Terra. Fires in the space around it. Ships burning in their thousands. A war of unspeakable ferocity, but all of it rendered insignificant by the two titans who faced each other alone across the blood-streaked deck.

One, a god in gold and platinum with laurels about his head and a sword made of righteous fury in his hand, a being of such majesty that Kano was thrown to his knees by the aura of his perfection.

The Emperor, beloved by all.

The other, night-clad in black iron and brass, glowering and tall like a war engine wearing the face of a man, the skulls of dead heroes jangling from his belt, a great claw clasping at the air and a spiked mace raised high.

Warmaster Horus, traitor son.

Kano saw and knew it could not be happening. He saw it and he knew it did happen, would happen, will happen, could happen.

Sword crossed armour and fell away in sparks. The Warmaster shouted defiance at his father and shattered the blade with his mace. Incredibly, the Emperor staggered beneath the blow.

And then with a sound like mountains colliding, the Warmaster’s leviathan claw pierced the Emperor’s armour and he bled fire. Son murdered father, and Kano watched it occur, the shock of the sight turning him to stone.

He was not there.

When Kano opened his eyes everything was different.

Gone were the black iron walls of the battle-barge and in their place he saw the polished marble of the Imperial Palace’s crystal arboria, the air full of smouldering flowers and the great crystalflex dome raining down in fragments. Above, a cluster of bright burning stars. Only five now.

Joy surged in him to see the Angel, alive, in full force and presence, storming forwards with a glittering spear in his grip, his wings rising high and wide in gales of white. At Sanguinius’s back, an army of his battle-brothers with fury chained for war.

They ran towards a battle host of dark armour and screaming, horned faces. At the head of the enemy legion, shouting curses in dead languages, Horus stood wreathed in a stygian cloak.

Sanguinius gave a shout and hurled the spear with such force that a sonic boom shocked across the ruined gardens. The blade-tip fell true, piercing the black-slit eye upon the Warmaster’s chest. Horus perished, his body erupting into flames.

His brother is dead.

Everything was different.

Now the ruins of Signus Prime returned to his sight, the great bone temple no more than an ossuary heap, skeletons slagged to black ash by warp-fire.

A new monument to horror stood in its stead, alike to the trees of the world called Murder, a scaffold built of dead legionaries. Four stars shone down upon it. Around its base stood the last of the Blood Angels, each chipping at their armour, defacing the wings of the aquila that they once bore so proudly. Etching instead, with acid and broken swords, a new shape. Angle upon angle, heavy thick lines that resembled an iron skull, a throne for a God of Blood. Consecrating their new, heretic loyalty over the bodies of their dead brothers and the broken spirit of their father.

His Legion falls to hell.

A blink of reality and nothing was the same.

And so again, in the halls of the Vengeful Spirit, as Sanguinius struck out at his brother, cutting a fearsome crack in the Warmaster’s nigh-impregnable armour. But it was not enough, and the Angel’s great red blade broke. Warmaster Horus’s monstrous claw clasped at Sanguinius’s throat and Kano felt it about his own. The Angel’s bones shattered as the life was crushed from him. Another star flared and faded.

He dies there.

The world changed.

A chamber of kings once more, but on no world Kano knew. A crowd of warriors from a dozen Legions gathered, in colours across the spectrum under pennants of glory and promise. The Angel and a cluster of his brothers, solemn and determined in equal measure. Overhead, a star died.

Legionaries, humans and primarchs, all of them bowed to Sanguinius as he sat himself upon the throne of empire, the laurel about his head.

Kano reached out, but the only word on his lips was ‘master’.

He is Emperor.

And the cloister returned, the sand and the endless sound of the winds; but this was not a distant tomorrow. It was far closer. He saw the gates to the caverns beneath Baal’s red desert, where the Hall of Heroes resided. The last star slowly dimmed.

Kano heard the Angel’s voice. I dreamed of you, my friend. He spoke of Raldoron, and Kano saw the First Captain crossing the corridor. A majestic grav-litter of gold and ruby followed him. I saw you on Baal. You were in the caverns beneath the fortress-monastery. You were filled with pride.

And Raldoron was proud; but he wept with it and bore a black band of mourning across his arm. He led the body of their father towards its final resting place.

He will die.

Kano opened his eyes for the last time and beheld a warrior in heavy, archaic armour glistening with wet crimson and hellish radiance, raised aloft by a pair of massive wings drenched in vitae, every feather dripping with tainted blood.

A screaming, red-stained angel.

EIGHTEEN

In the Company of Death
Ragefire
Vengeance

The red tide broke upon the walls of the great cathedral with unspeakable violence and the clash of a hundred thousand weapons. Leaderless and out of control, the Blood Angels acted on lethal instinct, converging at the towers of bone with only one impulse powering them forwards. Hate drove them into the cohorts of bloodletters and succubae defending the approaches to the temple, and they tore the daemonic creatures into shreds. The sons of Sanguinius were no longer a Legion, but a force of nature laying waste to everything that stood in their way.

Bolters screamed and filled the air with fyceline smoke and explosive fire; and when the guns ran dry they became clubs, or else they were forgotten in favour of blades and chainswords, battle mauls and power fists. Space Marines, Terminators and Dreadnoughts united in one single emotion: rage.

That fury manifested itself in a need for blood, an unquenchable thirst for the spilling of their enemy’s life essence. The pitiful colonists of Signus Prime – the ones who had not the fortune to die quickly for sake of the gargantuan ossuary or to turn to the perverse worship of the hell-cults – had been the meat upon which the daemons had built new bodies for themselves. Every flight of furies, every harrier or foot soldier beast had been reborn from a man or woman who had once been wholly human. The lesser daemons could not manifest completely in this place, and so it was that they needed meat to clothe their twisted soul-energies. The warp spawn inhabited them, malformed them, made them flesh-proxy.

But that flesh could bleed, and it could die. On the steps of the Cathedral of the Mark, the Blood Angels painted the ground red.

Perhaps it had taken them an eternity, or perhaps the blink of an eye. Time seemed malleable inside the bone temple, moving in fits and starts instead of linear progression. Meros had lost count of the number of creatures they had dispatched as they climbed the wide spiralling staircase that rose up inside the central tower. As before, when they had flown across the battle zone towards the cathedral, they seemed to move without travelling, and more than once he wondered if it were all some trick of the mind.

It was Niobe who showed them the way. He carried her, for she could not keep up with their pace, hoisting her to his shoulder in the way a parent might cradle a child. The woman lost her voice – through fear or something else, he could not be sure – but she pointed this way and that, directing them along arcades of bone and through the endless passages. The beasts looked through her, ignoring them, and Raldoron used the advantage well, killing anything that could threaten them.

But as they came to the tall, wavering curtains of tanned human flesh, Niobe let out a whimper, which became a sob and then a cry, low and pained. Blood flowed freely from her nostrils.

Guns and swords drawn, the legionaries stormed into the chamber and found the masters of the horrors they had been fighting for so long.

There were two of them: one was the bat-winged bastard that had struck down the Angel and taken the lives of Nakir’s company, the other the serpent-goat freak that had dared to challenge the primarch on the bridge of his flagship. Meros had never felt any hatred as righteous as the one that burst inside him at that moment. The reaction was pure: these creatures were simply not supposed to exist. All he wanted at that moment was to make that a certainty.

The Bloodthirster reacted with a roar of fury and flew at them across the pit in the centre of the chamber, black wings snapping as it soared up and dove down at the legionaries.

Raldoron shouted the order to scatter and the warriors broke apart in a flurry of motion. Meros shoved Niobe into cover as Orexis moved with him, both Blood Angels turning as they ran to fire at the screeching daemon lord.

The one that called itself Ka’Bandha landed like an earthquake and struck out with axe and whip. Meros saw Racine and two more battle-brothers sliced open. He shouted and fired at the beast’s head, aiming for its eyes, but the creature blocked the shots with the flat of its massive axe.

Spears of fire erupted into being as the legionaries released a salvo of plasma bolts at the monster’s torso and its gnarled legs, shots striking home in flash-cracks of burned, rotten tissue and oily fluids. It roared as the warriors hurled fire into its path, stomping forwards and taking the hits as if it relished the brutality of the pain.

The other beast-lord, the thing Kyriss, danced and spun at the far side of the chamber, giggling and braying with harsh amusement as it watched the fight unfold. Close to the sallow-fleshed monster, Meros glimpsed figures that rang a wrong note in his mind. He saw two warriors of the Legiones Astartes, silhouetted in the daemon’s repellent aura. The armour was unmistakable, Mark IV warplate.

But the colour was wrong. These were not Blood Angels. He could make out what looked like odd runic texts carved into the defaced ceramite, and where there should have been a sanctioned sigil of the Imperial Legions upon their shoulder pauldron there was only the grotesque icon of a howling devil-face.

‘Kreed,’ hissed Sergeant Orexis, recognising the traitors. ‘Harox. They dare show themselves…’

Any lingering doubts about the alliance between the Word Bearers and the architects of the Signus atrocity melted away and Meros cursed them. He went to take aim, but a group of horn-crested monsters clambered out of the glowing pit, hellblades burning in their claws. They rushed forwards to join the Bloodthirster, cutting at the air and roaring.

Raldoron and the rest of the squad retaliated, splitting their fire between the great monster and its soldier-minions. The brass whip cracked like thunder and more men died. Crimson-skinned daemons scuttled forwards, stabbing as they went, wailing as they tasted the aura of Niobe’s null-zone about them.

The First Captain vaulted from cover and killed one, blowing it apart. ‘Orexis!’ he shouted. ‘Converge fire on the leader!’ He shot Meros a glare. ‘The witch-mind! Bring her, keep her close! She pains them!’

The Apothecary turned to Niobe, who shook her head violently. ‘No,’ she cried. ‘Don’t you hear him?’ The female suddenly grabbed at Meros’s arm and looked at him with wild eyes. ‘Can’t you hear him screaming?’

‘Come with me,’ he insisted. ‘I will keep you safe–’

‘You can’t save him!’ Niobe shouted. ‘They have already killed him a million times over!’ Her hand jerked, and she pointed furiously up towards the apex of the tower above. ‘There is nothing left!’

Both Meros and Raldoron looked where she indicated and saw the massive brass-and-crystal mechanism hanging from its tethers above them, swaying as eldritch energy flicked around its corners. It seemed to waver and then grow clearer, as if Niobe’s scrutiny made it more real. The thick crimson mist inside was swirling with turbulence, almost as if it were trying to escape from the confines of the arcane capsule.

‘Look what they have done to him!’ yelled Niobe, tears streaking her smoke-dirty face. ‘Can you not see?’

The light from the haze touched the anger kindling in Meros’s hearts and he remembered the moment on the battlefield when Ka’Bandha had shackled the same force to kill a whole company of his brothers. Kano had spoken of a source to all the fury and pain that cast its shadow over the Signus Cluster, and there was no doubt in the legionary’s mind that at this moment, he looked upon it.

He could not describe it, the emotion that ran through him with such stark force. It was beyond fear and knowledge, beyond certainty. Meros had no experience with which to frame this understanding. He simply knew that this thing had to be destroyed.

It was then he saw the face.

The boiling, churning mist gathered and thickened, and for one brief instant it tried to make the shape of a man. But not a man. A legionary. A Blood Angel.

The half-formed image wavered, as if it could not quite remember how to hold itself solid, but it was enough for Raldoron to utter a vehement Baalite curse, enough for the blood to drain from the First Captain’s face in a moment of ghastly recognition.

‘I know him,’ Raldoron husked. ‘In the Throne’s name, it is Tagas! The captain of the 111th!’

‘No,’ Meros shook his head. ‘That cannot be… Captain Tagas died on One-Forty-Twenty, the world called Murder.’ He remembered the memorial scrolls upon the Red Tear’s honour wall, Tagas’s name there along with all the others. ‘It’s a trick!’

‘His body was never recovered,’ said Raldoron, emotion choking his words. ‘I knew him better than any battle-brother in the Legion! I swear it is he! He is trapped–’

Even as he said the words, the face in the red mist broke apart and it became inchoate again, as if the essence of fury had been distilled into an elemental mass and contained, chained like the sun-bright plasma of a fusion reactor’s core. The brief moment of coherence was lost forever.

An instinct drew Meros’s line of sight back towards the creature Kyriss, its doe-eyed gaze meeting his for a brief instant. It laughed at him, great mocking shakes of its muscular torso resonating out in chugs of derision from its bovine snout. Meros glimpsed the unending cruelty in that predatory stare and knew that Raldoron was not mistaken. ‘I think they killed him long ago, captain. They have bound him into that infernal device.’

‘Can you hear his screams?’ said Niobe. ‘What have they done to him?’

A brother of their Legion, a dead legionary yet undying, and these monsters had committed their greatest act of desecration upon him. If anything of Tagas had still remained, it was the wisp of a soul, the faintest echo of what he once had been, and he had spent it on warning them of what they were about to face.

Kano came back, and the transition was punishing. His thoughts were a jumble of incoherent images and half-felt emotions, pieces of his self left scattered in the trail of a rough awakening. He had been so close to his master’s thoughts, barely touching the trapped mind of the primarch, but then it had all gone away. His connection snapped, broken into flaming threads. The dream-realm and the visions, the strange future scenes he had witnessed, all were dragged back into nothing and Kano was ejected from the ethereal.

Reality interposed itself on him with crushing force and the legionary collapsed to the deck, his hands flat upon the metal floor of the medicae chamber. The odour of burned flesh and hot ash stung his nostrils and he blinked, trying to see through rheumy eyes. Kano heard a low, gasping moan and raised his head. He was so weak; there was barely enough energy in him to take a breath. The meta-concert of minds had drained him to the marrow.

He looked up to see Ecanus sink to his knees, a fountain of arterial blood spurting up from a grotesque wound in his neck. Kano’s trusted friend and battle-brother died then, the light fading from his eyes, his body toppling forwards to land in a heap.

Ecanus was not the only one. The others had perished, but in a manner more horrific, more fantastic. Salvator, Novenus, Deon, all of them were burned grey effigies of themselves, their bodies consumed from within by uncontrolled psi-fire. His brothers had surrendered themselves to project his consciousness into Sanguinius’s mind, through the veil of darkness – and all for nought.

Kano tried to rise, and he saw how Ecanus had been killed. A figure stood over the dead psyker, a human with a mad gaze and a heavy blade in his hand.

Murder, then, not sacrifice.

A legionary’s blood glistened on the knife, but as Kano watched the metal seemed to drink it in, absorbing the vitae into itself. The man was one of the survivors Meros had recovered from Scoltrum. Just a man, an ordinary human being.

And yet he had killed a Space Marine, tearing open poor Ecanus as he drifted insensate in the depths of a psychic trance. A coward’s assault.

‘I will… end you for that…’ Kano struggled, unable to gain a footing. Anger flashed in his eyes. His body refused to obey him. ‘Why…?’

‘This is always how it was going to end,’ said the man, and there was an echo under his words, as if another voice was making him parrot its own speech. ‘Hengist was always loyal, embedded from the start, born and raised to obey. A weapon-son, a piece upon the board placed to be ready.’ Suddenly his face twisted in a leering, snarl. ‘I always knew!’ He shouted the words, spittle flying from his lips. ‘Hengist and Lutgardis, Horsa and Phyria, the cult-brothers were ready.’ The blade came up; now it was clean. ‘Always ready,’ he muttered.

Kano watched him pull back the hood over his scalp and saw where the man had cut a ring studded with eight points into his forehead. Ecanus’s killer stalked towards him around the cruciform dais where the primarch still lay, silent and unmoving.

The warrior dragged himself to his knees, pulling at a pillar to support his weight. This madman would murder him as he had murdered Ecanus, striking when he was weakened and unable to fight back. Sanguinius would never be re-awakened.

Kano lost his grip and crashed back to the floor. His vision blurred and he tried desperately to pull himself away from the moment, from the betrayal of his flesh towards the eternal strength of his soul.

‘You will die now,’ said the madman.

‘You first,’ grated Kano, as his thoughts touched a burning kernel of power lost and deep inside his spirit. A power he had kept corralled for far too long.

The psyker raised his hand and let go. The air shrieked as a crackling bolt of ruby lightning erupted from Kano’s palm and strobed across the chamber. Hengist exploded even before he could scream in pain, blood and meat vaporising in a wet mist that darkened the floor and ceiling. After-light energy discharged randomly, crawling across the metal decking, short-circuiting sense monitors and biolume stacks.

It could have been a hundred years before Kano dragged himself from the compartment, lurching into the corridor. He fell against the walls, stumbling like a drunkard. Signus Prime’s wan light spilled into the broken passageway, the dust in the reeking air coating the bodies of the dead that littered the floor. Human corpses lay everywhere he looked, and sat upon the chests of some of them were winged harpies feasting upon their cooling meat.

The creatures spat when they saw Kano coming. They burst into frantic flight, wings droning as they spun out into the dead sky through the places where the Red Tear’s hull had been ripped away.

Kano stumbled again, falling against the broken wall. It took all he had in him to come this far. He wanted to drop to the deck and slumber, let the lull of his sus-an membrane overtake his taxed body and rest. To do so would be to admit the truth.

‘I have failed…’ he breathed. The promise he had made – to give his all to reach out to the mind of his primarch, trapped there in a cage of tormented visions – that promise had crumbled beyond his grasp, and the very warriors who might have turned the tide of this war lay dead because of it. He had been so close. Just a few moments more, if Ecanus had not been killed…

All around him the empty halls of the grounded battle-barge were mute witness to this unfolding truth. His brothers were gone, the Red Tear abandoned as the great thirst for blood had finally overwhelmed the Legion. Kano peered at the distant tower of the hellish cathedral. The tower of bone was calling to him as it had called to them all. It would be the monument to their ending.

A tide of wretched misery swept over Kano, so great that it robbed him of his breath. ‘I have failed my Legion. My kinsmen. My primarch.’ He closed his eyes to the shame of it.

‘You have not.’

Kano jerked, eyes snapping open as if bolting awake from the deepest sleep. Despite the chill and the foetor of the air, despite the bleak radiance of the Signusi stars bleeding through the sickly sky, there was bright amber and shining white before him.

A towering figure, a mythic form carved by light and forged from gold and crimson. Sanguinius stood over him, the Angel’s expression that of a father filled with all the conflicting emotions his soul could contain. Pride and sorrow, dread and elation, these and a hundred more.

‘My lord,’ Kano whispered, afraid to believe it. He reached out to touch the primarch’s arm. This was no vision; his fingers met sun-warmed ceramite.

For a moment, the greatest sadness weighed the Angel’s patrician face. ‘You gave much to bring me back, my son. You paid a high cost.’

‘We did what we thought was right…’

He raised a hand to silence him. ‘We’ll speak of that, but not now.’ He frowned. ‘Where are your brothers, Kano?’

The legionary raised a weary hand and pointed towards the Cathedral of the Mark.

Sanguinius nodded gravely, his amber eyes surveying the wreckage around them with dismay. ‘Look at what has been wrought here, set in motion by lies.’ He stumbled back on his injured legs, his powerful wings unfurling to their fullest extent. ‘I swear to you, it will go no further.’ Kano’s liege lord spared him a look, briefly placing a hand on his shoulder. ‘Your battle today has been fought and won. Now I will end this.’

With a storm-roar, the Angel vaulted into the sky, drawing his great crimson sword as he rose. Polluted clouds broke, scattering away from him as if in fear, and the primarch became a streak of golden fire, falling towards the temple of bones like a blazing comet.

A single feather, pure and dazzling white, settled slowly to the deck at Kano’s feet.

Since the war for Signus had begun, Captain Raldoron had seen much that had tested his reason, his stoic character, and for want of a better word, his faith. Yet it seemed that there would be no end to the obscenity of betrayal that patterned every assault the Blood Angels had suffered. Lies and hidden truths, creatures out of myth and fable, all these things were hard to take – but none so difficult as the risible horror of treachery.

Raldoron discharged his bolter into the screeching face of a bloodletter, beheading it with the gun’s back-blast. The crimson-skinned body stumbled about, sword still swinging wildly. He finished it with a hard kick that sent the daemon-form stumbling back over the lip of the glowing pit and down towards the eldritch fires writhing below. Warp-flame licked hungrily at the walls of the broad flue, emerging from some non-space pierced by the psychic pain of millions of victims.

As the battle raged about the chamber, his warriors continuing to engage Ka’Bandha and the other monstrous fiends, the captain’s gaze slipped for a heartbeat. It dropped towards the alien light of the pit. The illumination leaking from it soured everything. It was as if the Cathedral of the Mark had been built atop a wound in the flesh of reality.

The distraction almost took his life. A curved scimitar flashed at the edge of his vision and he spun, narrowly avoiding a cut that would have opened him wide.

Harox. The taciturn Word Bearer had come to make a trophy of the Blood Angel.

‘Why have you done this?’ Raldoron snapped, the question escaping him. ‘Why did you turn?’

‘You will never know, nor would you ever understand,’ Harox grunted, feinting, striking back with his sword.

‘Damn you, then!’ The curse exploded from Raldoron’s lips in a violent shout, and he felt his control slip away. The captain’s bolter barked twice, the rounds slamming into Harox at close range. Divots of armour blasted free and the Word Bearer stumbled. ‘Damn you!’ Raldoron’s fury took him and he clubbed Harox down to the floor of skulls with the smoking barrel of the gun, batting his sword from his grip with mad ferocity.

His armoured fist opened and without conscious thought, Raldoron tore across Harox’s neck, ripping it open. The Word Bearer’s blood jetted out in a cascade of crimson, splashing across his attacker. Before Harox could scramble free, Raldoron finished him, caving in his opponent’s skull with his armoured boot.

He rocked back, shocked at the abrupt pulse of aggression that had moved through him. Tainted blood covered his armour, smoking into vapour.

Kyriss watched it all, and threw him a mocking bow, cackling at the scene. Immediately, the anger returned and Raldoron took a step towards the serpentine daemon, his thoughts filling with the desire to tear it open and see the colour of its blood, just as he had with Harox.

He halted, pushing back against the impulse, refusing to let it take control. Raldoron instinctively glanced up and saw the roiling crimson aura bathing him, the hideous glow of the captured rage in the crystal capsule. The malevolent influence of the daemonic device was growing stronger with every passing second. It had to be destroyed.

The captain sprinted for the edge of the chamber, towards a ladder made of limb bones that rose towards a ribcage gantry ringing the walls. If he could get close, find an angle to take a shot…

‘Where are you going, insect?’ Hot, cloying breath washed over him with a foul stink like rotting flowers, and suddenly Kyriss was there in front of him, the creature’s sinuous legs and multiple arms twitching. The beast skipped towards him, blocking his path. ‘So transparent,’ it lowed, sniggering. ‘Do you not yet understand? You cannot win! You can only give yourself to the ragefire.’ Kyriss nodded towards Harox’s corpse and burst out laughing, spiteful and loud. ‘You already have!’

The fury rose again and Raldoron let it propel him forwards. He coiled his muscles and sprang at the daemon – but not in attack, as it expected. Instead, he dodged right, twisting to slip past beneath its guard towards the ladder.

The captain’s boots cracked across the crowns of broken skulls, but then the world became a wall of pain and his ruse was blunted. Kyriss pirouetted like a dancer and one of the black claws on its secondary arms raked across his chest and shoulder, shredding ceramite and ripping away his pauldron. The talon closed, and Raldoron felt his innards being crushed as his armour was compacted.

‘Khorne-child!’ Kyriss called out to its daemonic companion. ‘Deal with this.’

The bat-winged goliath across the chamber knocked away a pair of warriors firing on it and turned. Kyriss discarded Raldoron like a distasteful piece of meat and he spun from its killing grip, tumbling across the mottled floor to halt beneath the sickly illumination of the vast cathedral window.

Ka’Bandha stalked closer as Raldoron struggled to his knees, grasping for the handle of his sword. The captain saw the wicked smile on the monster’s lips, saw the rise of its massive, rough-hewn axe. ‘The blood of the weak will oil the blades of the strong.’ The words bubbled deep in its throat.

The axe-head rose for the killing blow, just as a shadow passed across the maimed suns in the sky outside. A shadow in grace and swiftness, moving with unstoppable purpose.

The beast Ka’Bandha hesitated.

Glassy matter and bone frames exploded into millions of fragments, the circular mandala-window destroyed by the force of the Angel’s arrival.

Sanguinius landed with a thunderous roar at his back, his wings rising in shimmering arches of white, the shine of his battle armour as dazzling as the light of daybreak. A pure force of will radiated from him, magnificent and unending. The primarch was at that moment the very antithesis of the shroud of hate and horror that had taken root on Signus Prime; it was as if the universe itself had decided to express its disgust at these daemon-things through his martial fury. Sanguinius rose like a golden storm, vengeance incarnate, the righteous power of a brother betrayed and a father wronged crackling at his fingertips.

Lightning-swift, he surged forwards, the length of his crimson-bladed great sword lifting to cut the ashen dust. He did not turn to lay his gaze upon the goat-headed Kyriss, not even for an instant, yet Sanguinius’s sword left his hand with a flick of his forearm and it sang as it sliced through the air towards the pink-skinned daemon.

The tip of the blade pierced Kyriss’s muscular gut with such force that ran it through, slamming the beast back into the walls of the bone temple. The creature released a high-pitched, ululating scream as it struggled in place, pinned there by the full length of the sword, like an insect of curious nature captured for study.

This was done, on fleet foot, in the blink of an eye. The Bloodthirster was already turning towards the Angel, its execution of Captain Raldoron forgotten in the face of this new attack. Axe and lash flexed in brawny, clawed hands as it squared up to meet him.

Sanguinius crossed the yellowed tessellate of the chamber floor, the cheers of his noble sons echoing. Bloodletters baying for murder rushed to meet him, hellblades red as hate rebounding off his armour. The primarch gave them little heed, smashing them aside or crushing them into the ground with heavy swinging blows from his mailed fists.

Ka’Bandha spat and threw the arc of his whip out in a downward stroke. Sanguinius did not falter in his approach, his left wing snapping forwards to cloak his face, meeting the barbed tip of the lash, blood jetting where the hooks bit deep. He hissed in pain but shrugged off the assault, closing to point-blank distance, reaching for his foe. The daemon was ready for him and the Bloodthirster’s other arm fell with the axe set to cleave the Angel’s skull in two. Sanguinius’s hands came together in a strident crash of sound, catching the blade between them.

For a brief moment, the two titans struggled against each other, eyes locked, muscles bunching.

‘You came back,’ grated the daemon.

‘My sons found me.’

‘That changes nothing, little angel.’ The axe trembled, shifting back and forth. One mistake and the blade would fall.

Across the chamber, the impaled Kyriss bellowed over the sound of the Angel’s legionaries in battle with its foot soldiers. ‘Kill him!’

Ka’Bandha’s tongue flicked. ‘Your precious Legion will be destroyed, Sanguinius. You cannot stop it. Even now your chosen are caught in the depths of a killing rage they cannot escape. It is too late! The poison is in them. You know that as well as I.’

‘Perhaps,’ hissed Sanguinius. ‘But they will not fall today. I will not permit it.’ He bared his fangs in a snarl. ‘This ends now… daemon.’

With a wordless shout, the Angel twisted his arms, his hands tearing at the strange, grisly material of the axe-head. A sickening crack broke about the room like the snapping of a spine, and Ka’Bandha’s weapon shattered across its length, scattering pieces of shrapnel. Before the creature could react, Sanguinius grasped one of the Bloodthirster’s curved horns and jerked it forwards with all his might. The primarch brought up his fist to meet the beast’s snout and landed a flurry of quick blows from the knuckles of his gauntlet before Ka’Bandha shoved him away.

Spitting out gobs of black, fuming blood and broken teeth, the daemon growled. ‘Look at you. Where is the noble angel now, abhuman? Better the sweet blood to smother you!’ Ka’Bandha’s arm swung back, the brass cords of its whip scraping across the bone floor, flicking up into the air for another lethal blow as powerful as the one that had struck down the Angel upon the Plains of the Damned.

Sanguinius reacted faster than the eye could follow. He flashed into the air, wings crackling, and caught the razored tips of the whip before they could reach him. The cords burned where they touched the ceramite, pennants of vapour issuing from between his armoured fingers. The primarch dove at the Bloodthirster, dragging the lash with down him, and before the creature could react, he pulled the whip into a loop across the howling monster’s throat.

Angel and daemon collided, crashing to the floor. Ka’Bandha released its grip on the lash, but it was too late; the brass cables pulled tight. Sanguinius gave the whip a violent tug and the Bloodthirster’s howls became strangled, frenzied barks.

The beast tried to break free, swatting at the primarch, grasping at air. Its bat-like wings unfurled, the talons at their tips, scratching gouges in Sanguinius’s armour.

With cold and lethal precision, the primarch arrested the wild, beating motion of one of the freakish wings with his free hand. ‘Only angels may fly,’ he said darkly, tearing out the black pinion.

The sound was like the splitting of a great sack-cloth sail, and the daemon Ka’Bandha screamed loud enough to shake the walls. Warpfire gushed from the stump of the wing and it shuddered in agony, a sensation it had only known previously from the cries of its enemies.

With the whip still coiled about its neck, the Angel dragged the spitting, wounded fiend to the lip of the pit in the middle of the chamber, then lifted it up so he could look it in the face. The daemon cackled through its pain, convulsing as it tried to shake free. ‘I will take your skull yet.’

The primarch’s eyes flashed with a powerful hatred. ‘If you truly do hail from the realm that men once called hell,’ he intoned, ‘when you return there, tell your kindred it was Sanguinius who threw you back.’ With a grunt of effort, the Angel took hold of the beast and shoved it over the spiked edge.

Ka’Bandha’s curses echoed all the way down, before it finally vanished, shrieking, into the warp-flames.

Meros’s spirit soared as the primarch dispatched the winged daemon, and for an instant he dared to hope that they might yet still find a shade of victory in this bloody clash of attrition. He beat his fist off his armour to echo his master’s triumph, even as the Apothecary knew that the battle was far from ended.

About him swirled a nightmare of screaming, bestial forms that threw themselves against the guns and swords of the Blood Angels. Orexis was at Raldoron’s side, hoisting the captain to his feet, firing with his off-hand. He glimpsed Cassiel, Leyteo, the Techmarine Kaide and a handful of other legionaries held off from Kyriss by a rampaging pack of bloodletters.

Meros turned to reach for the woman Niobe, where she cowered in the shadow of a bone pillar. ‘Tillyan! Come with me! We need you!’

She shook her head violently. ‘I can’t. I can’t!’

He grimaced. Niobe’s eyes were filled with fear. Nothing she had experienced could have prepared her for the horrors that were unfolding about her, or the path that had brought her here. It was a miracle that her spirit had not broken under the strain.

But Niobe’s life, just like his, or any of the Legion’s number, counted only in how they could be turned to the defeat of their enemies. He reached for her, and from nowhere a bolt shell creased his thigh, the impact blasting him from his feet.

The concussion was a hard fist of pressure that slammed Meros aside and into the fractured bone flooring. He rose quickly, shaking it off, and glimpsed Niobe lying in a heap; for a heart-stopping second he feared the bolt had struck the pariah, but there would have been little left of her if that had been so. The woman was bleeding and insensible. The edge of the blast that had put Meros down had knocked her unconscious, and even as he realised it, the legionary felt the strange null-aura around her retreating, dissipating.

Meros feared Niobe might still perish. She was frail compared to a Space Marine, easily the casualty of internal injuries – but he could not spare a moment to attend to her.

Another shot tore into him.

Agony flared in Meros’s leg from torn flesh and splintered bone, sparks jetted from his damaged armour. The fibre-bundle muscle array beneath the ceramite of his cuissart misfired, making him stagger. He felt for his chainaxe but the weapon was not there. Too late, he realised it had been torn from its mag-lock when he fell.

He saw the bastard acolyte Tanus Kreed coming at him, firing again and aiming low. Meros dodged, attempting to draw him away. If Niobe was killed, whatever vague power shielded the strike team from the malignant energy of the ragefire would be lost, and so would they. Even now, Meros felt the tide of anger building in him. It felt horribly true. This blood thirst was not something created from without and forced upon the Blood Angels. It was a thread of the poison lying dark and dormant within them all, waiting to be dragged to the surface.

‘You are lost, Blood Angel,’ said Kreed. ‘Never to know the glory. Your eyes forever blind!’ The Word Bearer ran him down before he could draw his pistol, and the acolyte bludgeoned Meros with the heavy mass of his boltgun. He stumbled again as Kreed fired point-blank, the shout of the rounds ringing in his ears.

The heavy barrel of the bolter, still searing hot from its discharge, struck the Apothecary in the face, his flesh sizzling. He lost his balance and went down.

‘Change is coming, but you won’t live to see it.’ Meros blinked; Kreed’s voice was close and resonant, rising on a symphony of gunfire and screams. ‘Only those who embrace the truth will march with us.’

‘You…’ Meros managed, coughing out a lungful of smoke. The pain was intense. ‘You are weak. Like Lorgar. The Word Bearers have always… been weak. Never with the strength to stand alone. You’ve always needed an excuse.’

‘You know nothing,’ growled Kreed, raising the bolter to aim it squarely at Meros’s face. He could see tiny lines of prayer text acid-etched into the metal of the barrel.

‘You always had to find a power to hide behind. A false god to justify your frailty of spirit! First it was the Emperor… and now these warp-freaks.’

Kreed leaned close, savouring the moment. ‘Our gods love us.’

‘Then go to them!’ Meros lunged, bringing up his medicae gauntlet with all the strength he could manage, twisting away from the bolter muzzle. The weapon discharged, deafening him, but the shot went wide. Meros did not miss; with a flex of his fingers, the gauntlet mechanism extended a serrated bone-cutter and he forced it up through the underside of Kreed’s jaw, ramming the keen edge up into his nasal cavity and skull. He pulled back and ripped the blade away, splitting open the acolyte’s face in a splatter of gore. The Word Bearer died with a hissing gargle and the Blood Angel skidded free of his kill.

He recovered his chainaxe and went to Niobe, scowling with each weighty step he placed on his wounded leg. Gathering up the woman over his shoulder as if she were no more than a roll of cloth, he left Kreed’s corpse behind and approached his battle-brothers.

From elsewhere, in the halls of the Cathedral of the Mark, came the echo of clashing blades and hatred unleashed.

NINETEEN

Sacrifice
Drink Deep of Victory
Remember the Fallen

At the halls of Signus Prime’s profane basilica, the massed might of the Blood Angels Legion had gathered in their numbers, drawn from all across the battlefield to press the daemonic enemy back into their lair. Dead cultists and the deformed bodies that were the flesh-cloaks of the spirits from the warp carpeted the bone floor and the great ruined plaza outside. Slicks of fluid painted the ground or pooled in shallow lakes. Elsewhere, the spent blood of the culled beasts was spattered in arcs across the walls where throats had been opened. The scene was repeated all across the planet, in every stronghold of the enemy and upon the ships that even now still duelled in the dark of high orbit.

The sons of Sanguinius had lost themselves in the riot of killing. Careful, drilled lines of company and Chapter had become broken and mixed, and from hour to hour, the Legion had slowly transformed into something wild. They had become a red hurricane that tore across Signus Prime leaving nothing in its wake. The Blood Angels fought as they had never fought before, not with cool reason and righteous might as their guides, but with hearts beating for vengeance, a berserker’s blood-thirst on their lips. Unstoppable, all that stood in their path was obliterated.

The foe had gravely miscalculated the will of the angels. Far from being broken by the vicious, brutal attack upon their beloved Sanguinius, they had been cut loose by it. The bonds that held them in check were slipped, and a darkness previously hidden had been unleashed. Each of them bayed for the blood of their enemy, but it was a thirst that could not be slaked – only given respite for a brief interval.

The last of the daemon guard were backed into the wide, echoing annex at the base of the Cathedral of the Mark, pressed into a mass of writhing, unspeakable flesh. The horde had lived high in their rule of the Signus Cluster, tormenting and killing the common human colonists that had called these worlds home. The last of them had been butchered by the daemons in this spot, and so it was a fitting place for the killers to be killed.

The Blood Angels cut them down, their numbers thinning as the blades rose and fell. Bodies were ripped apart in spurting tides of gore, daemonic essences shrieking as they evacuated the dying meat to fall into the great pit in the temple’s bowels. The last of the soldier-creatures was massacred under a whirlwind of swords, but when it was done the rage did not abate.

A sullen, brooding silence descended, broken by the dripping of blood and the low grind of breather grilles. Only the mewling beast Kyriss now remained alive, up above in the great chamber of pain, but here upon the battlefield there was nothing left to kill.

Every enemy lay dead, but the blood-thirst still burned, seeking new hatred to fuel its unending hunger. Without words, hundreds upon hundreds of warriors raised their heads to look upon the faces of the legionaries around them, to see not their battle-brothers, but rivals and the sources of old, petty enmities. Knuckles whitened around the grips of swords, fingers strayed towards triggers.

In the stillness, the future of a Legion balanced upon a blade’s edge.

The daemon was weeping and laughing in equal measure as it placed its slender fingers about the hilt of the Angel’s sword, agonisingly forcing it out of the gaping cavity in its torso. Ropes of stinking matter followed it in a gush as the blade crunched out of the wall and finally fell free, clattering to the bony floor.

Raldoron steadied himself, bringing up his gun. ‘I want to be the one to kill it,’ he spat, furious beyond measure. His wounds seemed vague, forgettable things. All he wanted was to slay the thing called Kyriss, to hear it screaming.

The captain blinked and tried to shake the sinister impulse away, but it only retreated to the edges of his thoughts, colouring everything around it.

The pink-skinned monstrosity spread its four arms and rolled its bovine head. ‘Destroy this flesh and I will find more. That won’t end the madness.’ It stuttered as Sanguinius crossed the chamber towards it, golden light radiating from him. The Angel’s face was set with wintry fury, a baleful glitter in his eyes.

Here was an aspect Raldoron had never seen of his master until this moment. There was pain in him, an intense hurt that could have stemmed from the wounds he had taken from the Bloodthirster’s crippling lash. And more than that; Raldoron looked upon Sanguinius and saw a wound in his spirit, so deep it might never be healed.

But this was buried beneath a towering vehemence of such scale that only a gene-forged warlord could contain it. Sanguinius crouched and took up his crimson sword from where it had fallen, and the blade came alive with heat and colour, as if it had been drawn fresh from a blacksmith’s forge.

‘You are defeated, creature,’ he rumbled. ‘This war of horrors is over.’

All around, the survivors of Cassiel’s and Orexis’s squads had their guns trained on the beast, holding it in check. Raldoron saw Meros at the far edge of the group, gently placing the woman Niobe on the floor. His chainaxe twitched in his hand. All of them were feeling the same fraying of their tempers.

Kyriss cackled, clutching at the ragged wound in its gut. ‘You know that is not so!’ It pointed at the Angel’s face. ‘You have sight. You see into the changing of ways and the ways see into you. This present is your past vision. You dreamed it!’ It threw back its head and hooted, black blood foaming at its lips. ‘Today is the day your flaw emerges, Sanguinius of Baal. All your sons will see it. Some will not live to tell the tale!’

‘No!’ the Angel brought up the sword for a killing blow.

‘Yes!’ Kyriss threw up its hands, staggering backwards. It jabbed its claws at the smouldering crystal capsule above, rocking back and forth on its thick hawsers. ‘The ragefire is lit, and it burns now, ceaseless.’ The daemon leered at the Angel. ‘It is the manifestation of the darkness inside you, abhuman. The same threads of red and black that spin through the molecules of your flesh and blood. The flaw dormant in your sons…’ It cocked its head, toying with the words. ‘The flaw that you have carried since your birth, Sanguinius.’

‘What lies are these?’ spat Kaide. ‘My lord, destroy it and be done!’

‘They are not lies,’ said the primarch, the pain rising in his eyes once more. He glanced at Raldoron, sharing the brief anguish with him. The captain remembered a warrior in the ruins of a sunken church on Melchior, and the handful of others before that.

‘We know you, Angel,’ Kyriss said, stifling a cough. ‘We always have. Did you never wonder, in the long darkness of the night, when you were alone and troubled? Did you ever dare to voice thought about the origins of…’ It trailed off, pausing to make a shape in the air, tracing the lines of Sanguinius’s wings. ‘…your gifts?’ The low, brassy cackle sounded once more. ‘When you were cast from your errant father’s arms to settle in the dust and the rad-lands of Baal, the Ruinous Powers watched you. They laid hands upon you.’

‘Now you lie,’ said Sanguinius. ‘I am my father’s son, and always will be. I am the angel of his pure wrath.’

‘Then kill me and watch your sons fall to that power.’ Kyriss rose up, drawing itself to its full height, ignoring the suppurating wounds across its ruined torso. ‘Wrath. It is what you are, it is what you hide beneath your noble mask. But if you do not embrace that flaw, if you continue to deny it… then the cost will be the lives of all your sons!’ The daemon spun about, forcing the legionaries to drop back, out of range of its claws. ‘That thug Ka’Bandha’s artless game is over, and I will salvage some morsel of victory from this debacle. Submit to me!’

‘Never.’

Kyriss roared in annoyance. ‘I give you a choice, primarch. The ragefire cannot be doused, only experienced. It is self-sustaining. Look upon your sons. Even these warriors of great renown chafe at the bit and long to be released to the berserker’s craving! If not for that ghost-mind witch they brought with them, it would have happened already. The rest of your Legion are but a breath away from turning upon one another!’ Its claws clacked angrily. ‘And this red thirst is only the beginning. It will become more powerful than anything you have yet dreamed.’

‘What… choice?’

When Sanguinius said the words, Raldoron felt as if a blade had pierced his hearts. ‘My lord, no–’

‘What choice, daemon?’ thundered the primarch.

‘Take the ragefire into yourself,’ said Kyriss. ‘Accept it. Come with me, walk with your beloved brother Horus. Do this and your sons will be released. I make this promise. Your Legion will be spared, Angel. They will never know the flaw again. It will be your life for theirs.’

Raldoron saw the question unfolding in his master’s eyes. Ever since the captain had learned of the legacy of the lost, of the threat that hid in the genetic matrix of the Legion, he had kept it silent as his liege lord had asked; but he could not close his eyes to how this knowledge brought pain to his primarch. There was no fate the Angel feared but the suffering of his sons.

The tip of the great crimson sword wavered, and dipped towards the floor. Raldoron heard a chorus of shouts from the warriors at his side, cries of disbelief and censure. The First Captain struggled to his master’s side, shaking his head. ‘This is what the traitors want,’ he insisted. ‘This is why they brought us here, my lord! To bring us to this, don’t you see?’

‘I see,’ said Sanguinius, and the words seemed to age him centuries.

‘Is it so much to ask?’ the daemon simpered. ‘A father giving everything for his children. That is what you intended all along, isn’t it, Sanguinius? To die for them?’ Kyriss’s hands crossed to perform a complicated string of gestures, and in return the crystal capsule above rattled and unfastened, plates of psychically-resonant material opening like a baroque mechanical flower. The red smoke within breathed into the air, billowing.

Raldoron tasted the haze on his tongue. It was bloody like wet iron and rich like bitter hate. ‘You cannot trust this thing,’ he spat.

‘We will never lie to you,’ said Kyriss, echoing Ka’Bandha’s words on the Plains of the Damned. ‘We will give you what you need. What you desire.’

The Angel cast a long, sombre look out through the ruined frame of the shattered window, down towards the masses of crimson-armoured warriors surrounding the cathedral. His beloved sons.

‘If there must be sacrifice,’ said Sanguinius, his wings slowly unfurling, ‘then it will be made.’

‘It will be made!’ The shout sounded in echo of the primarch’s words, and Raldoron spun towards the voice, hearing the abrupt drone of a chainblade weapon. ‘But not by you!’

He saw Meros, brandishing his axe high in one hand. The Apothecary snatched at one of the broad fibre-bound cables where it was bound to a ring of bone fused into the far wall, coiling his arm about the thick rope’s circumference. Before anyone could stop him, Meros brought his chainaxe down on the rope and severed it in one buzzing cut. Released and free, the ragged cable’s tension recoiled and it reeled up towards the complex web of massive pulleys and weights suspending the crystal construct. The Apothecary held on tightly, and let himself be hoisted up with it, into the cloying mist spilling from the open capsule. Meros’s axe was wrenched from his grip and it tumbled away as he disappeared into the blood-shaded smoke.

Without hesitation, Sanguinius threw himself into the air in a flash of white and gold, soaring upwards in a spiral after his errant son.

He committed the act without uncertainty. He knew it was right. If there had been time to doubt, Meros might have wondered after such abstracts as fate or destiny, but he was not one to think in those terms. There was only the question of what needed to be done, of the immediacy of the action.

He cannot fall.

Ever since the moment he had been shot on Nartaba Octus, when he felt the soulseeker round penetrate his gut and lodge in his flesh, Meros had known that a ghost of his own ending was close at hand. He had been ready to die; that was the lot of a legionary, to always be ready to perish in glory and battle, for the Imperial Truth.

But death had not claimed him that day, and in the sarcophagus where he lay as his blood was cleansed of alien taint, whatever intangible quality of man that could be called his spirit wavered close to the edge of life.

Warmaster Horus.

The warrior he met on the dreamscape of the healing blood-sleep had said that name. A warning. Only now did Meros fully understand. At first, he thought that it was a caution, come too late, but in this moment it seemed otherwise. Was it, instead, that he had been prepared for this event? A Blood Angel who should have already been dead, held back from his end for this choice? This act?

It seemed right. It was right.

The shrieking cable burned as it rattled through the pulley mechanisms, hauling the heavy mass of his body and warplate upwards, a dense counterweight dropping down towards the floor in return. Meros’s vision clouded as he plunged upwards into the crimson haze and he let go, spinning free. Velocity shoved him aside and the Apothecary fell hard upon one petal of the open psi-capsule, cracking the crystal matrix. He scrambled, ceramite-sheathed fingers scraping across the slick surface, and rolled. Meros caught himself before he could lose his grip and tumble back the way he had come. He rose and got his bearings.

The capsule, which from beneath had resembled a great box of misty crystal and brass filigree, was now open and lit with flares of energy. The colour of the bursts struck him in synesthetic jolts of emotion; the shade of hate, the tone of frenzy, the hue of anger.

The opened container should have ended, but within its structure there seemed no dimension, no form that was real. The inner space of it extended away into infinity, like a mirror looking into a mirror.

Red smoke moved around him as blood moved through clear water, in billowing, aggressive surges. It had intent and malice in its motion. Meros was reminded of the manner of a stalking carnodon, circling its prey.

He opened his arms. ‘Come, then. Before I realise the fool that I am, come. Take your sacrifice.’

A heavy rush of air and the rumble of beating wings sounded a new arrival. Meros turned and suddenly there was the stern face of the Angel, alighting behind him. ‘Stand down, my son,’ he said. ‘I command you.’

Meros took a breath, and then he spoke the most difficult words he had ever uttered. ‘No, my lord. I must respectfully refuse.’

Sanguinius’s eyes narrowed. ‘You disobey your primarch.’

‘Aye.’ From nowhere, a strange mutter of sentiment rose through the Apothecary and he gave a rueful laugh. ‘I suppose that makes me a traitor.’

‘Meros. You cannot do this.’ The Angel’s wings folded close and he pointed towards the writhing mist. ‘No mortal soul can survive contact with such a force. If it is what the beast Kyriss said, it is the raw force of the warp. It is the crude power of all our rages. You will not be able to control it. It will destroy you.’

‘Yes,’ he said, taking a step closer. ‘It will destroy me. Not you.’ Meros raised his hand, turning the wrist where the medicae gauntlet rested across his armoured wrist. ‘You have taught us many things, Lord Sanguinius. The nobility of our spirit. The warrior prowess of our hearts. Humility, in the face of a universe of grandeur and magnificence.’ Meros nodded to himself. ‘And duty. The great weight of duty.’ He looked up, meeting the Angel’s steady, questioning gaze. ‘You are a primarch, Emperor’s son and warlord, the most numinous and gallant of your kin. I am but a warrior, born of the dust of Baal and raised high to fight in a great cause. And I see no greater cause than this.’

‘I will not have my sons die in my stead,’ whispered Sanguinius.

‘That choice is not yours to make. It is ours. It is mine.’ Carefully, Meros extended the gauntlet’s cutting saw and placed it against his neck seal. ‘If a single legionary is consumed in fire and fury, the galaxy will spin on, unheeding. But if you fall…’ He grimaced. ‘If the Warmaster has turned his face from Terra, then you cannot fall. Only you can meet him on equal footing. When the battle comes, you must be there to face him, brother against brother.’ Meros hesitated. ‘I do not have your sight, master, but I see that. And I know.’

With a gush of sparks and a growl of pain, Meros forced the cutter down the front of his armour, opening a jagged tear through the ceramite that ran from throat to groin, down through the layers to the flesh beneath. He guided the barbed tip of the reductor to the correct places, as he had so many times before upon the bodies of legionaries about to die. The device whirred and bored through skin, raising a rasp of pain. Meros flexed the digital controls and, with wet pops of spilled blood, he removed his own progenoid glands. The device sucked the nodules of gene-rich tissue into a reservoir pod, sealing them inside for preservation. Meros’s bequest to his Legion now lay secured.

Crimson spotting his lips, the Apothecary twisted the medicae module and it detached from his armour. ‘My lord, if you will?’ Reeling from the shock, Meros tossed it towards the Angel, who snatched it out of the air with a flash of gold. ‘Take this… and let something of me live on.’

Then he turned his back on his master and threw himself into the churning heart of the ragefire.

It was more terrible than words could describe. It was rage in its purest form, an utter vacuum of all other sense and emotion. There was no love to temper it, no peace to foster tranquillity. There was no control or reason by which the fury could be marshalled and commanded. No intellect to focus it, no morality and instinct through which it might find boundary.

There was only rage, burning red and livid, summoning a thirst for blood and blood and blood; and somewhere deep beneath, waiting to follow the crimson path, there was a night-black fury beyond even this. A madness, a frenzy of towering psychotic dimensions.

And all of this was within them.

The burning smoke poured into Meros as wine would fill a cup, in through the breach in his armour, entering him by his eyes and his ears, bleeding through the pores in his skin.

The last tiny vestiges of the legionary that had been Captain Tagas, battle-brother and lost soul, passed through him, gossamer-light and then were gone forever. Meros caught the dimmest fraction of Tagas’s self. The warp had changed the captain, the psychic power of the capsule slowly denaturing his flesh until poor, tortured Tagas had disintegrated into this directionless energy. For so long they had kept him undying, held him on the edge of fury and madness, that it had literally consumed him. The daemons had trapped a warrior in a crucible of hatred until all that was left was the most base, most flawed part of his spirit. Flesh become energy. Self become emotion.

In this impossible alchemy, Kyriss and his sorcerers had made the ragefire from Tagas. They had turned one ordinary warrior soul of the Blood Angels into the key to destroy them all.

Meros would avenge him, if he could. He held on to that thought as the rage and the thirst overwhelmed him, slowly encroaching upon all that he was. The fire would consume him, overwrite his mind and character.

And it was here, at the end, as he willingly made the choice to sacrifice himself, that Meros felt the presence of another mind. Not Tagas, for he was long dispersed, and only his echo had remained. No, this was something newborn.

A consciousness of the warp aggregated and growing, becoming animate.

Some said that the crazed tides of the immaterium were a literal sea of emotion, the unreal reflection of the corporeal. If that were so, then this mind was born of that. A gathering of rage and thirst, of need and desire, so powerful that it now achieved sentience itself. By degrees, that presence swept in and drowned the mind of Brother Meros, filling him, changing him, becoming real. In a cataclysmic detonation of red, the crystal capsule exploded into a burning rain of glittering dust.

Kano felt his friend’s ending, and he stumbled, the shock shoving at him like a physical blow. He staggered and fell against a broken stanchion, blinking away the sympathetic pain, his head rising. Kano stared out through a jagged slash in the Red Tear’s hull, out over the wastelands of the warzone towards the high towers of the daemonic temple. Lightning in spears of emerald and crimson flashed from turbid clouds swirling overhead, illuminating the ashen sky. The sparks of searing colour were like the swords of warring deities, chasing each other back and forth.

The greasy, electric tang of raw psychic energy was in the air, the careless toxic overspill of the warp’s denizens liberated in their death-throes, polluting the world from their point of entry into this universe. Through all that, Kano felt Meros being taken away. It wasn’t a death; that was a regrettably commonplace effect, felt many times over in the service of the Great Crusade. Meros’s end was more a slow erasure of his self from the surface of reality. Kano’s psychically-attuned mind saw it happening, though his physical self was many kilometres removed from the Cathedral of the Mark.

What he saw without seeing was the retreat of an invisible tide of furious hatred and blood-charged frenzy. All upon the surface of Signus Prime and within the span of its orbit had bathed in a ghostly radiation of anger, a spectral texture of it that spoke directly to the heart of a Blood Angel. That cloak of gloom, like the great black veil that still shrouded the entire Signus Cluster, was made of the unmatter of thought, and its touch was poisonous. Soberly, Kano considered that it would have ended them all eventually, robbing even the best of them of restraint and reason.

But now this shadow-that-was-no-shadow drew back, falling away like the scales of wild fury from the eyes of his battle-brothers. As it passed, legionaries with guns raised and swords at the high found the snarls in their throat stilled. The flaw within them remained undimmed, its power still strong, but the control that had been stolen from the IX Legion was at last repaid to them. Their temper changed as the storm broke.

The ragefire of over a hundred thousand warriors collapsed in on itself, growing heavier, becoming solid and distinct. Like an unborn star condensing from stellar gas and dust, the fury accreted within the soul of Kano’s battle-brother. It brought a gasp of pure sorrow to his lips as he understood the supremacy of the sacrifice the Apothecary had made.

Meros was a warrior of good character, but he had never been what others would have called a champion, a hero of the Legion. He was simply what the rank and file of the Blood Angels had always been: loyal, noble sons of Terra and Baal, selfless and ready to fight. Ready to die.

Kano closed his eyes but he could not shut out the vision. The telepathic surge was too great, dragging his inner sight to it with the sheer gravity of its effect. In his hearts, a cold and slow certainty began to form, and Kano steeled himself. This felt familiar. He had seen it before.

He remembered the deck beneath his boots breaking apart like brittle ice and falling through into a bottomless void of black.

‘No.’ The denial left his mouth in a whisper. The word was a weak, fragile thing, it was sudden understanding; it was memory and regret. It was truth.

He remembered a human figure coming up out of the darkness, straight towards him, screaming. A warrior in heavy armour that glistened with wet crimson and hellish red radiance.

Ranged in the endless mental chasm of the psychic realm, Kano knew now what the vision he had experienced back in the meditation cell had revealed. The eyes were known to him. In a way, he had always known who it was. Everything had been moving, turning as worlds turned about suns, event upon event, all to bring this moment to pass.

Meros transformed, writhing in the grip of an infernal glow as the burning power merged with every atom of his being. The flesh of his face distorted into a hollow mask far beyond the guise of pain. His armour became dark and disfigured, joints steaming, the shell of it trembling as it fought to contain energies never meant to be bound to this reality. In the warp’s shadow, Kano saw a pair of ghostly, blood-drenched wings briefly unfold from the wounded Apothecary’s back, anointing the ruined bones beneath with a rain of phantasmal blood; then they were gone.

Brother Meros ended, and the Red Angel began.

The crystal matrix of the capsule rang like dissonant bells as it came apart, brass and crystal shards becoming lethal shrapnel. The beast Kyriss bolted forwards, arms raised in what could have been supplication, screaming in tongues. The strident, inhuman noise was deafening; it was the sound of an emotion dying, a deceit so stygian and ghastly that even the blackest of human hearts would not have been able to encompass it.

The daemon howled, it wept like a bereft widow, it hammered in great tantrums at everything around it. Finally it turned and spat bile towards the ragged line of Blood Angels who moved to keep the creature in their sights. ‘You had no right to do this! You mewling, ignorant animals! How dare you ruin it all? You are our pawns! This is Signus Daemonicus, our beachhead, our war-ground! And here you do as we bid!’ Kyriss’s melodic voice crackled and broke, becoming hard-edged and spiteful. As it changed, so did the daemon’s tattoo-patterned face, the bland pinkness of its bovine snout gathering newer, more malignant shades. ‘The pieces upon the board have no right to rebel! You take what we give, you adore it–’

A winged shadow broke the words of the beast as white pinions cut the smouldering haze above, and the red-shaded iron of a heavy warlord’s blade flashed. Kyriss fell back and squealed, the tone ringing up and down a cascade of chords, a whickering atonal siren-song that blasted the Blood Angels back with the force of a graviton cannon. The claw-hands of its borrowed flesh came up, snapping and raking at the ground, and it drew a weapon cut from seamless, shimmering silver, as if out of thin air.

Raldoron, Cassiel and the others needed no orders to press forth the final attack, knowing as much as their enemy did that it was the last daemon standing. Bolter shells lashed at the fiend, chopping twisted divots of meat from its warped body.

Kyriss spun in a mad, dizzying pirouette, trying to kill whatever it could. Thick, rheumy tears oozed down its face, spittle foamed over lips and across its shivering breasts. ‘You must love us!’ it bellowed. ‘We give you blood and hate and you will love us for it!’

The Angel was there for the killing blow, looming large behind the creature. He stood magnificent and terrible in his sun-bright armour, his great sword held in a reversed executioner’s grip. ‘I will take your silence now,’ he said, and crossing his hand over his chest, Sanguinius put the red blade through the daemon’s throat from shoulder to shoulder.

Kyriss’s voice ceased. With a cascade of polluted blood jetting from the killing wound, its body tumbled forwards, freed from its head. The primarch snatched at a curved horn before the cut could separate both parts and let the corpse drop. He slowly turned the severed head to study it with dispassion, examining the trophy he had made of the thing from the warp.

It whispered words that only Sanguinius was close enough to hear. Then he smiled, the instant so brief it was barely there.

Raldoron ignored the pain of his wounds and limped towards his master, lowering the muzzle of his bolter. He watched the primarch discard the daemon’s head with a cursory flick of his wrist, sending it over the lip of the great pit. Noxious fumes that sickened even the hard constitution of a legionary were already curling from the corpse of the dead fiend.

Quickly, like an accelerated pict-feed, the headless body of the thing that had called itself Kyriss the Perverse decayed, melting away into an ugly slurry that resembled some flyblown trough of offal. Flesh became gluey liquid, oozing into cracks of the floor, and misshapen bones became visible before these too blackened and denatured like old, yellowed wax. The First Captain had a killer’s knowledge of anatomy and organic structure, but nothing of the creature’s remains followed any logic of biology he could recall. For a disturbing moment, he thought he saw the outlines of a man’s skeleton, somehow trapped inside the bones of the daemon, as if one had grown out of the other; but then it became gritty powder, aged millennia in seconds. The last fragment to dissolve was the blackened nub of a heart organ.

Cassiel drew a line through a drift of the rotting matter with the tip of his sword. ‘Is it over, then?’ There was such weariness in his voice, one might have thought a century had passed in the prosecution of the Signus pacification. It was hard to accept that it had only been a span of days.

‘Look,’ said Kaide warily, the heavy servo-arm emerging from the Techmarine’s backpack whirring as it turned to point towards a figure standing at the edge of the pit.

Raldoron looked and looked again. In fact, the figure did not stand. It floated, just a short span off the floor, drifting slightly. The same sickening light that he had seen boiling inside the psychic capsule, that he had felt pressing into his thoughts, was now concentrated in this one individual. A halo of hell-flames burned about him, rumbling low and hateful.

‘Meros,’ said Cassiel, making the name a memorial. ‘By the throne, he lives.’

‘That is not life, sergeant,’ said Sanguinius, stepping forwards to place himself between his warriors and their transformed brother. ‘He gave that up for us.’

Raldoron signalled to the other legionaries to be ready, and they took aim. ‘Must we kill him, then?’

The Angel waited for the apparition to make the next move. ‘Something different exists inside that body. Of the legionary we knew, only a fraction may remain.’

The thing that had been Brother Meros abruptly looked up, as if Sanguinius had called its name. ‘A fraction remains,’ it said, and there was the ghost of the Apothecary’s manner in the words. ‘Just enough so that he may be tormented by what he has done.’

It drifted slowly towards them and the legionaries held off an instant from opening fire. Sanguinius stood his ground, blade at rest, waiting.

‘I am here now,’ it went on. ‘Within your fallen son. I know your dark heart. This one will not perish as the other did. Tagas’s weakness was that he believed he had been abandoned. That is the key through which the Ruinous Powers destroyed his soul. This one…’ It paused, examining its broken, armoured hands. ‘He knows what he did for you.’

Raldoron was closest to his master’s side, and so it was only he who glimpsed what might have been the shimmer of a tear upon the primarch’s fire-seared cheek.

‘Heed me, creature. Let Meros hear this.’ Sanguinius raised the great sword and pointed with it, right at the transformed warrior’s chest. ‘Your gambit has failed. Whatever these powers are that you call master, whatever irrational choice my brother Horus has made to seek a pact with them, you stand defeated this day upon the cusp of victory. Do you understand the reason why?’

‘This one.’ The broken legionary traced the smouldering breach down the front of the shattered armour. ‘An exemplar of your kind. You were underestimated. The thirst would have taken you–’

‘But it did not.’ Sanguinius’s face hardened with defiance. ‘Because as long as one single Blood Angel lives and breathes, he will be master of his spirit. He will not let the abyss that lies in the hearts of us all take him into darkness.’ He looked away, fierce pride in his eyes as he surveyed Raldoron and the rest of his battle-weary sons. ‘That is the truth you did not understand, the truth that Horus has forgotten. It is not the descent towards the shadow nor the rise towards the light that makes us superior. It is in the endless struggle between the two where greatness of character resides. We are tested, and we do not break.’ The Angel’s voice became a sudden shout. ‘We will never fall! Take that to my brother and tell him!’

The broken warrior turned, giving a doll-like nod, and drifted towards the great pit. The warp-fires within it grew loud and agitated, as if they sensed its approach.

To Raldoron’s surprise, Sanguinius took a few steps after the phantom. ‘Meros?’ he said, and his words were low so that they would not carry. ‘If you hear this, know my oath. I swear upon the Legion, whose honour you have upheld, that your noble sacrifice will be repaid. You will not end in silence.’

The fire-wreathed form did not acknowledge him. It stepped off the edge of the floor, and crimson wings of arcane lightning flashed from its back. Raldoron heard a throaty, bass rumble from beneath them that grew until it was as loud as the world breaking open.

An inferno of warp energies fumed with volcanic force, swallowing up the body of the transformed warrior. Sanguinius spun to put his back to it, spreading his wings wide to shield the bodies of his legionaries from the punishing wall of hellfire.

An instinct screamed in Raldoron’s thoughts – a sense buried deep in the core of his brain, something that stemmed back millions of years to the most basic element of the human psyche. He bellowed out a command to the legionaries. ‘Turn away! Do not look upon the fires, brothers! Turn away!’

Horrors untold and unfathomable in word or thought screamed and cursed the Blood Angels as their last foothold on Signus Prime was broken. The upper storeys of the temple’s thick conical tower were blown to pieces as a seething globe of raw warp-fire tore free of the surface of the planet. Broken fragments of bone scattered wide, tumbling from the sky in an obscene rain.

The warp-mass lost its grip on the material universe and was dragged shrieking through the sky, searing the ash clouds, breaking through the thin membrane of atmosphere and accelerating. It consumed great gulps of wreckage from the death belts in low orbit, and the surviving ships of the Blood Angels flotilla burned hard and fast to get out of its path, many of them becoming the battle’s last victims as their ships reacted too slowly to avoid obliteration.

The swirling sphere of immaterial witch-fire lost cohesion and, like a dying, drowning man striking out with mad violence as death encroached, it clawed at the planets and suns of the Signus Cluster, ripping at their surfaces and sucking in matter. But it could not hold. This time the psychic scream was suffocated and a brief supernova blossomed before the fire bled out into embers and at last, nothingness.

Slowly, tentatively, the veil of shadow that had engulfed the full span of the star system broke apart, dissipating like a storm before the wind.

There, up on the surface, standing in the ruins of the broken tower, Raldoron looked up into a sky where there were no clouds. Little by little, in the black above them, the stars that had been blinded returned their light to look down upon Signus Prime once again.

Cassiel was the first to speak. ‘Is it over now?’

Sanguinius spared him a look. He shook his head.

TWENTY

Price to Pay
Sorrow
Imperium Secundus

The ground trembled as the earthquake resonated across the desolate plains, and there was a moment when Signus Prime seemed to hold its breath. Then, on spars of nuclear fire that burned rock and sand to vapour, the gigantic hulk of the Red Tear began to rise. Slowly at first, sloughing off broken shards of metal and sheaves of falling sand deposited by the mournful winds, the battle-barge pulled free of the earth that held it. Fighting gravity every metre of the way, the ship seemed to defy reason as it lifted into the dull air. The monolithic, city-sized craft resisted the planet’s attempts to hold it where it had fallen. This was the last battle that would be fought in the Signus Cluster, the final match between the might of the Blood Angels and the wastelands made from human misery and warp-sorcery. The IX Legion would win it as they had those before; to fail would be to dispute the will of the Angel.

On Signus Prime, on Holst, and in orbit, in every place where their warriors had set foot, their primarch had commanded that his sons excise all evidence that the Legion had ever come to this place. Over the days that passed after the final charge on the Cathedral of the Mark, an army of servitors and Wardens had gathered up every battle-brother’s corpse, every broken vehicle, every torn piece of armour or blunted sword. The work was almost complete, but for the spent casings of a few bolt shells lying lost and buried in the sands, but little more. Sanguinius had ordered it so. The Blood Angels would leave nothing behind in this blighted, murdered place. Not their ships, not their relics and not their precious dead.

Wounded but still imperious, the Red Tear lifted faster and faster as its mighty engines pressed it into the sky. The warship’s damage was great – deep within her internal spaces repairs were still underway – but like the Blood Angels, she had defied the odds and the plans of a deceitful enemy to ascend again. The white glow of the dwarf sun Signus Beta, high overhead through the pall of airborne dust, shone down and was briefly eclipsed by the Red Tear’s silhouette. The shadow it cast in mirror of the Legion’s sigil passed over the battlefield, and away.

Raldoron watched the mighty barge recede into the ranges of the Signusi sky, he and all the other captains gathered in the tumbledown ruins gazing up in salute to see it go. They were the last Blood Angels on planet, anywhere in the system. A short distance away, a flight of Stormbirds were waiting to take them from this disfigured wilderness. Once they turned their back on Signus Prime, they would never return.

No one would return. It had already been etched into the Legion’s book of hours, by the primarch’s own hand. The Blood Angels would not build a monument or grave marker here, as they had on other planets where such bloodshed had occurred. The hundreds upon hundreds of the dead would be taken home to Baal to be buried on the slopes of Mount Seraph, the injured ships to stardocks for repair and re-armament. Warning buoys and automated beacons were being deployed all about the star system’s perimeter, there to turn back any ships that might come this way in the years ahead.

The Signus Cluster had been declared Mortae Perpetua; forever dead. It would be left lifeless and rotting until its suns burned cold, with nothing but the echoes of those who perished there to bear witness.

Raldoron turned away from the burned sky and the bloodstained desert, his gaze crossing the faces of his comrades. He saw Galan and Furio, Carminus and Azkaellon, each legionary outwardly at attention in their master’s presence, but each under some aspect of the same brooding shadow that lay across the entire Legion. In the aftermath of the bloodbath at the cathedral, when the witchery of the ragefire had finally been broken, the character of the Blood Angels had turned to morose mien and the bitter sting of misery. Slowly, like men emerging into day from decades of life in a lightless dungeon, they had come to understand that this particular nightmare had passed. Some even affected brighter manner and hopeful mood, but the First Captain could not help but wonder how much of that was forced. It was only Amit whose conduct had grown darker. Even now, he lurked at the edges of the group, engaging no one, his eyes hooded and lost in his own thoughts.

Raldoron frowned. The Legion had been wounded in this place, a cut that had pressed to their very core. Like their primarch, the Blood Angels had been blindsided by those they called kin. The distant perfidy of Warmaster Horus and the closer lies of the Word Bearers had brought them to the brink of the abyss. We have been shown the worst of ourselves, he thought, and it is a sobering truth to behold.

Time would tell if they would heal this wound, or if it would fester within them for eternity. For now, the captain remembered Sanguinius’s words in the bone temple. We are tested, and we do not break.

He stepped aside briefly to allow a servitor to grind past him, ambling towards the Stormbirds. The machine-slave was one of a handful that had accompanied the battle captains to this place. The sevitors bore the mechanisms for a tactical cyclonic device, which now sat in the middle of the ruins. A stubby bollard of plasteel, it contained a warhead of incredible destructive power. The weapon had been programmed to detonate when the assembled officers reached a safe distance; the resultant blast it would create would be enough to rip a massive chasm in Signus Prime’s surface, and eradicate all trace of the Cathedral of the Mark forever.

Sanguinius considered the weapon, then turned to face them. ‘Our enemy has made a grave error, my sons. He did not kill us all when the chance was open to him.’ The Angel’s expression was grim. ‘And now we will exact the blood cost for that mistake. The cost, for the lives of your battle-brothers lost in this madness. For the innocents sacrificed to draw us here.’ Fury glittered in his eyes. ‘The cost of betrayal and treachery.’

The primarch glanced at Azkaellon, and the Guard Commander took his cue to offer up a nugget of information. ‘Our ships have conducted a search for the Dark Page, but the traitor vessel has eluded us. We can only assume that the Word Bearers have fled the system and made space for the warp. I imagine they carry word of their failure back to...’ He faltered suddenly, stumbling over the words.

‘Horus,’ intoned the Angel. ‘You may say my wayward brother’s name, Azkaellon. We will all be called to speak it, when the moment comes that he must be named arch-traitor.’

Raldoron knew that his master was in pain with every breath he was taking; although he gave no sign of it, the crippling injury he had suffered on the battlefield still had to heal. A lesser being would never have walked again without sacrificing their broken limbs for augmetic replacements. Sanguinius mastered that pain, holding it where none could see it. But not so the other pain, the agony of his soul. That, he could not keep from the warriors of his inner circle, the legionaries who knew the Angel best. Raldoron saw it in his eyes, heard it in his words. The Warmaster had awakened at first a great sorrow in his angelic brother, but now that had burned down and been rebuilt as a great and powerful hatred.

The primarch’s sword slid from its scabbard and Sanguinius placed his bare hand upon it, drawing blood. ‘I swear that the day will dawn when I face Horus and put him to the question, and to the blade. There is no doubt in my mind that my brother has turned away from the rightful rule of the Emperor and the banner of Terra’s glory. He has united with monsters to prosecute his rebellion. I do not know why, but that shall not stay our hands. It may be madness, the influence of the alien or the corrosion of his heart, but I will learn that truth when I meet him face to face.’ He gripped the sword with fierce intensity. ‘And then I will kill him for his treason.’

As a mutter of grave assent passed through the assembled group, Raldoron felt compelled to speak. ‘My lord, if the Sons of Horus and the Word Bearers have united against the rest of the Imperium, then we face a battle like no other in human history.’

Sanguinius nodded. ‘It is much worse than you think, my friend. This day, Azkaellon brought me news of a communication deciphered by one of our few surviving astropaths.’

Raldoron listened intently. While the arcane veil had been in place, no astropathic signals had been able to reach the Blood Angels flotilla. It seemed that while they had been locked in their peculiar prison, time had stuttered in a freakish pattern and events had moved on around them. This new war, it seemed, was not confined to the Signus Cluster or the Blood Angels.

The primarch announced that the message bore the seal of Rogal Dorn, the Imperial Fist himself. A cheer went up. Many feared that traps similar to the one that had ensnared the IX Legion had been sprung upon other steadfast sons of the Imperium, and word of Dorn’s wellbeing was met with relief.

‘Aye, it is well he lives,’ said Sanguinius, his mood unchanged, foreboding. ‘But his word came with greater import. Dorn marshals the defences of Terra, but warns of the rot of betrayal spread wide. The Emperor’s Children, Word Bearers, Night Lords, Alpha Legion. The Iron Warriors, World Eaters and the Death Guard. All of them now march to the Warmaster’s drums.’

A shocked silence fell. Raldoron heard the rumble of his blood in his veins, felt his breath catch in his throat. If any other but the primarch had said those words, he would have decried them on the spot. The First Captain saw his battle-brothers struggling to process this information. It was a dizzying, horrific revelation. The Legiones Astartes, sundered by lies. A civil war ignited between colossal armies of gene-forged fighters, which could only end in fires of conflict burning across the galaxy.

And this was only the beginning of it. Dorn’s blunt, matter-of-fact message had carried not only word of disloyalty but also of death. The Salamanders, Raven Guard and Iron Hands had taken the brunt of the betrayal, their forces smashed. Mars was ablaze in factional warfare. The fates – and the fealty – of the White Scars, Ultramarines, Dark Angels, Thousand Sons and Space Wolves were unknown.

Sanguinius’s voice revealed nothing but hard, fiery anger as he spoke of his brother Ferrus Manus, reportedly slain by Fulgrim himself, and of great Vulkan, also presumed dead. ‘We have broken out of this hellish oubliette, and found ourselves in a different universe from the one we left. Everything has changed.’ He placed a hand over the ruby heart on his chest plate, marking a line of blood upon it. ‘Even us.’

Each warrior knew what he meant. The red thirst had come upon them all, and staggered them with its power. Furio spoke the words they all felt. ‘What took place here can never be allowed to happen again.’

‘But it will,’ said Sanguinius. ‘And when that fury comes once more, know this. The Blood Angels will be ready. The flaw in us is not something that can be dismissed or defeated with ease. It is the inner enemy, the reflection of the conflict without!’ The burning fury in his manner shifted, and Sanguinius walked among them, giving each warrior a nod or a touch of his hand upon their shoulder. ‘Aye, it is part of what we are. Our gift and our curse. And we will master it, if we are to win this war, the war of brothers against brothers, for the Imperium and the future.’

‘For the Imperium!’ The call left Raldoron’s lips, and his battle-brothers carried it high, drawing their swords and raising them in salute.

The Angel gave a nod. ‘We take our leave of this place, my sons. Turn from it and guide your eyes to the battles ahead. With these steps, our Legion embarks upon its greatest challenge.’

They filed back to their ships, and none of them glanced over their shoulders to see what they left behind. A glitter of gold and red by his boot caught Raldoron’s eye and he stooped, plucking an ornate honour-sigil in the shape of a teardrop from the sand. The decoration was fine with etched text; he recognised it as belonging to a legionary of Squad Vitronus, and he resolved to return it to its owner’s side.

When he looked up, the Angel was there. ‘Ral,’ he began, ‘when we reach the flagship, I want you to send word to my brother. Tell Dorn what we fought here, if you can find the words. Tell him that the Blood Angels are on their way to Terra with all possible speed.’

At his primarch’s side, the Sanguinary Guard Commander, Azkaellon, offered a thought. ‘That may be easier said than done, lord. The Navigators aboard the ships at the edge of the system are reporting a strange confusion in the void.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Raldoron. ‘Something to do with that veil effect?’

Azkaellon shook his head. ‘No, this is different.’ He frowned. ‘The Navigators spoke of… a “dislocation” of the Imperial Astronomican. The eternal light of the great beacon on Terra is not where it should be.’

Raldoron grimaced. ‘More warp-spawned trickery?’

‘Perhaps,’ considered the primarch. ‘We must be cautious. We’ll put the fleet into a distributed pattern, and have the Navigators sound for the strongest psychic signal. After what we have encountered here, the Legion must be prepared for any eventuality.’

They approached one of the Stormbirds and the crew saluted as the Angel climbed aboard. Raldoron followed Azkaellon and Sanguinary Guards, the drop-ramp rising behind him.

He saw the primarch glance at his Guard Commander. ‘The full casualty reports have yet to be brought to me… I am saddened to consider Captain Redknife’s absence from our gathering. What fate befell his Wolves?’

Raldoron’s report to Azkaellon about finding Stiel had been thorough and unflinching in its estimation of how the Rune Priest had perished; the captain waited for Azkaellon to cast a look in his direction, but he never did. ‘They died with honour, my lord,’ replied the commander.

With a crash of engines, the Stormbirds lifted off from the desert and blasted upwards at hypersonic speeds. They moved too fast for the cyclonic shockwave to reach them, but the First Captain caught a flash of brilliant white from the corner of his eye, reflected from a viewport.

He turned away.

The central atrium of the Red Tear had been a place of devotional artworks and battle trophies to laud the warship’s accolades, but after Signus, it had changed as much as the Legion. Many of the halls and corridors of the battle-barge had been sealed off after the damage the ship had suffered, compartments and chambers repurposed for more immediate needs. The changes to the atrium had come without order, though. It had been done through silent understanding.

At the foot of a great frieze showing the Angel and his golden guards, brothers began a makeshift memorial for the lost. Small items such as sigils or honour-chains, personal chalices, even broken blades, formed a tapestry across the far wall. Rolls of digital parchment were fixed to the marble, and upon them there were names written in dozens of different hands. This would be the way they would remember, until the ceremony of mourning could be formalised.

Sergeant Cassiel reached out and traced Meros’s name with his finger, his brow furrowing.

‘He is dead, then.’ A hollowness moved through the air around him and Cassiel knew it was the woman called Tillyan. She came to stand beside him, reading the parchment. The sergeant considered her; at first, when they departed for the strike mission against the cathedral, he had thought of Niobe as a liability. She would slow them down, reduce their reaction times and make the attack much more difficult. He had little regard for the common Imperial citizenry.

But she had surprised him with her fortitude. This woman, who was not even a soldier, had walked with them into a place filled with terrors undreamed of by even the most seasoned veterans. She had not faltered. Cassiel saw a cast in Niobe’s eyes that seemed familiar, the same gaze he had seen in himself, in his kinsmen. Eyes that had gazed upon a kind of hell.

He wasn’t certain if she was crying; the emotions of unenhanced humans were hard for him to gauge.

She did not know the full detail of the Apothecary’s sacrifice, nor his ultimate fate. If truth were told, neither did Cassiel. Beaten, Tillyan Niobe had lain insensate on the floor of the bone temple while Meros had given his life. Or had he? Cassiel knew death, and that was not what had claimed his brother.

‘He will live on,’ offered the sergeant. ‘His gene-seed was recovered from the field of battle. It will become the genesis of future generations of Blood Angels. Meros’s bravery will be remembered.’

‘Is that all that is left of him?’ Cassiel didn’t understand the question. ‘What of his spirit?’

‘I have no knowledge of such things,’ he replied, after a moment. Niobe clasped a small, leather-bound book in her hand. It was careworn and scuffed, and he had not seen it before. ‘What is that?’

She coloured slightly, clutching it tighter. ‘It belonged to Dortmund. I found it on his–’ Niobe swallowed. ‘I found it,’ she concluded.

Cassiel had seen the remains of the civilian survivors, butchered by the harriers and furies. They had died because their presence had been revealed by Niobe’s departure, and it had not been swift for them.

She opened the book and he saw pages of tiny red text in the local dialect of Gothic. ‘There is some comfort in it,’ she explained.

Cassiel was about to leave, but an odd impulse came to him. He glanced at the parchment once again, then to the book.

‘Read some of it to me,’ he said.

The drill hall was empty when Raldoron arrived, in hopes of finding the peace of meditation in the wide open chamber. Such tranquillity no longer came easily to him.

When the sound of a fist ringing against the adamantium supports broke his focus, he did not begrudge it. The First Captain rose from where he knelt and turned. Without waiting for his permission, a hooded figure pushed past him into the chamber.

‘Amit.’ No other warrior of the Legion would be so bold. The Captain of the Fifth pulled back his hood and fixed his brother with a brooding, surly gaze. ‘I thought you returned to the Victus,’ Raldoron went on.

‘For a time,’ Amit said wearily. He opened his robes and there in his hand was the naked length of his battle sword, the barbed flaying blade that had earned the captain the name ‘Flesh Tearer’. He offered it like a trophy. ‘Take this from me. I no longer deserve it, nor my rank and status. I have dishonoured our Legion. The Wolves…’ His words faded.

Raldoron’s blood ran cold as a missing piece fell into place in his thoughts. ‘It was you. Your legionaries. You were responsible for the deaths of Redknife’s squad.’

‘Take it!’ Amit shouted. ‘I must atone for what was done. I and my warriors have betrayed our Emperor. We murdered our allies! We lost control! The blood…’ His voice broke in a gasp of sorrow and anger. ‘It blinded me. I saw only enemies to be killed.’

How could you do this? Raldoron wanted to shout the question, but he knew the answer. He had felt the power of the ragefire, barely been able to resist it himself even with the pariah woman at close hand. Amit and his legionaries had been granted no such protection. The fury in them, so close to the surface already, had smothered their reason.

‘I will take responsibility for what has been done,’ said Amit. ‘I forfeit my life, my rank and my honour.’

‘You will do none of that.’ Azkaellon emerged from the shadows across the chamber, his armour shimmering in the light of the electro-candles. ‘It will not be permitted.’

‘Following me?’ Amit snapped.

‘You knew,’ said Raldoron, eyeing the Guard Commander. ‘When I confided to you about Jonor Stiel, you knew then.’

Azkaellon gave a curt nod. ‘The bodies of Redknife’s warriors were recovered by High Warden Berus. He understood the import of how they had met their end as well as I did. I took steps.’

Confusion crossed Amit’s features. ‘What does he mean?’

‘He kept the truth of your… error… from the Angel.’

Amit rounded on Azkaellon, brandishing his sword. ‘You had no right!’

The warrior in gold surged forwards and snatched at the tip of the blade, gripping it in his fingers. ‘I have every right!’ he snarled. ‘I am Master of the Sanguinary Guard and it is my duty to protect the primarch in all things!’

‘You lied,’ spat Raldoron. ‘To Sanguinius himself!’

‘I only kept a single truth, for the sake of the master and the Legion.’ He pushed the blade away. ‘I did it to protect us!’ Azkaellon’s moment of temper ebbed and he became cool and controlled once more. ‘And you will do the same, my brothers.’

‘No,’ Amit shook his head fiercely.

‘Yes,’ insisted Azkaellon. ‘Or you will damn us to greater division and bloodshed.’ He studied them both. ‘If Sanguinius knew how Redknife’s Wolves had died, what would he do? In his noble purity, he would never conscience keeping that from Leman Russ. He would bear the blame himself, and what would be the result? A new schism between two Legions in a time when unity must be paramount. We are entering a civil war! Aye, the Space Wolves may never stand with the Warmaster’s rebellion, but still they must not be given cause to distrust the Blood Angels.’ He shot a cold look at Amit. ‘We cannot afford to assuage your guilt over actions committed while you were not in your right mind. Many horrors were unleashed upon us at Signus. Yours is only one, captain.’ He turned to Raldoron, a flash of regret in his eye. ‘You both know I am right.’

‘The point is well made,’ said Raldoron, the words ashes in his mouth. He hated the mendacity of it, but while callous, Azkaellon’s logic was sound.

‘You command me to silence,’ growled Amit. ‘But what will quiet the remorse in my hearts?’

‘The burden you must carry is a small price to pay,’ said Azkaellon.

Zuriel’s glaive encarmine whispered from its scabbard as Kano approached the sanctorum, the sword dropping across his path. ‘You are not summoned, brother,’ said the Sanguinary Guard sergeant. ‘This day he speaks to no one.’

Kano grimaced, much of it from the bite of his healing wounds, but more from a deeper pain not so easy to banish. ‘Perhaps the Angel will change his mind if he knows I have come to him.’

Zuriel’s face shifted, and there was guilt there. It had not been said aloud, but Kano knew that at the heights of the brutal frenzy that had overtaken the Blood Angels, even the Sanguinary Guard had succumbed. None could blame them, but the warriors in gold had left their posts at the primarch’s side to fall into the grip of the blood-thirst. Each of Azkaellon’s legionaries bore the shame of that dereliction of duty, and Kano wondered how they would pay for it.

Kano had been the only one who stayed; what Zuriel would think of him because of that, he could not guess at. For his part, Kano’s status was in flux. He had been party to the breaking of an Imperial edict, and while some spoke of reinstating the Librarius division, others called for the harshest censure.

All of the Blood Angels were weary, even if they hid it well. It had been days since the grand flotilla had left the Signus Cluster and lit for the core worlds. Entry into the warp had not been easy: ethereal hyperstorms awaited them in the extradimensional realm, fogging their course and battering at the Geller fields protecting their ships. There were suggestions that the warp itself had been agitated into frenzy by the incursions of the daemon creatures. Whatever the cause, it made hard going for the fleet elements. Then there was the matter of the Astronomican. The guiding beacon, the psychic lighthouse on Terra that stood as the single fixed point in the otherwise malleable landscape of warp space, had become indistinct. A spatial disturbance of magnitudes not recorded since the Age of Strife rippled in the void, robbing the Navigators of their certainty. Now the fleet struggled on through the screaming abyss, searching for the strongest psychic glimmer, in vain hopes of pushing through to the Throneworld.

The sergeant was about to shake his head and dismiss the adjutant more forcefully, but then a subtle indicator icon on the vambrace of Zuriel’s armour blinked red. His manner immediately changed, and the glaive returned to its sheath. ‘You may enter.’

Kano glanced around, wondering if Sanguinius had been monitoring the antechamber through some hidden scrying device.

Inside, the Angel’s chamber of solace showed some signs of damage and minor disarray, but it seemed insignificant. The primarch was in the centre of the room, seated upon a curule chair of gunmetal and red velvet. He was without any iteration of his great armour; along the far walls there were hemispheric capsules with crystalflex panels, revealing his battle plate contained within. Yet without the gold the Angel did not seem diminished. Rather, it was as if he had been released. His wings nestled above his back, Sanguinius wore ordinary robes of a cut that was identical to those of a first-ranked neophyte. They bore no marks of status beyond the Legion sigil and a thick black mourning band that circled the sleeve about his bicep.

A tall, spindly servitor hunched over the primarch, a spider of delicate plasteel fingers tracing across his face. Kano smelled ink and blood.

‘Come,’ said the Angel, without turning. He raised a hand and beckoned Kano closer. ‘What ails you, my son?’

As he opened his mouth to speak, Kano felt a weight descend upon his shoulders. ‘Master. I am deeply troubled. Each time I close my eyes, I see again what ranges out before us. Futures. Possibilities.’ His throat was arid and he swallowed. ‘Death.’

‘Those things were not meant for you,’ said the Angel. ‘I am sorry you had to witness them.’

Kano came to stand at attention in front of the primarch, pausing to give a low bow. There, he could see that the servitor was at work at Sanguinius’s cheek, moving tiny probes over the surface of his skin. Dots of bright laser light flashed at the mechanical fingertips. He looked away. ‘Those visions. Those events. Is that what you see, my lord? In your dreams, the deaths of empire and Emperor? Of eternal war?’

It was a long moment before the Angel answered. ‘I dream of many things, Kano. I dreamed of you, years before you became known to me. Meros. I saw him too. I saw you both in your acts of valour, saving my life. Saving our Legion. But only now do I realise the meaning I had glimpsed in those brief moments.’ He grasped a corner of his robe and held it up, running his fingers over the surface of the cloth. ‘This is time, my son. A fabric of possibilities, crossing and re-crossing one another. But it is the weave that makes the shape of it, not the threads. What may appear to be a seam of importance leads nowhere. And what is dismissed…’ He trailed off. ‘I can no more predict our tomorrows than I can command the motion of the stars.’ For an instant, Sanguinius’s gaze turned inwards, remembering something long past. ‘As much is unseen to me as is seen. Know that, Kano. What you shared with me is only the skein of the potential, and even in the act of observing it, you altered its path. We will know the future when it is upon us, and not before.’

Despite himself, Kano gave a rueful smile. ‘That is little comfort, my lord.’

‘I know,’ said Sanguinius. ‘Believe me, I know. You will find a kind of peace eventually, but when you came into the mindscape, you burned something of yourself to reach me. You will never have it back, just as Ecanus and the other Librarians will never live again but in our memories.’ He reached for a red grail at his side and raised it in salute. ‘I continue to be honoured by my Legion’s dedication. You have my gratitude.’ As the Angel took a sip, the servitor released a sigh and retreated, the spindly lengths of its arms folding back into its chest.

There, upon Sanguinius’s face, a single black teardrop had been permanently tattooed into his cheek. The ebon mark marred the flawless form of his features, but he wore it proudly. ‘So none will forget,’ he explained, and offered the grail to Kano.

He took it, surprised by the gesture. It held a fine, rich red wine, and the taste of it reminded him of Baal. The flavour kindled a moment of memory; another rich taste upon his lips, another thirst for something else.

The primarch watched him, and gave a nod. ‘The curse is revealed. I had hoped it would never be so, and in my hubris, I tried to hide it. Horus used that against me. So many trusts he broke. Now every Blood Angel knows the burn of the red thirst, the shadow on their spirit… and the worst of it is, a greater darkness lies beneath that impulse. I will do everything in my power to hold that future at bay.’

Sanguinius rose and walked to the tall windows across the sanctum. There was the slightest stiffness in his gait, the only outward sign of the near-crippling injuries he had suffered on Signus Prime.

Glimpsed behind heavy curtains of crimson, beyond the armoured portal, the wild colours and non-space of the immaterium surged and churned. The Angel pushed a curtain aside to stare into the face of the warp.

‘But there are futures I am sure of,’ offered the primarch. ‘The creature Ka’Bandha who struck me down… We will have a reckoning. And there will come a greater battle beyond that, with the Warmaster himself.’ Bitterness filled his words. ‘I made a vow, Kano. I will see it to its bloody ending.’ The Angel turned away from the window and incarnadine light haloed his folded wings. ‘There may be a day, and sooner than we might wish, when you… when my sons will have to go on without me.’

Kano found himself shaking his head. ‘No, my lord. You are eternal–’

‘No being is eternal,’ came the reply, ‘not even my father.’ Slowly, a proud smile crossed the primarch’s lips. ‘You and Ecanus and your fellows… Meros… every single one of you proved that the Blood Angels have the strength and the nobility to face any challenge. No matter how terrible. You did all this without me at your side.’

The red grail fell from Kano’s nerveless fingers, thudding to the deck as he realised what he was hearing.

Sanguinius’s gaze was strong and steady. ‘Swear this to me, Brother Kano. You will speak to no one of what we shared in those visions.’

It seemed like an eternity before he could answer. ‘On my oath. I swear it.’

The words had barely left his lips before the Red Tear’s deck lurched beneath his boots and the nightmare vista of warp space flashed brilliant white.

Kano felt the sickly rush in the pit of his thoughts that always came with a translation from the immaterium. He looked up and through the portal saw unfamiliar stars patterned across the blackness of space, and what might have been starships.

The Angel turned, and his eyes hardened. ‘This isn’t right.’

Kano whirled as the chamber doors crashed open and Zuriel entered at a run, his brothers Mendrion and Halkryn a few steps behind. Belatedly, alert tocsins began to sound.

‘Master?’ said Zuriel.

Sanguinius waved him away and strode to a hololithic display in the centre of the chamber. ‘Command,’ he snapped, ‘priority.’

Immediately an image swam into definition, and Kano made out a three-dimensional representation of part of the Red Tear’s bridge. A figure hove into view: Captain Carminus of the Third Company, the officer chosen by the primarch to take the temporary office of Fleet Master after Admiral DuCade’s suicide.

Carminus saluted and did not wait to be asked the obvious question. ‘The Navigators, my lord. They fell into some kind of fugue state a few moments ago. We tried to awaken them, but they would only speak of “a safe harbour”. Then suddenly they executed a warp translation here.’

Halkryn was at the great windows. ‘This is not the Sol system. The stars are all wrong.’ He pointed up and to starboard, where a thick belt of light – the curve of a galactic spiral arm – was clearly visible.

‘Initial estimates show we are still within the Ultima Segmentum,’ said Carminus. ‘The cogitators are running exact constellation matches now, but it appears we have been displaced.’

‘Hundreds of light-years off course,’ said the primarch. ‘We must assume the worst. Send word to all ships, all squadrons. Take us to battle stations, Sacrus. Anything that does not fly our colours is to be considered dangerous.’ Carminus saluted and turned from the visual pickup to relay the command.

‘How did we come to be here?’ said Kano, struggling to process it. ‘We should be at the gates of Terra.’

‘Warp travel has never been an exact science,’ muttered Zuriel. ‘But if our Navigators were somehow corrupted by the enemy without our knowledge… They may have delivered us to the traitors.’

Sanguinius shook his head. ‘No. This is something different, I can feel it. The storms, the fading of the signal from the Astronomican. It’s all connected.’ He fell silent, musing. ‘I told the Navigators to strike for the strongest telepathic signal.’ The Angel glanced at Kano. ‘What if that was not my father’s beacon on Terra?’

‘How can any light be greater than the Emperor’s?’ insisted Mendrion.

The primarch was grim-faced. ‘I do not know.’

Carminus reappeared in the hololith. ‘Lord Primarch. Fleet pickets are reporting the approach of a skirmish line of unidentified starships.’ He read the data off a slate in his hand. ‘Imperial silhouettes. Heavy cruisers. Frigates. Destroyers. They are running with void shields raised and gun ports open.’

‘A blockade force patrolling the approaches,’ offered Zuriel.

Halkryn raised his arm and pointed. ‘I think I see them. Port quarter high.’

‘Prepare to fire,’ ordered the Angel. ‘Warning shots first. If they do not stand down, order gunners to target for motion kills.’ He turned from the hololith and went to the portal, Kano trailing behind him.

The interception force approached at high velocity, the dots of light swiftly gaining definition. Even from such a great distance, Kano’s enhanced eyesight brought him the shape of the vessels. He saw the distinctive plough-like bow blade common to Imperial warships, and noted that many of the craft had the patched, rough-edged look of veterans. This was no flight of hangar queens, but battle-hardened craft not long off the front lines.

At the leading edge of the group, the hulls were the common silver-grey of the Imperial Army’s naval battalions, but the larger ships had a different livery. A bright cobalt-blue the shade of an evening sky, trimmed with flawless white and shining gold.

At his shoulder, Zuriel saw the same. ‘Can it be?’

‘My lord!’ Carminus called from the hololith relay. ‘We are receiving a signal…’ The captain hesitated, uncertain of what he was about to say. ‘I believe it is for your attention.’

The flickering hologram broke apart into a wash of shimmering static, changing and reforming. It became a powerful figure, a new face, a strong and stern visage of aquiline proportions. A towering warrior whose presence – even diminished by distance and the attenuation of the projection – was still a match for that of the Angel.

‘Roboute…?’ Kano heard the surprise in his primarch’s voice. ‘Brother.’

The master of the XIII Legion smiled, gratitude in his gaze. ‘Well met, Sanguinius. I welcome you to Ultramar and the Five Hundred Worlds.’ He nodded to himself, as if acknowledging a truth now revealed. ‘It is good that you are here. Now we can begin.’

EPILOGUE

Warmaster Horus looked up from his throne and his assembled court as Erebus entered the chamber. The Dark Apostle broke protocol and strode forwards without waiting for acknowledgement, barely even offering a dip of his head as some kind of salute. Annoyance danced in his dark eyes, uncharacteristically clear for once.

‘Warmaster,’ he said, a sneer buried in the words, ‘I bring you a gift from Signus Prime.’

A cluster of Word Bearers followed the Chaplain into the hall, each of them holding on to a chain that extended away to a figure floating off the deck. The figure was a warrior in broken crimson armour, wreathed in a fiery red-orange glow that reeked of anger.

Horus’s Mournival were already stepping forwards, his trusted lieutenants with their hands on bolters and blades, the issue taken with Erebus’s disrespect open for their punishment. The Warmaster gestured with a talon of the huge power claw on his right hand, stopping them before they could act. Instead, he rose and stepped down from the dais.

Ignoring Erebus, he crossed to the tormented warrior. Horus brushed aside the Word Bearers holding the chains, and they gingerly stepped back, releasing their charge. The daemon-touched legionary did not react, his inner glow seething.

The Warmaster felt hatred radiating from the possessed body, and he turned his face to it, basking in the burn. Horus knew rage well, and he saw it contained here. The tortured, cracked armour of the warrior that had once been a son of Sanguinius wavered like a mirage. He studied the figure for anything that showed name or rank, but found only the remains of company and squad markings, and the molten ruin of an Apothecary’s prime helix badge.

‘Who are you?’ he asked.

Infernal eyes regarded him. ‘Who I was no longer matters, Warmaster. I am a weapon at your command.’

Horus smiled coldly. ‘I approve of that.’

‘The hate of a hundred thousand souls fills me. I burn eternally with it. I am bound to the ruin of all things.’ The spectral voice echoed. ‘I am the Fallen Son of Baal, the Cruor Angelus, the Willing Slave. I am the Red Angel.’

‘It takes Angron’s title in vain?’ Maloghurst, the Warmaster’s equerry, dared to offer an opinion. ‘The gladiator will see grave offence in that.’

The daemon-bound did not look away from Horus. ‘If the primarch Angron wishes that name then he may challenge me for it. I deserve it more than he ever will.’

A mixture of gruff amusement and irritation at this presumption moved through the assemblage in the court, and Horus let it die away, circling the possessed figure. Finally, he nodded to himself. ‘You will be of use.’ He turned to walk back to his throne.

‘Of use?’ Erebus repeated, and his tone halted the Warmaster in mid-step. ‘This freak collision of effect is plucked from the rubble of a failed endeavour, and that is all you have to say on the matter?’

‘You take issue with this?’ Horus’s voice was deceptively calm.

It was the manner of Erebus to be metered and calculating in all things; or at least, it had been that at the beginning. But recently, the reticence that shadowed his easy cunning had waned, and there a growth of arrogance was becoming clear.

‘The trap at Signus has failed!’ The Dark Apostle bit out the words. ‘The Blood Angels should be at our banner.’ He jabbed a finger at the floor. ‘Sanguinius should be kneeling before you, bathed in blood and broken. Instead, this remnant is all we have to show for our effort!’ Erebus frowned. ‘So much had been put into the construction of the cults and the blood fanes. We needed that Legion. We would have that Legion, if you had not intervened.’

Horus showed no sign of irritation at the veiled accusation. ‘You think I was wrong?’ He opened his hands. ‘Please, speak plainly Erebus. I would have it no other way.’

That Erebus took the next step was the clearest indication of how much he had changed since Davin. ‘You broke the pattern. You disrupted the flow by offering skulls to the Bloodthirster, all because you did not wish the Angel to stand among us! You did not want a rival in our ranks! The Blood Angels walk the scarlet path, but now they will never be ours. The Ruinous Powers will not be pleased.’

The Apostle’s brief tirade died away into silence, and no other sound rose beyond it. There came a flash of shock, quickly smothered, as too late Erebus arrived at the understanding that he had overstepped the mark.

Horus studied him, examining the dense lines of text tattooed across the Word Bearer’s face and neck. ‘I admit I am displeased at this turn of events. Sanguinius’s death would have served many purposes, even if my vanity was one of them.’ He grinned, at once malicious and self-deprecating. Then his manner turned cold. ‘But so be it. The Angel will face me in battle before our campaign ends. Only one of us will survive.’

‘That could have been avoided,’ Erebus offered, attempting to make back the ground he had given up.

‘Do you think I am a puppet?’ said Horus. He nodded at the Red Angel. ‘A weapon to be commanded? I think you may. I think you must be reminded of your place in the scheme of things.’

The Warmaster’s hand shot out and snatched at the hilt of a dagger sheathed at the Dark Apostle’s belt. Erebus gave a gasp as Horus took his athame and turned it in his grip, letting the warp-touched blade catch the chamber’s ill light.

‘You let the mask slip, Erebus,’ he told him. ‘You showed yourself to me. I saw what you show them.’ Horus touched the tip of the dagger on the Apostle’s cheek and he flinched away as it burned him. The Sons of Horus were suddenly there at his back, blocking his retreat.

For a moment, the Word Bearers legionaries in the chamber hesitated, hands falling to their weapons, ready to defend their master, but Erebus slowly shook his head, warning them off. He had to realise what was to come, and that he had no choice but to accept it.

‘Let me see that face again,’ said Horus, cutting a bloody line across Erebus’s forehead, as his warriors took the Apostle’s arms and held him rigid. ‘Your true face.’

With an artist’s care, the Warmaster sliced through flesh and into meat. Though he gasped and trembled, Erebus did not cry out. Horus took the severed edge between his fingers, and like the turning of a page, he skinned Erebus’s face from his blood-smothered head.

The Word Bearer staggered back, his features a ruin of crimson, stark white eyes glaring out and unable to blink.

‘The things that whisper in your ear, that you hold in concord with your pacts and your inscriptions… Remind them that they are not the architects of this war.’ Horus paused as he considered the bloody rag that was his new trophy.

‘I am.’

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 Primarchs

Rogal Dorn, Primarch of the Imperial Fists, Praetorian of Terra

Perturabo, Primarch of the Iron Warriors

The VII Legion ‘Imperial Fists’

Sigismund, First Captain

Amandus Tyr, Captain, 6th Company, Commander of the Halcyon

Pertinax, Captain, 14th Company, Commander of the Hammer of Terra

Alexis Polux, Captain, 405th Company, Master of the Retribution Fleet

Raln, Sergeant, 1st Squad, 405th Company

The IV Legion ‘Iron Warriors’

Berossus, Captain, 2nd Company

Golg, Captain, 11th Company, Commander of the Contrador

Imperial Personae

Armina Fel, Senior Astropath

Calio Lezzek, The Retribution Fleet’s Master of Astropaths

Halm Basus, Primus of the Tribune

True strength is born in pain.’

– Ancient Terran proverb

‘All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened’

– from burnt fragments recovered from the Alba archives,
attributed to the ancient poet Elliot

‘We are future memories. When our flesh is dust and our dreams faded we will be ghosts living in a land of legends, made real only by the memories of others. What we take with us into that realm of the dead, what we are remembered for, that will be the truth of our lives.’

– Solomon Voss, from The Edge of Illumination

Prologue

The Nightside of Inwit

Can I bear this?

My world has become a shrinking sphere of cold darkness. Within there is only pain, beyond it there is nothing but hungering night. I cannot see. Ice has pooled in my eye sockets, my tears frozen against my skin. I try to breathe but each sip of air draws razor edges through my lungs. I cannot feel my hands. Numbness is spreading through me. I think I am on the ground, curled on the ice, my limbs shaking more slowly with every fading heartbeat.

The beast must be close. It won’t have given up and it has my blood to follow.

My blood.

I must still be bleeding. It is not a large wound, a clean puncture through my calf, but it will kill me all the same. I have trailed red across the ice-dunes, trying to shut out the pain, trying to ignore the numbness, trying to keep moving. I have failed. The cold is taking me and the beast will have what is left.

I cannot bear this.

I was never going to succeed. I am not strong enough.

The world is turning dark, the pain fading.

There is a voice shouting out of the black distance. I try to hear what the voice is saying but it is too far away.

Hands grip my face. Pain shoots through my head. I scream. Fingers peel back my eyelids.

‘Alexis, you must move.’ I see a face, surrounded by rime-caked fur. The eyes are blue, the blue of glacial ice. Helias. It is Helias, my brother. He is still with me. Behind his face a blizzard fills the starlit sky with spiralling shards of white.

‘You must move now.’

I feel him grip my arms and yank me to my feet. Bright pain flares through my body, jagged-edged, slicing and grinding with every movement. I scream again.

‘The pain is how you know you are still alive,’ shouts Helias over the wind. I blink, trying to focus. The numbness recedes; I can feel my limbs again. There is no comfort in the returning sensations. Part of me wants to be numb again, to lie down and let my blood freeze.

We stand on a narrow flat ridge, crevasses opening to either side, its top sculpted into undulations of white powder. Around us the fractured pinnacles of ice rise above the blur of the snowstorm like shards of flawed glass, dark blue in the starlight. The false radiance of the fortress moons shines down on us from beyond curtains of emerald aurora light. These are the Splintered Lands, the night-soaked side of Inwit which has never seen the sun. The cold is as constant as the night. The warriors of the ice caste only venture here in metal-plated environmental suits, but those who wish to join the Legion must cross this desolate place in rotting pelts and rags. It is a test, a journey through a midnight realm of agony. I have chosen that journey, but I will not see its end.

There is blood on the ice, frozen hard, trailing away into the distance.

‘Where is it?’ I ask, looking at Helias. He shakes his head. Strips of rag hide his face, and the snow-caked furs magnify his bulk so that he looks more like a tundra-ox than a man.

‘I don’t know, but it is close,’ he says, his voice muffled but still strong. I know that his hands are swollen and black with frozen blood, but the pain does not even reach his eyes. As I fade, he is unbowed. He is my brother, my twin in all ways except one. He is stronger than me, he always has been. I would not have made it as far as this without him, and now I have failed him. He should leave me here; I am weak and I will kill us both.

He looks at me, as if he heard my thoughts.

‘Don’t even think it, Alexis. I am not leaving you.’

I open my mouth, but the reply dies in my throat. Over the snow-laden wind I hear it again, a low animal sound, like a breath released with a smile of anticipation. Helias has gone utterly still.

There is a growl from behind me, a crackling purr that floods my veins with warm fear. The beast has found us. It wants me, I know; I am weak and bleeding and it has already tasted my blood. There is another growl, closer, longer. I can imagine it slinking across the ice behind me, its muscles moving with delicate slowness, its colourless eyes on my back. It is waiting to see what I will do, judging its attack for the moment when it is certain. And while it prepares it wants its prey to know fear.

The growl comes again, nearer, and I can hear the soft noise as the beast slides its furred body across the ice. I try to make myself calm, to ready my failing muscles for movement. Helias keeps his eyes steady on mine. He knows what I intend; it is what he would have done. I nod once, very slowly.

I hear the beast’s claws scratch over the ice. In my mind I can almost see its muscles bunching under its ice-dusted pelt.

The beast roars as it leaps towards my back, the sound rising over the blizzard. I dive to the side, my muscles on fire. I am too slow. The beast’s jaws close on my trailing left arm. It turns as it lands, dragging me across the ice. Teeth tear through my flesh. I can smell the rank meat stink of its mouth, the animal reek of its body. It flicks its head, my arm still between its teeth. I hear joints pop and agony flashes across my eyes. I do not even feel it as I slam back to the ground. It releases my arm, and places a clawed paw on my chest. Ribs crack, and needle-sharp claws touch my skin.

There is a yell and suddenly the pressure on my chest is gone. I scramble to pull myself away, and look up. Helias is standing with his back to a crevasse, his body poised, arms spread like a wrestler. Between us the beast coils on its six legs. Pale fur covers its long body from the snout of its shovel-shaped head to the end of its twitching tail. It pauses, assessing the new prey that has drawn its attention away from the easier kill. It tenses. I cannot see my brother’s face but I know that under the rag mask he is smiling.

The beast pounces. Helias is still. The beast’s jaws are wide, its glassy teeth like knife blades. My brother moves at the last instant, pivoting as his arms come up to grip the beast’s neck. He turns and the beast’s momentum spins it through the air towards the waiting crevasse. It is almost perfect. Almost.

I start running, pain and injury falling away… The beast twists as it flies through the air, its forelimb raking flesh. The long hooked claws fasten on Helias’s leg. The beast howls as both tumble together into the crevasse.

I reach the edge in time to grab my brother as he falls. His weight pulls me off my feet. The beast’s claws come free and it vanishes into the crevasse, drops of blood following its panicked snarls into the darkness below.

Helias is hanging from my hand. I am on my front, my right hand gripping a ridge in the ice, my head and left arm extended over the crevasse’s edge. My brother is spinning at the end of my grasp, his hand locked around mine. My arm is a lacerated ruin, the flesh punctured and chewed in the beast’s jaws, and Helias’s weight is pulling the wounds into broad and bloody smiles. The pain is like nothing I have ever felt. Blood is running over our hands. My hold is slipping. Pain and fear have become one inside me. I will not let this happen. I am strong enough, I must be strong enough. I try to pull him up and my grunt of effort becomes a scream. I cannot lift him. My right hand holding the ice ridge slips. I jerk forwards, sliding further over the edge.

‘Alexis.’ My brother’s voice is so low that it is almost lost on the wind. I look down at Helias. His eyes flick to our hands, the frostbitten flesh slick with blood that looks black in the starlight. I see what he already knows; my grip has already broken. It is his hand locked around mine that is holding him from the black void below.

He was always stronger than me. I look back into his eyes.

‘No!’ I shout.

He opens his hand.

One hundred and forty-one days before the Battle of Phall

The Phall System

My scream woke me from the dream.

My eyes snapped open. For a moment I thought I was blind, that I was still on Inwit and that the cold had stolen my sight. Then the chill touch of my armour cut the long-distant past from the present. I was not blind, and my brother had fallen from my hand long ago. I felt cold, as if the dream had reached into reality to wrap me in a memory of Inwit’s chill. Ice covered my helmet’s eye lenses, turning the view into a frosted haze of slowly shifting light. The ice was pink, the colour of snow melted to slush by blood. Warning runes pulsed at the corner of my eyes, slow, dim red.

Hard vacuum warning…

Armour integrity warning…

Gravity condition zero…

Injury assessment…

Armour power low…

I could not remember where I had been, or how I had come to be freezing while my armour died around me. I blinked, tried to focus my thoughts. Sensations began to creep across my body: a numbed echo of pain from my right leg, a black absence of all feeling from my left hand, a metallic taste on my tongue. I am alive, I thought, and that is enough for now. I tried to move my right arm, but the armour resisted no matter how hard I strained. I tried to close my left hand. Nothing. I could not even feel my fingers.

I looked back to the weakening pulse of the warning runes. The armour had cycled down to minimum power, turning it into little more than a lifeless shell of metal. It was keeping me alive, but it must have taken severe damage.

I closed my eyes, steadied my pulse. I knew where I was. I was floating free in the vacuum of space. The armour was keeping my body warm, but it was failing. Its power would fade, and I would begin to bleed more heat into the void. My enhanced flesh would last for longer than that of an ordinary human, but the cold would eventually reach my hearts and still their twin beats to silence. It was only a matter of time.

For a second my control almost broke. I wanted to scream, to thrash against the iron embrace of the armour. It was the instinct of a creature trapped beneath the water, its last breath burning in its lungs, the blackness of inevitability closing around its life. I let out a slow breath, forcing the instinct to stillness. I was alive, and while I lived I had a choice.

‘Re-power all systems,’ I said. A pulse of electric sensation ran through my body as the armour obeyed.

Almost as soon as the armour powered up it began to scream. Sympathetic pain stabbed into my spine. Overlapping warning chimes filled my ears. Angry runes pulsed across my helmet display. I blinked the warnings away and the chimes faded. There were at most a few minutes of power left before the armour became a tomb. I brought my right hand up and scraped the melting ice from the helmet lenses.

Light poured into my eyes, raw and white-edged. I was floating in a vast chamber lit by sunlight that came from a source somewhere behind me. A layer of pink frost covered everything, glittering in the stark light like a sugar glaze on a sweet cake. Small crystals floated all around me, turning slowly with the last of their fading momentum. Irregular shapes coated in rose-coloured rime hung in mid-air across the chamber.

I blink-clicked a faint marker on my helmet display. The vox system activated with a moan of static. I set it to a full spectrum broadcast.

‘This is Alexis Polux of the Seventh Legion.’ My voice sounded hollow inside my helmet, and only more static answered me. I set the broadcast to a looped cycle that would last until the power faded. Perhaps someone will hear. Perhaps there is someone that can hear.

Something bumped against my shoulder and spun lazily into view: a frozen lump a little wider than my hand. It spun lazily end-over-end. I reached out to knock it away, and it turned over and looked at me with lifeless eyes.

Memory flashed through me: the hull splitting with an iron roar as the ship spilled from the warp storm’s grasp, blood arcing across the deck as debris sliced through the air; a human officer shouting, his eyes wide with terror. I had been on a ship. I remembered the deck shaking under my feet and the screams of the storm outside the hull.

I jerked my hand back from the severed head, and the sudden movement sent me spinning through the frozen blood spray. The chamber rotated around me. I saw the ice-clogged servitor niches, and mangled banks of instruments. A tiered auspex dais pointed down at me from the floor, its screens and holo-projectors looking like the branches of a tree under winter snow. I tried to steady my momentum but I just continued spinning. Warnings began to shriek in my ears.

Power failing…

Power failing…

Power failing…

Sights flicked past me, suffused in the warning rune’s ruddy light. There were bodies fused to the walls by layers of blood ice. Sections of splintered yellow armour drifted amongst limbs and shattered bone. Severed bundles of cabling hung from the walls like strings of intestine. Streamers of data-parchment floated beside the foetal shapes of frozen servitors. I spun on and saw the source of the light: a bright white sun shining through a wide tear in the hull. I could see the glittering blue sphere of a planet hanging against the star-dotted darkness. Between me and that starlight was a sight that made me stare as my view turned over.

Dead warships lay spread across the void. There were hundreds of them, their golden hulls chewed and split like worried carcasses. Vast strips of armour had peeled back from cold metal guts to show the lattice of chambers and passages within. Mountain-sized hulls had been portioned into ragged chunks. It was like looking at the jumbled remains of a slaughterhouse.

All my brothers are gone, I thought, and felt colder than I had for decades. I remembered Helias, my true brother, my twin, falling into darkness from the end of my fingertips.

Power failing… the warning runes chimed.

Final memories clicked into place. I knew where we had been going: where all of us had been going. I stared at the graveyard and knew one more thing with certainty.

Power failing…

‘We have failed,’ I said to the silence.

‘…respond…’ The mechanical voice filled my helmet, broken and raw with static. It took me a heartbeat to reply.

‘This is Captain Polux of the Seventh Legion,’ I said as my helmet display dimmed. Bursts of static filled my ears. I could feel the armour stiffening around me, its power finally drained. A quiet numbness began to spread across my body. The helmet display faded to black. I felt something bump into my chest and then fasten around me with a grind of metal. In the prison of my dying armour I could feel myself falling into darkness, falling beyond sight and pain, falling like my brothers. I am alone in the darkness and cold, and I always will be.

‘We have you, brother,’ said a voice that was a machine whisper. It seemed to carry out of a night filled with dreams of the ice and dead ships glittering in starlight.

I knew it would fall to me. I knew the protocol of our Legion as well as any other, but that did not stop me wishing it was otherwise. The remembrancers and iterators speak of the Legiones Astartes and say that we are without fear, that nothing fills our hearts and minds but resolve and fury. Of the Imperial Fists they say more: that we have souls of stone, that emotion is silent inside our flesh. The truth, as ever, is something that words cannot touch. If we felt nothing we would have failed in the thousands of wars we have fought on the Emperor’s behalf. Without doubt to temper boldness our enemies would have slaughtered us many times over. Without rage we would have never have reached the heights of glory. I do not feel fear, but inside me something of it remains, mutilated and withered, its strings tuned to different notes. Where a human would feel fear I feel the tug of another emotion, one layered and spliced into my psyche by the process that made me. Sometimes it is rage, caution, or cool calculation. And sometimes it is dread, a ragged echo of fear that is lost to me. And it was dread that I felt as the leadership of the fleet gathered on the Tribune.

They passed me as they filed into the granite and bronze chamber. A hundred war leaders arrayed for battle. Intricate silver patterns wove across the golden yellow surface of each suit of armour, and the emblem of the clenched fist worked in jet gleamed from chests and pauldrons. Some were old, their faces lined and scarred; others seemed young, though they were not. There was Pertinax, watching me with green machine eyes. Beside him walked Cazzimus, who had held the towers of Velga for six months. There Iago, who had fought in the first pacification of Luna. Beside them were marshals, siegemasters and Legion seneschals. Between them they carried almost ten thousand years’ experience of
waging war.

Once they had all passed I followed, walking down to the centre of the chamber. The machine adepts were repairing my armour so I wore a saffron robe knotted at the waist with a blood-red cord. I stand taller than all my brothers, and even without my armour I still dwarfed every warrior in the room. The chamber was silent and my steps echoed as I limped between my peers. I could feel their eyes on me, watching, waiting. My left arm was stiff at my side, the old scars of teeth and the newer wounds hidden by my robe’s wide sleeve. The healing flesh shot traces of pain up my nerves. None of it showed on my face.

The chamber was deep in the hull of the Tribune, now the flagship of the Retribution Fleet, or what was left of it. Polished bronze lined the walls and its floor descended in tiers of black granite. Firelight from braziers filled the chamber with a red glow, and a ghost-green projection of a star and planets revolved above the open space at its centre.

Tyr had told me what must happen. He had come to see me as I recovered under the eyes of the Apothecaries.

‘It falls to you, Polux,’ he had said, looking down at me, his eyes dark in his axe-sharp face. The medical servitors had been bonding flesh to the left side of my body or I would have risen to reply. As it was I had to remain on the steel slab as the razor lasers and cauterising torches worked to rebuild my mashed and frozen muscle.

‘There are others more worthy,’ I had said, without breaking his stare. The edge of a sneer twitched at the edge of Tyr’s mouth. Control is one of the first qualities required of an Imperial Fist, and I had no doubt that Tyr’s hint of derision was no slip. Maybe he thought my words a sign of weakness, a betrayal of a flaw not yet discovered in my decades of service. Perhaps he simply did not like me. We are brothers, bonded together by oaths and the blood of our primarch, but brotherhood does not require friendship. In truth I do not know what he thought. I have always been apart, unable to read the signs of my Legion brothers’ thoughts. They are blank to me, and perhaps me to them.

Tyr had shaken his head, the hunched shoulders of his Terminator armour shifting with the small movement.

‘No, brother. You are Yonnad’s pupil, the heir to this command. The primarch and Sigismund passed it to him. Now it is yours, but it is not yours to refuse.’

I had looked into Tyr’s eyes that were so like our primarch’s. I had not spoken from false modesty; there were others more worthy to lead a force that was still a fifth of our Legion’s full strength. Better men had survived the wreck of the fleet: commanders with more campaign experience, higher in the rolls of honour, and more skilled at arms. Tyr was one such leader.

I am no hero, no champion of the Legion. I know how to defend and attack, how to stand and not to yield. I have nothing else. It is all I have. But we are Imperial Fists and form and order is not something we set aside easily. Yonnad had designated me as his successor. That command might fall to me so soon was a possibility I doubt he contemplated. But they had pulled me alive from a frozen wreck, and the storm had taken my mentor. Tyr was right; I could not refuse. It was my duty, and that duty led me in limping steps to the centre of a circle of my peers.

I stopped at the chamber’s centre, under the turning display, and looked up at the faces lining the raked tiers. A hundred pairs of eyes glittered at me from the shadows. I felt deeply honoured and completely alone. The truth was that I did not fear the command. Yonnad was the Legion’s finest fleet master and I was his best pupil; I had commanded expeditionary fleets and campaigns of conquest. With Yonnad dead in the storm I was his heir. It was an honour the Legion had tutored and trained me for, but it was an honour I did not want.

Our fleet was the primarch’s first answer to his brother’s treachery. Five hundred and sixty-one ships and three hundred companies had left the Phalanx. First Captain Sigismund had been given command but the primarch had taken him back to Terra, and so we had jumped towards Isstvan under Yonnad’s command. The storm had seized us as we entered the warp and it had not let go. The Navigators could not find the beacon light of the Astronomican, and every course took us deeper into the tempest. We were lost, drifting on the currents of a malign sea. After what seemed like many weeks the Navigators perceived a break in the storms, a single point of stillness. We had fled towards it, and the storm’s fury had followed.

The fleet had translated into reality on the edge of a star system. The power of the storm in those last moments was like nothing I had ever felt. Geller fields failed, hulls sheared into fragments and burned in the fires of their own reactors. Some ships had reached safety, but many had died, their corpses spat out of the warp to freeze in the void. Two hundred warships lost, their remains left spinning in the light of a forgotten star. They had found me in the remains of one of those broken wrecks. I was one of the few.

Ten thousand Imperial Fists gone. I could not grasp that loss.

Three hundred and sixty-three warships remained. The fates of over twenty thousand of my brother Imperial Fists were now in my hands. It was a weight that I had never carried before. I must, I thought. Even if it is more than I can bear, I must.

I nodded once to the assembled chamber.

Silence. Then a hundred fists slammed into chest plates in unison.

I gestured across the slowly rotating projection of the system we found ourselves in. Its name was Phall, a system so minor and un-noted that it existed only as an obscure footnote in navigational records. The projection spun, the orbiting planets disappearing as a section of the image grew to show the surviving Imperial Fists vessels. I let it rotate for a moment. There was a question that all those present needed to consider.

‘Five hundred vessels aimed at the heart of the greatest betrayal ever committed. Two hundred lost as they fled to the one point of calm amidst the storm. Two planets, once inhabited, now empty.’ I looked at where shifting purple clouds represented the relative warp conditions around the system. ‘Here we sit, surrounded by the storms that drove us here. Cut off from communication. Contained. Trapped.’ I looked up at the watching faces; some were nodding as if seeing where I was going. Perhaps they had already seen the same elements of our situation and made the same judgement. I knew how to construct a trap, had used them in dozens of wars, and I knew what it was to kill a weakened and surprised enemy. Looking at the projection of our fleet floating in the Phall system I saw a trap. How anything could create such a thing was beyond me, but I knew what every instinct was telling me.

‘And if we have been trapped here,’ I said, and my voice carried through the silent chamber, ‘who is coming for us?’

The Imperial Palace, Terra

His father waited for him at the summit of the oldest stronghold on the Throneworld. The Bhab Bastion was an irregular cylinder of rock that rose to the roof of the world like a finger pointing to the heavens. In the long millennia of Old Night warlords, kings and tyrants had made it their refuge, and even they had called it old. Now it was an ugly relic surviving amongst the growing sprawl of the Imperial Palace, a blunt reminder of barbarity fused into a monument to illumination and unity. Sigismund wondered whether now the barbarity of the old fastness would triumph over the palace that had tried to tame it. The old ways and necessities are come again, he thought, as they always do. War had been the only constant of existence since mankind first walked under the rays of this sun, and it would last long after that same sun burnt to a cold ember. Of that he was certain.

The wind that blew across the bastion top was cold and scented by spices carried from the work camp on the distant mountain slopes. Above him clouds scudded through a brightening blue sky and a chill dawn light fell across the bare skin of his face. It might once have been handsome, but war and genecraft had carved it to a different end. Noble features were spread across a blunt visage, the skin pitted and the flesh under the right eye chewed by a scar that ran down the cheek to the jaw. But it was the eyes most people noted: bright sapphire-blue and lit by hard intensity. Clad in burnished gold battle plate, swathed in a white surcoat crossed in black, he bore the marks and honours of a hundred wars like a second skin. In battles across the stars he had never been defeated. From the gladiatorial pits of the World Eaters to the conquest of star clusters he had demonstrated what it was to be a warrior of the Imperium. In another time he would have been the greatest warrior of his age, but in these times he was merely the strongest son of the being who waited for him by the tower’s parapet.

Rogal Dorn glimmered in the brightening light. Standing head and shoulders taller than Sigismund, the primarch of the Imperial Fists was a demigod clad in adamantine and gold. Beside Dorn stood an astropath, a hunger-thin woman whose bent spine showed clearly under the green silk of her robe. Neither said anything but Sigismund could feel that a conversation had just ended, the severed tension still hanging in the air. He knelt, the wind stirring his tabard against his armour.

‘My thanks, mistress.’ Dorn nodded to the withered astropath, who bowed and walked away. ‘Rise, my son,’ he added.

Sigismund rose slowly and looked up at his father. Dark eyes glittered at him from a face of hard lines and unreadable stillness. Dorn smiled grimly. Sigismund knew what that meant; it meant the same as it had every day since they had returned to Terra.

‘There is no word, my lord?’ asked Sigismund.

‘None.’

‘The warp storms occluding the–’

‘Would make communication unlikely, yes.’ Dorn turned away. Out beyond the battlement an eagle turned against the cold blue sky, skimming the edge of a plume of drifting smoke. Dorn’s eyes followed it, tracing the spiral of its flight as it rose on a column of warm air.

It had been many weeks since Dorn had heard and seen the evidence of his brother’s treachery. Sigismund remembered the rage in his father’s eyes. It was still there, he knew, wrapped in will and buried beneath layers of control. He knew it because it burned in him, a bright echo of his father’s cold fury. Dorn had wanted to go and confront Horus himself, to hear the traitor’s confession and bring retribution with his own hands. But duty had held him back: duty to the Emperor and the Imperium that Horus now sought to destroy. They had returned to Terra, but Dorn had sent his sons as emissaries of his anger. He had named it a Retribution Fleet. Thirty thousand Imperial Fists and over five hundred warships had struck out towards Isstvan, a force great enough to subdue a hundred worlds, bearing a brother’s wrath. Now a second force from many Legions gathered to strike at Isstvan, but no word had come from the Retribution Fleet.

‘Word will come, my lord. The galaxy does not simply swallow a third of a Legion.’

‘Does it not?’ Dorn turned his dark eyes on Sigismund. ‘War amongst the Legions. Horus a traitor. The ground under our feet becomes the sky. Can we be sure that we know anything for certain?’

‘You have been listening too much to the worries of the council, my lord,’ said Sigismund in a level voice. Fear surrounds us, he thought. It ran through the halls of Terra like a cold wind. It ran through the hive sumps of Nord Merica, and through the whisper colonnades of Europa. It spread in glances, rumour and in the silence of fears left unsaid. It was everywhere and it was growing. Horus’s treachery had shaken all assumptions of loyalty and truth in the Imperium. In a single moment everything had become unsure. Who else had sided with Horus? Who could be trusted? What would happen? The questions went on without answer. As he looked into his father’s eyes Sigismund reflected that knowing some of the answers gave little comfort.

‘The fleet will arrive at Isstvan, and whatever happens to them they will endure. They are your sons.’

‘Do you now regret returning here?’ asked Dorn.

‘No. My place is here,’ he said, looking back into his father’s face. Command of the Imperial Fists sent to Isstvan had been Sigismund’s, but it was a duty that he had not taken. He had asked instead to return to Terra. Dorn had trusted his son and acceded to his plea without question.

He had kept the real reason to himself, sensing that his father would not understand. Sigismund barely understood it himself, but he had made his decision. That deception had weighed on Sigismund like penitent chains ever since.

Dorn smiled.

‘So certain, so little doubt,’ he said.

‘Doubt is the greatest weakness.’ Sigismund frowned.

Dorn raised an eyebrow. ‘Quoting my own words is unsubtle flattery, or a very subtle rebuke.’

‘The truth is a many-edged blade,’ quoted Sigismund in a flat voice. Dorn’s laughter blew across the platform like brief thunder.

‘Now you really are trying to provoke me,’ growled Dorn, but the words still held a note of laughter. He gripped Sigismund’s shoulder. ‘Thank you, my son,’ he said, his voice grave again. ‘I am glad you are here.’ For a moment Sigismund thought of telling him the truth, of telling him why he had returned to Terra. Then his father looked away and the feeling passed.

‘And there is more for you here than keeping me from melancholy.’ Dorn’s eyes had gone to the stars glittering on the horizon’s edge, his gaze fixed on where a red spark flickered like a cooling cinder. ‘It has reached us,’ he said. ‘The treachery is at our threshold.’

‘The reports are true, then? Mars is falling?’

‘Yes.’

Sigismund felt anger coil through him at the thought of an enemy so close to the heart of the Imperium. The hate built within him, running through his limbs in a hot wave, feeding on lesser emotions until it was a focused line of barely shackled fire. It was this inner fire that had made him a warrior without peer beneath the Emperor and the primarch whose flesh he shared. For a moment he felt as he had before the encounter on the Phalanx, before everything had changed.

He let out a long breath. ‘I will grind the Martian traitors to dust.’

Dorn shook his head. ‘There is no time. For now we must secure what we need for the defence of Terra – the armour from Mondus Occulum and Mondus Gamma.’ Sigismund nodded. If they had no allies remaining amongst the Martian adepts it would be a punishing task; punishing, but straightforward.

‘My resources?’

‘You have four companies, and Camba-Diaz will go with you.’

‘To shackle my temper,’ snarled Sigismund, seeing the wisdom in his father’s order even as it pulled at his pride.

‘All of us need others to balance us.’ Dorn inclined his head slightly. ‘Is that not so, my son?’ Sigismund thought of the flicker of uncertainty he had seen in his father’s eyes and of the real reason he had asked to return to Terra. He stands at the centre of a storm of fear and betrayal, he thought, and I must stand with him no matter what is to come.

‘It will be done, my lord,’ he said, and knelt at his father’s feet.

‘Of that I am certain,’ said Rogal Dorn.

Eighty-eight days before the Battle of Phall

The Phall System

The fire from the fleet’s engines blotted out the stars. Beyond the Tribune’s viewports hundreds of warships slid across the darkness in an interlacing web of plasma trails. Each was moving on a precise arc around its fellows, forming a shifting lattice like an ever-changing orrery. Some were so close that I could see the augur spines projecting from their backs and bellies. It was an arrangement I had created, placing each element and setting their trajectories in motion. Every ship was in a constant state of readiness, their shields raised, and their weapons ready. At another time such a creation might have pleased me, but it only served to fill my mind with half-formed worries. It had been weeks and nothing had happened.

I flicked my eyes back to the battlegroup commanders that stood in a circle around me. My first sergeant, Raln, stood a little behind me, his helmet in his hand, his face devoid of its normal crooked grin. We stood at the centre of a spit of white marble that ran down the centre of the Tribune’s bridge. Black stone walls curved above our heads to a vaulted roof. Round viewports ran the length of the bridge, their armoured eyelids open to the void beyond. In the clefts to either side of us rows of servitors sat bound to machines by thick creepers of cable. The smell of warm wiring and the sound of clicking cogitators filled the air. Human officers paced the long rows, followed by hovering servo-spheres that projected transparent curtains of data in front of their faces. Beneath my feet images of mythical beasts inlaid in gold and bloodstone writhed across the marble. The Tribune was the product of the Inwit shipyards, and like all ships birthed above that world of night and ice its master commanded on his feet. Those that came into his presence stood with him, equal in respect if not rank. It was a principle that appealed to me, but after dozens of councils I sometimes felt that the Inwit shipwrights had been kinder to the commanded than the commander.

Pertinax completed his report. I nodded thanks and then looked around the circle. Each of those assembled commanded one of the fleet’s two-dozen battlegroups. Most of those in attendance were projections, their translucent images rendered in flickering light. Only Tyr, Raln and the spindle-limbed Master of Astropaths Calio Lezzek were physically present. The council had been like all those that had preceded it; all was quiet. As it had been for weeks. I caught Tyr’s eye and saw the old argument growing in the glance. I looked away to the only person yet to give their report.

‘Master Lezzek.’ The old man raised his head at the sound of his name, and cocked his head as if to listen. ‘Is there word from Terra?’

‘No, captain,’ wheezed Lezzek, the loose skin of his face quivering above his silk-shrouded shoulders. ‘There has been no word from Terra, or anyone else.’ The answer was as expected; we were as deaf and mute as we had been when the storm first spat us out.

‘Thank you,’ I said, and was about to dismiss the gathering when Lezzek took a gulp of air and continued.

‘We lost another two astropaths in our last attempt to send a message through the storms.’ The old man paused, breathing hard. I could see the fatigue running through his body. His skin had a fever sheen to it, and a drop of blood formed at the corner of his mouth as he spoke. ‘Fleet master, we have lost half the remaining astropaths in the fleet trying to get word to Terra. We cannot continue like this. The storms beat on our minds even when we sleep. It’s like they are alive. Like they–’

‘You will keep trying,’ I said, a hard edge to my voice. Lezzek opened his mouth to speak but I did not give him a chance. ‘There is nothing more important. Nothing.’ Lezzek was silent for a moment and then nodded.

It was a death order, I knew. I was ordering his astropaths to give their lives whether they wished to or not. But there was no choice, and we had all suffered losses in this endeavour. Doing one’s duty while bearing loss is the essence of loyalty. Still I felt the blind man’s empty eyes boring into my back as I turned to the other commanders.

‘Until next division,’ I said, and brought my closed right fist to my chest. All of the Imperial Fists returned the salute. Lezzek simply bowed and shuffled away, looking as if he might fall over at any moment. One by one the projected images blinked out, until only Tyr remained. A frown creased his sharp face as he stared at the back of the departing astropath. A sensation of restlessness hung around Tyr even when still, a restrained energy like a predator looking out from the inside of a cage. He was honourable and true but he bowed in respect to no one other than Sigismund and Dorn himself. He was my brother by virtue of the alterations to our flesh and the oaths we had made, but he would never be a friend.

‘If you have something on your mind you should have voiced it, brother.’

Tyr gave me an accusing look. I braced myself for renewed debate. Behind me Raln moved discreetly away from us both, his constant enigmatic grin back in place.

‘He has a point, brother,’ said Tyr, looking at where Lezzek had stood. ‘We cannot continue like this.’

‘We must establish communications with Terra,’ I said, my voice flat and steady. Tyr nodded, still looking at the spot vacated by the astropath.

‘That is true, but that is not what I meant.’ He frowned, the scars across his face becoming jagged fissures. ‘The primarch ordered us to Isstvan. Word from Terra is vital but so is the mission.’

‘Ten ships, captain,’ I said quietly. Tyr winced. Since I had assumed command he had been arguing that the whole fleet should be trying to find a way through the storms. In his eyes staying in place and preparing our defences was a waste of time. After our first conversation I had agreed that we needed to try to break through the storms. I had given Tyr the responsibility of probing into the warp to try and find a safe passage. Ten ships had been lost over the last weeks, and twice as many had taken damage. The storms had not abated; if anything they seemed to have increased in ferocity.

‘If the whole fleet sought a way out–’

‘We would lose more, and we would not be able to maintain our readiness.’

‘Is that our duty?’ growled Tyr. ‘To stay here and wait for an enemy that may never come? Command did not fall to you to delay here while our enemy waits for us beyond the storms.’ He gestured at the viewports but kept his gaze on me. I saw something dangerous in the deep centre of his eyes.

I stepped closer to Tyr, a poised stillness suddenly running through my body. My armour was void-hardened battle plate, less massively plated than Terminator armour, but I still looked down on Tyr. ‘I have listened to you.’ My voice was low and level. ‘I agreed to let you seek a way out. But mastery of the fleet is mine.’ Tyr looked about to say something, but I shook my head slowly. ‘You could have had command. You are more honoured. Sigismund holds you in high regard, as does the primarch. The decisions I make could have been yours. But they are not. You and the others placed this duty in my hands.’ Unconsciously I found I had clenched my hand, the scarred fingers hidden by the enfolding bulk of my power fist. ‘You may continue to seek a passage out, but I will not risk more of the fleet, or our deployment. That is my command, captain.’

Tyr blinked once and then bowed his head, but when he looked up again I could still see fire in his eyes. I felt something kindle at the base of my neck, a hot acid sensation that spread through my head and chest. I recognised the feeling: anger. Not the focused rage of battle, but the low human sensation.

I opened my mouth, but never spoke the words that had formed there. At that moment, the Tribune screamed.

We are told that pride is a virtue, but only when bound to humility. I had been ready for an attack. Through the long weeks of watching, drilling and planning I had waited for the enemy to show his face. I had expected silent ships drifting on momentum from the system edge, or a blunt mass assault from behind the system’s sun. Our disposition accounted for this, as it did for any number of other preludes to attack.

My plan, though thorough, had not anticipated the unimaginable. Of the many mistakes I made it is perhaps the easiest to understand but the most difficult to forgive.

It began with the servitors. There were hundreds of them, bound into the ship by interface trunks, and locked in cable cradles and machine niches. As one they howled. Some vomited data code as if trying to purge themselves. Others babbled half-formed words. Those without mouths thrashed in silence.

I tried to understand what was happening. Then the psychic wave hit me and pitched me over into a sea of fragmented sensation. I heard crying, jabbering, and pleading in a hundred desperate voices. I staggered, my vision swimming with luminous streaks of light and colour. I was falling and the sounds I heard were shards of memory and suffering that were not mine. I was drowning, stinking fluid filling my lungs. I was floating in the void knowing that I was about to die. I was screaming as an iron-faced figure walked towards me, bladed arms extending. I was shouting into the winds of a storm.

‘Brother.’

The word seemed to come from far away. I opened my eyes. A fever blur edged my vision and the screams echoed in my ears. There was a face looking at me, the pain on its features an echo of my own. For an instant I saw a ghost, a half-dream of the past meshed with the present. Then I felt a blow jolt my shoulder, hard enough to shake me inside my armour. My senses snapped back into sharp clarity. Tyr was looking at me, a snarl of suppressed pain twisting his thin face. Sweat beaded his skin. Behind him I could see human officers slumped over sensor daises, or twitching on the floor amongst pooled vomit and excreta. Blood dribbled from their eyes and ears, running over static-filled data screens. I could tell by their stillness that some were dead. There was a taste of dry ash and grave rot in my mouth.

‘Look,’ shouted Tyr, and pointed to where the holo-projection of the Phall system turned in the air above us.

I looked, and was shouting for full battle readiness even as my mind processed what I saw.

A thousand energy signatures flared and blinked out in front of my eyes. Sensor bursts and auspex sweeps bombarded us, hundreds of them exploding from sources that came to life and then vanished. Clustered spikes of data and auspex readouts bloomed and died across display screens on the bridge. It was like watching a phosphor shell scatter sparks across the night sky. The cogitators snarled as they tried to process and assess the sudden squall of data. And all the while the nightmares and visions churned through our minds in a swelling tide.

Then it was over. The last energy signals vanished from the holo-projection. The machines went quiet, the servitors slumped at their stations, and the fevered sensations faded from my mind.

Twenty-eight days before the Battle of Phall

The Phall System

They took our fear but not our doubts. Am I right? Have I misjudged? What will happen? The questions hammered on me and I bore them in silence. That is the necessity of command: that you hold doubt within. You cannot look to others for assurance, because you are their surety. You cannot share your misgivings, lest they spread like a withering disease through muscle. You are alone. Sometimes I wonder if the primarchs feel this; if decisions eat at their thoughts as they do mine.

I had been drilling with my company for hours. Normally I find calm in the repetition of such practice, but the questions repeated in my mind. What if the storms did not abate? Should I change my plan? What would Sigismund have done?

The training chamber ran along the flank of the Tribune for half a kilometre. Blast doors closed tank-wide holes in one wall, shutting out the void beyond. The floor was a tangle of barricades and fire-scorched debris. Weapon servitors hung from the ceiling, sliding along gantries to rain fire from the different angles required by the training scenario.

As I glanced up I saw that the barrels of the servitors’ cannons were glowing red. The guns increased their rate of fire. Sparks danced across the rim of my boarding shield. Lines of tracer fire scored the air above my head. My shield arm was vibrating with the impact of hard rounds. A line of tracer hit the crown of my helm, and I felt muscles tear in my neck. To either side of me two of my first squad stood with their shields braced across the left of their body, their legs set.

Each shield was a thick plate of plasteel two-thirds our height. The snouts of bolters jutted from the vertical slot cut into the right-hand side of each shield. Standing shoulder to shoulder, we created a wall of metal. In battles fought in the guts of starships this is what keeps you alive and allows you to win. Fighting this way is blunt and ugly; it is killing with discipline and workmanlike routine. It is perhaps the method of war I come closest to enjoying.

‘Advance, with fire,’ I roared. Our targets were servo-rigged automata that moved to preset patterns to mimic the response of a determined enemy. Only when we had closed the distance would real opponents replace machines and servitors. We began to step forwards and every step was a volley of bolter fire, repeated with lethal rhythm.

Questions rang in my head in time with our tread. Was Tyr right? Should we try and break through the storms? After the sensory and psychic onslaught we had come to full alert, and waited for an enemy to show their face. They had not come. And the weeks had passed, and the drumbeat of questions grew in my head.

‘Enemy, ten metres, front, closing fast,’ shouted Raln, from my right. I could not see the enemy without looking over my shield, but I did not need to; Raln had seen and I trusted his judgement.

Was the Phall system really a trap? The populations of its planets were missing and we had seemed to come under a form of psychic attack. But we had not found the cause of the onslaught. There could be other factors at work. Our being here could simply be coincidence.

‘Open ranks,’ called Raln. Our shield wall opened, peeling back just before the enemy hit. Five Imperial Fists in a tight wedge, hammers and chainswords ready. Skill at war is a blade edge made sharp only by harsh practice, and so I had picked the best of the company as our close-quarter opponents. They came at us as I intended: as if they wanted to kill us. The five came through the gap in our shield wall and spilled into the space behind. ‘Close,’ shouted Raln. Our ranks closed, enveloping the mock enemies within in a tight ring of shields.

Can I do this? A fifth of a Legion on full alert, drilling for an attack that I believed was coming… What if I am wrong?

A hammer blow hit my shield with a sound like a gong. An instant later one of the five enemy warriors had rammed his shoulder into the point where mine and Raln’s shields touched. It was Settor, sergeant of the sixth squad, an old warrior seasoned by the conquest of worlds. He was also lethally fast. In the instant that a gap opened between our shields he had stepped forwards, forcing it wider and bringing his hammer down on my head. My vision swam. I blinked and in that second Settor was through our shield wall. He kicked Raln’s legs out from under him and suddenly there was a wide hole in the circle of our shields. Above us the gun servitors rose on their hoists and bullets began to fall on our heads like rain.

I raised my shield high, covering my head. Settor’s hammer head hit me in the gut. I staggered and a second blow crashed into my face plate. The eye lenses of my helm shattered, red fragments spilling down my front like drops of blood. I was dead, or would have been in a true fight.

‘End,’ I called over the vox. A second later the gunfire slackened as the servitors hanging from the weapon gantries cycled their slug cannons to silence. I pulled my helmet off. Pieces of red glass ringed the eye sockets like shattered teeth. Around me my company lowered their weapons. Sulphurous weapon smoke fogged the air. Countless chips and gouges had stripped everyone’s armour back to the dull metal beneath. Flattened slugs smeared the fronts of our boarding shields.

‘There was an opening, fleet master,’ said Settor, bowing his head as he spoke. ‘A momentary gap in your guard. I used it to break the shield wall.’ I nodded. It is the duty of all Imperial Fists to recognise weakness. Settor was right – my thoughts and focus had drifted. In a real fight it could have led to slaughter and failure.

‘Thank you, brother,’ I said with a nod. Settor moved away, his hammer hanging loose from his fists. I looked at the battered helm in my hand. Anger buzzed behind my eyes. I had allowed my doubts to make me weak. If I could not find the strength to bear my duty then I would kill us all.

There may be no enemy coming for you, whispered a craven voice at the back of my thoughts. Tyr may be right and your duty might lie down another path. I thought of Sigismund, our first captain. This was to have been his duty to bear, but he had returned to Terra with the primarch. I thought of the steps of mischance that meant that his duty now rested in my hands. Would it have been as heavy in his?

‘Not bad.’ Raln’s voice cut through my thoughts. He had come to stand at my shoulder; blade cuts and gunfire had pitted and gouged his armour. He pulled his own helmet off, and took a deep breath as if savouring the thick smells of battle training.

‘The wall broke,’ I growled.

‘For the first time in four hours.’

‘It still broke.’

‘Response and cohesion have increased.’

‘Another four hours,’ I said. Raln held up his helmet as if in surrender and I saw the hint of a smile on his scarred lump of a face. I have no idea why he smiles.

‘The artificers will not thank you.’

‘Another four hours.’ I hefted my shield, feeling its reassuring weight.

Raln raised an eyebrow, but nodded and began to shout orders. The company started to reform. Overhead the gun gantries repositioned into a different configuration. I did not care if the artificers had to rebuild every suit of armour in the fleet; when an enemy came we needed to be ready. The opinions of others, whether they agreed or not, were of no matter. Strength requires obedience, not thought.

I clamped my eyeless helm over my head. I would be without the information fed to me through the helmet’s eye lenses, but I would continue anyway. In war you cannot rely on anything except your brothers. To do otherwise is weakness.

‘Begin,’ I called and the hammer chime of gunfire filled my ears.

‘Fleet master?’ The helm officer’s voice cut through the noise as I was about to give the first order. It was Cartris – a human veteran of fifty years in service to the Imperial Fists, and the man I had trusted with coordinating the sweep of the system’s planets, moons and asteroid belts. He was not the type to be easily shaken, but I could hear the tension in his voice.

Was it an attack? Alarms would have rung through the ship. No, it was something else, important enough to alert me immediately but not enough to raise a general alarm.

‘I hear you, Cartris.’

‘We have received a signal from our search units.’ Cartris paused. I could hear the chatter of signal readouts and vox distortion in the background. ‘They have found something.’

Tyr came with me. Perhaps I wanted him to see it and so answer his own questions. But perhaps there was another, less worthy motivation.

Our steps clanged dully as we approached the dead machine at the centre of the gloom-filled chamber. I glanced at Tyr, but his eyes stayed fixed on the isolated circle of bright light. The chamber had been an ordnance magazine. Its walls were three metres thick, and its triple-layered blast doors sealed by stratified layers of cipher codes. The machine sat alone under a buzzing stasis field, a specimen pinned out for display and then locked away from sight. Automated gun turrets twitched at our approach, and then cycled to stillness. It was as if we had passed into a shadow world that had formed like a cyst around a secret.

We stopped and looked at what the search teams had pulled from the ocean of Phall II. The machine glistened under the stab lights, water beading its bare metal body, the stasis field tinting the drops to sapphires. It had suffered severe damage, but its form was still clear: a blunt-edged cube of metal, studded with thruster vents and ugly protrusions. Its shell had been cracked open, first by jagged wounds that to my eyes looked like impact hits, and then by the smooth cuts of a melta torch. The tech-priests had dissected it and left it with its innards exposed. I could see a jumble of cables and clusters of glass blisters like lidless eyes. Dribbles of yellow fluid hung unmoving from severed tubes. Shattered crystals had spilled over the stained floor. At its heart was something grey and soft, like a corpse bloated in lightless water. I could see a spine under pale skin, and above that a nest of cables haloing a head, its eyes and mouth stapled shut. There were no arms or legs, just stumps. A thick smell of ionised air filled my nose, and my teeth ached in time with the field’s hum.

I had seen countless servitors created by the Mechanicum, and had waded knee-deep through mutilated bodies, but there was something about the machine and the amputated torso that was utterly repellent. I had examined it before, when the search teams first brought it aboard, but without the crowding tech-priests and labour servitors it felt different. It felt like going to a grave’s edge to look down at the remains of a secret atrocity.

Tyr let out a carefully controlled breath beside me. ‘What is it?’ he said, his voice echoing in the empty chamber.

‘We don’t know, at least not with certainty,’ I said. Tyr was moving around the edge of the stasis dome. ‘The search units I sent to Phall II found it floating in the oceans, but it has clearly been exposed to the void. The adepts tell me that the machine components have several purposes.’ Tyr gave a small nod, but was silent as I pointed to different portions of the wreckage. ‘Most of it is made up of high-gain augur arrays and broad-spectrum sensors effective over a relatively short range. Then there is the human component. Apparently it would have been in a state of hibernation, kept alive with minimal power usage. Their assessment is that it was in orbit around Phall II, suffered damage and fell to the planet’s surface.’ Tyr was still staring at the grey remains of the human in the machine. I glanced at it then away; it made me want to shiver.

‘Some form of servitor-controlled sensor vehicle? An asteroid survey unit, perhaps?’

‘The adepts think it unlikely. In addition to the sensor equipment some of the systems seem to be a form of psy-amplifier.’

Tyr looked up. ‘This created the psy-attack?’

‘This and others like them. There were hundreds of energy signatures detected. There are most likely many more.’

‘We need to find and destroy them; they could trigger again at any moment.’

‘This one fell through the ocean planet’s atmosphere as its orbit decayed. Our search teams would never have found it without the flare light of its re-entry.’ I looked back at the broken machine and its pitiful occupant. ‘It sustained damage but the adepts say that most of its system had already burnt out. Its occupant was already dead.’

Tyr shook his head, his face taut with an emotion I could not read. ‘They were killed once they had been activated,’ he breathed. There was a note of disbelief and rage in his voice. ‘Objects this size, now dead and without power; we could sift this system for a decade and find nothing. With no population on the planets there is no way of knowing who put them here or why they attacked us.’

‘You are correct, but it was no attack.’

‘You say that now?’ I could see the months of dispute and controlled animosity straining at his will. After the psychic attack Tyr had not dropped his calls for the fleet to try and break the storms. If anything his attitude became more unyielding. As had mine. I had hoped that he would have seen the full implication of the recovered machine, and that my decisions had been correct. It was a weakness, and like everything built on weakness it was doomed.

‘Look at it, brother.’ Tyr’s eyes flicked back to the machine, skimming over its broken form. ‘The sensors, the augur and communication sifters. The psychic screams we all felt were not attacks. They were a message.’ He looked up at me and I saw that he understood at last. ‘It was no attack, brother. It was a prelude to one.’

The Imperial Palace, Terra

Silence followed the messenger. The click of her staff echoed through the corridors as she approached the planning chamber. Figures pulled back before her, their eyes following her steps, their whispered conversations stilling as if they could sense the weight of the news she carried. Four gold-plated Custodians flanked her and black sentinels followed in her wake like armoured mourners.

Within the planning chamber Sigismund caught the movement from beyond the chamber’s open door and looked up. He saw the approaching messenger and the look on the astropath’s withered and blind face. Something cold ran over his flesh at the sight. He knew the astropath: her name was Armina Fel. She had served the Imperium for three decades. That service had bent her spine and turned her hair to the white of raw cotton. She had brought countless messages to Dorn. Most of the news was bad, some frustrating, but none of it had required an escort. It was almost as if what she brought needed to be guarded like a prisoner in case it slipped its bindings and ran free.

Sigismund turned to look at his father, but if Rogal Dorn had seen the approaching procession he gave no sign. Vadok Singh was outlining his proposed fortification of the Imperial Palace. The war mason paced amongst the broad pillars, perfumed smoke puffing from his mouth as he sucked on his long-stemmed pipe. Dorn stayed in the centre of the room, frowning down at the plans spread across the table at the room’s centre. Brass projection apparatus hung from the ceiling, scattering images of Singh’s plans across the chamber’s sandstone walls. The room seemed almost peaceful, but Sigismund knew that this short moment of calm was a lie. He had returned from Mars to find the atmosphere of uncertainty and fear growing stronger with every day. It was as if the whole of Terra was holding its breath and waiting to see where the next blow would fall.

‘The Dhawalagiri Elevation?’ said Dorn, scowling at the sprawling schematics. ‘You think that necessary?’

‘Not necessary,’ purred Singh. ‘A necessity, Rogal.’ The war mason flicked a skeletal finger at one of his silk-robed slaves and the man changed the focus on one of the projection lenses. ‘Look at the inherent weakness in the alignment of the outer elements. You of all people must see that if this section of the palace is to hold we must remake it, and remake it now.’ Normally the war mason’s familiarity would have angered Sigismund, but he barely heard the words.

The procession was at the chamber’s open doorway. Behind Sigismund, Dorn gave a low snort.

‘Necessity is a word that makes me suspicious, old friend,’ said Dorn.

Sigismund watched Armina Fel and her escort pause on the threshold. The astropath brought her hand up to the empty pits that were her eyes. Pearls of moisture glittered on her cheeks. She is crying, he realised. Beside her one of the Custodians brought the butt of his spear down three times on the stone floor. The sound of the blows rippled through the pillared chamber.

Dorn raised his head slowly.

‘There is news,’ he said in a flat voice, and looked at Armina Fel. For a moment Sigismund thought he saw an unreadable expression flicker across his father’s face. ‘It is all right, mistress. Please tell us what you must.’

The woman’s lips were trembling.

‘There is word from Isstvan, my lord.’ She took a ragged breath. Dorn stepped forwards, his black robes falling back from his arms as he reached out. He gently raised her face until her empty eyes looked up at him.

‘Mistress,’ he said softly. ‘What has happened?’

Armina shook herself, poise and strength returning to her features, as if some of Dorn’s stillness and strength had flowed into her. She began to speak, her voice the monotone drone of precise recall.

‘Imperial counter-strike massacred on Isstvan Five. Vulkan and Corax missing. Ferrus Manus dead. Night Lords, Iron Warriors, Alpha Legion and Word Bearers are with Horus Lupercal.’

Nothing moved in the chamber. The black sentinels and Custodians stood like statues of jet and gold. Vadok Singh simply stared at Armina, the ember in the bowl of his pipe cooling to grey ash. For a moment Sigismund felt nothing, as if what he had heard had stripped all sensation away. A primarch dead. Two lost. Three Legions gone, and four gone from friend to enemy in the space of a handful of words.

This is it, thought Sigismund. As she showed me. This is the true beginning of the end. If four more Legions can turn against us, then why not more still? They shall come here, and here we must stand, and stand alone. He realised that he was shaking, taut muscles vibrating under scarred skin. For a second he wondered if it was fear, if that long-dead emotion had returned to him after so long. Then he recognised the sensation: it was hate. Hate so bright and focused that he could almost see it. Let them come. Here my father stands, and I will stand with him.

Dorn’s hands fell from Armina’s face. His eyes were black holes in a facade of stone. Hard control radiated from him like cold from glacial ice. He looked at Sigismund. For an instant Sigismund thought he saw a reflection of his own anger in his father’s eyes, a flash of rage, quickly hidden.

‘Find any remnants of the new betrayers that remain in the system.’ Dorn’s voice was a hoarse growl. ‘Use whatever and whoever you need. Take them or destroy them as you must. Do it now, my son.’

Sigismund began to kneel, but Dorn was already turning back to Armina.

‘Get a message to the Retribution Fleet. They must return here immediately.’

Armina swayed as if the words were a storm wind. ‘Lord Dorn, we have heard nothing from them.’ She swallowed. ‘They may have reached Isstvan Five before the massacre. They may…’ Her voice trailed away as Dorn took a step closer.

‘If you have to burn through a thousand astropaths you will reach them.’ Dorn’s voice was low but it seemed to fill the room. ‘Bring my sons back to Terra.’

The Isstvan System

‘This information is accurate?’ Golg’s question broke the silence, but the tension remained. The only sound was the hum of armour and the dull rumble of the Iron Blood’s reactors. Golg shifted, his hunched augmetics hissing nervously. The other Iron Warriors captains kept their eyes on the luminous surface of the holo-table, their shapes casting bloated shadows onto the walls. They were the senior commanders of their Legion, those that had the primarch’s countenance. Forrix, his gaunt face framed by a hood of vulcanised rubber. Berossus, his pale eyes glittering above a sneering half-smile. Harkor, in Terminator armour still black with soot from the slaughter on Isstvan V. Dargron, hidden behind a slot-eyed face plate. Varrek, his face so twisted by scar tissue that it looked like chewed meat. None of them looked at Golg. They were waiting to see how Perturabo would respond. They had all known others who had presumed the Lord of Iron’s favour and paid for their mistake.

Golg raised his eyes from the luminous columns of data. Perturabo was watching him, his gaze unmoving. Golg felt the danger in that glittering gaze, the force of destruction behind the oil-black eyes. A hammer, as tall as the Iron Warrior himself, rested head down under Perturabo’s hand. The black iron head gleamed in the ember light that lit the chamber. Perturabo made the smallest of movements towards the illuminated table.

‘It comes from the Warmaster,’ said Perturabo, his eyes moving from Golg to the other captains. None met his gaze.

Golg ran his eyes down the glowing data runes. What it represented left his mouth dry. Over three hundred warships caught in a backwater system like fish in a whirlpool. A fleet of ships pinned in place and waiting for extermination, and here were all of those ships’ dispositions and characteristics, listed and laid out in cold light. It was too perfect, too neat. How could even the Warmaster achieve such a thing? It was daunting in its implication. There was possibility here, though, the possibility to rise high in the sight of the primarch. Golg knew that the other captains would be thinking the same. They would be judging how much power they could gain, and how high were the risks. Golg opened his mouth to ask another question but Forrix spoke before him.

‘This information was gathered first-hand?’

Perturabo nodded once.

‘By scout elements in the system.’

Golg managed to hide his surprise at Perturabo’s words.

So this was no random event, he thought. This was planned before we came to kill the weakling Legions on Isstvan. But then what else would he expect from the Warmaster and the Lord of Iron? He thought of the massacre they had just committed, of the Legions they had butchered. They were weak and destroying them had been nothing more than another task to be completed. But the Imperial Fists were rivals of old, arrogant pretenders to honours and reputations they had bought with lies. Golg felt himself smile. The possibility of breaking Dorn’s sons was a prospect so rich he could almost taste it. Was this part of the price of our allegiance to Horus, he wondered? The chance to break one enemy bought by the deaths of others?

‘What of the storms?’ asked Harkor, eyes hooded by a frown. ‘If they cannot penetrate them, how will we?’

‘Our passage will be possible. The Warmaster guarantees it,’ said Perturabo. That anyone could make such a guarantee staggered Golg. He caught Forrix’s eye as he glanced up, held the first captain’s cold gaze for a second and then looked down again.

‘If they suspect the possibility of an attack they will be prepared,’ said Forrix, extending an armoured hand to the table surface to flick between details of ships.

Berossus shook his head at Forrix, his lip curling. ‘If it is Sigismund who commands them, he will not sit patiently in his cage. He will make attempts to break through the storms. That will make them less prepared, and more vulnerable.’

Perturabo turned his head slowly to stare at Berossus. The commander of the Second Grand Company seemed to shrink in spite of the size of his reinforced armour.

‘Sigismund has command,’ growled Perturabo, his voice heavy with disgust. ‘My brother will not have trusted this fleet to another.’

Berossus straightened, eagerness clear in his face. ‘Lord, with an equal number of ships I will break them with the first attack. I will–’

‘No.’ The word hung in the air. Perturabo stepped forwards until he was looking down at the glowing lines of data frozen on the surface of the holo-table. Golg could see the cold blue glow glittering in the primarch’s eyes, like starlight on a blade’s edge. ‘No. They must not simply be broken. They must be ground to nothing. Dorn does not deign to come himself, but his favoured pup will bleed for him. All of the ships currently under your command will go.’ He looked up, his gaze moving between them as he spoke. ‘And I will command the attack myself.’

The eve of the Battle of Phall

The Imperial Palace, Terra

Dusk shadows filled the Investiary, pooling at the base of the amphitheatre’s wall and spreading from the statues ringing its centre. A sky of fading blue crossed by thin cirrus clouds domed the quiet space. Cooling air, tinged with the smell of evening dew on stone, licked Sigismund’s skin as he stepped from one of the wide doors at the amphitheatre’s edge. Lumen globes were kindling atop wrought-iron posts, but the open space was still a place of half-light, on the boundary between day and night. The Great Crusade had scattered to the stars from that spot, forged by the oaths sworn there.

So many of those oaths now broken, thought Sigismund. He looked up at a figure towering against the sky, its white marble features caught somewhere between nobility and determination. Guilliman. Still with us for certain, he frowned. As far as we know, as far as anything can be certain. There had been twenty, twenty replicas of the primarchs carved from white marble by the last of the Pendelikon artisans. Two were gone, their ouslite plinths empty, and their Legions consigned to oblivion. Nine hid beneath pale fabric, their faces swathed as if to conceal the shame of their treachery. In the distance he could see a golden figure standing still at the base of a statue. Something about the figure seemed to draw the eye, as if it held a greater scale than could ever be captured by chisel and hammer. He began to walk towards the distant Rogal Dorn.

Sigismund had seen something change in Dorn since news of the Isstvan V massacre, as if internal structures of will and strength were realigning within the primarch. Dorn moved from briefing to briefing, watching as the labour armies began to tear down and remake the palace, pressing the astropaths for news and connection with the worlds beyond the solar system, consulting with Valdor and the Sigillite in sealed chambers. In the brief moments in between Dorn had taken to walking the parapets and silent places of the palace. Sigismund did not know what weighed on his father’s mind, but he did know that what he had to tell him would only increase the burden.

He wondered again why he had decided to tell his father the whole truth. Guilt? Yes, guilt was part of it. Guilt at having deceived him, at having relied on his trust while knowing he would not understand the truth. I am sorry, father, but you must know. I cannot keep it from you. You must see. He thought of one of the basic laws of strategy, a dry line of insight that now seemed charged with new significance: The first axiom of defence is to understand what you defend against.

Dorn was staring up at one of the hidden statues as Sigismund approached.

‘Yes, my son?’ said Dorn, without turning.

Sigismund looked up at the covered stone. There were still recognisable features under the wind-rippled fabric: the hint of a predatory stance, the projecting shape of a clawed hand pressed against the covering as if about to rip through. Curze, he realised, the brother who had tried to kill Dorn. Was that a sign of what was to come? Should we have seen these darker days in that moment of near murder?

‘They should be torn down,’ said Sigismund. ‘All of the traitors. They should not stand beside those who keep their oaths.’

Dorn gave a low chuckle and turned to look at Sigismund. ‘Would you like to do it yourself?’

‘Give me the word, lord, and I will do it with my own hands.’

Dorn gave a brief smile and shook his head.

‘Not yet. We are not at such a point yet.’

‘Are we not?’ asked Sigismund, his face still, eyes unblinking. Dorn did not answer but looked back up at the statue of Curze that stood covered behind Sigismund.

‘No,’ growled Dorn. ‘The Imperium endures and will outlast this treachery.’ Sigismund thought that Dorn looked as if he were speaking to Curze’s statue as much as him. ‘There is still honour, there is still loyalty.’ Dorn dropped his gaze, frowning. ‘I do not know how this war will unfold, my son. I do not know what it will demand of us, but I know that eventually it will end, and for that day we must be ready.’

Sigismund echoed Dorn’s frown. ‘Horus has the initiative, we are the ones mired in confusion. He could cut us apart piece by piece, wait until we are so weak that there is no resistance left.’

Dorn looked sharply at Sigismund, but he could tell that his father had considered the same possibility.

‘If it was Curze or Alpharius then perhaps, but they are not at the heart of this.’ Dorn looked to where the moon was rising at the darkening edges of the sky. It was red, stained by the dust and smoke rising from the palace as it settled into night. ‘He will come here,’ said Dorn softly. ‘He will not stay out amongst the stars and bleed us to nothing. No, he is still Horus. The single spear thrust to the throat, the final killing blow. He will come here to finish this. One night we shall look up and see the heavens burning.’

He sees it already, thought Sigismund. At least in part. He shall see that I was right, that my choice was right.

‘Father.’ Dorn looked at him. Sigismund could feel the primarch’s eyes playing over his face, assessing, judging.

‘Something troubles you?’

‘I must speak with you about why I requested to return here, about why I did not take command of the Retribution Fleet.’

‘We have talked of this before. I saw no reason to question your judgement then and I see none now.’

Sigismund swallowed, his throat suddenly dry.

‘I had another reason.’ Sigismund felt the words hang in the air. I am committed now, he thought. There is no turning back.

‘Speak,’ said Rogal Dorn. The primarch had become still, his gaze fixed, as if his entire being focused on Sigismund. A dust-scented wind stirred his white-edged cloak, lifting it against the growing gloom.

Sigismund looked away, his mind weighing how to begin.

‘It was on the Phalanx,’ he said, after a moment. ‘The fleet was being broken up, preparing to follow back to Terra or strike towards Isstvan.’ He thought back to that narrow sliver of time, remembered the tension that ran through every Imperial Fists ship after Garro’s revelation. Some thought it could not be true but those who had seen the evidence had no such comfort. While the truth soaked in, the Imperial Fists had made ready for war. ‘I was walking the lower habitation decks. I am not sure why, I do not think that I had a reason besides perhaps seeking peace.’

‘You lacked clarity?’ said Dorn, his blank voice as unreadable as his face. Sigismund shook his head.

‘I knew what you required of me.’ He glanced away to where the shadows of night gathered at the margins of the amphitheatre. ‘Perhaps I was looking for purpose.’

‘Purpose?’ said Dorn. ‘You knew what was required but you sought purpose?’ Sigismund nodded, and let out a long breath.

‘I knew my orders, but I was missing something.’ Sigismund blinked, paused. He remembered those days on the Phalanx more clearly than he had lived them. He had felt diminished, as if Garro’s words had taken something vital from him. ‘For so long I took each step of the crusade without doubt. Each campaign, each battle, each blow had purity. That was my strength, had always been my strength.’

Dorn lowered his chin and his eyes seemed to darken. ‘Your thoughts seem far from clear, captain.’

‘Perhaps, lord,’ nodded Sigismund.

‘So you refused the command because of this? Because your purity of purpose was disturbed?’ There was anger in Dorn’s voice, controlled, held back but still there.

‘No, lord. I would have done your will without question.’

‘But you did not.’ Sigismund felt ice in the words, the judgement forming in them. I must tell it all, he thought, but did not meet his father’s eye as he continued.

‘I was on the deck where Garro’s civilians were quartered. It was deserted and I thought I was alone.’ It had been quiet, he remembered. The whole fleet had bustled with preparation and tension but at that moment the decks he walked had been silent. Afterwards it had struck him as strange, as if he had walked along a corridor of stillness between moments of activity. ‘It was only when she spoke to me that I realised I was not alone. “First captain,” she said. I drew my sword and turned.’ Sigismund frowned at where his hand rested on the pommel of his sheathed sword. ‘She stood only five paces behind me. I had not even heard her approach.’

‘Who?’ asked Dorn. Sigismund looked up, his eyes unfocused.

‘The remembrancer,’ he said, the memory suddenly more vivid than the present: a human girl in a pale robe. ‘Keeler,’ said Sigismund. ‘The one that spoke to you before we–’

‘I remember her,’ Dorn snapped. Superstition clustered around Euphrati Keeler. Sigismund knew that some form of cult had sprung up around the girl. It was dangerous, a breach of the Imperial truth. Some said she was a witch, others a saint. She had an undeniable confidence and poise, but then so had history’s many false prophets. Sigismund knew this to be true, but somehow that truth seemed dimmer as he remembered Keeler standing in the memory of a stone-lined corridor.

‘She was just there, looking at me as if she had been waiting, as if she knew I would come.’ She had smiled, he remembered. A smile of understanding in a fragile face too young to show such calm. She had nodded as if answering a question he had not asked. You have questions, she had said.

‘What did she say?’ said Dorn, and the memory dissolved back into the reality of the Investiary and his father’s voice.

‘Enough that I came to you and asked to return here, my lord,’ said Sigismund.

‘And what could ever have been enough for that?’

The question echoed in Sigismund’s ears. The moment extended, filling him with vivid sensations: the perfect texture of the ouslite plinth ten paces behind his father’s back, the rustle of fabric shifting in the breeze around the statues. He could detect a dozen spices in the wind, traces of smoke, dust and coming rain. He suddenly realised it was the smell of a half-forgotten life, of a brief childhood lived in the drift camps on the Ionus Plateau. It was the smell of a lost home. He had not thought of that half-remembered scrap of time for decades. He wondered why it had returned to him now.

He looked into Rogal Dorn’s eyes.

‘It was not just what she told me. It was what she made me see.’ Sigismund paused, remembering Keeler’s face. You must decide, she had said, and there had been sorrow in her voice. ‘The war will come to Terra,’ said Sigismund.

‘A possibility that you did not need a remembrancer to reveal to you,’ said Dorn as he raised a hand to point at Sigismund’s chest. The threat in the gesture was like the muzzle of a gun pointing at his heart. ‘Was it not you that said Horus could try and defeat us without coming here? Now you say back to me a judgement that I have reached myself and call it revelation.’

‘I hoped that you might disagree, my lord. That there might be another possibility.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘There is not. I cannot doubt your judgement that Horus will bring the war to Terra. It does not refute my choice, it validates it.’ Dorn looked away, his face suddenly half-hidden in the gathering night. ‘It is not the fact that the traitors will come here, it is how,’ said Sigismund, and remembered.

‘You must choose,’ she had said. He had been about to tell her to return to her quarters, to keep her falsehoods to herself. ‘You must choose your future and the future of your Legion, Sigismund, First Captain of the Imperial Fists.’ Her words had held him in place. Fear filled him, forgotten and alien in its raw intensity. ‘You must choose where to stand. By the words of your duty, or by your father’s side at the end.’

‘The end of what?’ he had managed to say.

‘The end of everything that has been,’ she had replied.

Sigismund kept his eyes fixed on his father, trying to read the effect of his words as he spoke. ‘She spoke and I seemed to see what she spoke of.’ Her words had unfolded in his mind in blurred reality, like snatches of dreams, like flowering nightmares. ‘I could see it. It was real.’

So many ships that the sky was iron. Fire falling like monsoon rain. Armoured bodies heaped as high as the Titans that strode amongst them. Hundreds of thousands of enemies, millions, an uncountable horde surging through the broken walls. An angel, its wings red in the pyre light of a burning palace.

‘They will come here, their numbers will blot out the sun and cover the ground, and we will be few, father.’

‘Few or many, let them come,’ growled Dorn.

‘We will be few and they, they will be far more than we can defeat. That is the point when we will face the end.’

Imperial Fists tumbling from blackened walls, falling like water, broken, bloody. Columns of smoke so tall that they touch the armoured sky. And still they come. Ships blasting dead wrecks aside to scatter more troops to the surface.

‘You must understand what it will come to,’ she had said. As she spoke he had known it was true. The universe was war without end. The Imperium had turned on itself and so it was only a matter of time before everything rested on a single battle, on a sword’s edge.

‘It will come to that, father,’ he said quietly. ‘It will come to the last breath in the body of the Imperium. I saw it, and understood that it was true, and that I had to choose.’ Another image opened in his mind’s eye: his own corpse, drifting lifeless and frozen on the edge of a forgotten star system in a future he would not see. ‘I chose to return here with you.’ It had taken him days to decide, to sift through his instincts and reasoned arguments. He had tried to forget what she had told him, what her words had made him see. But the possibility had eaten at his mind. In a galaxy where Horus turned on the Imperium, what other outcome could there be?

‘What is the other path?’ he had asked. She had shaken her head.

‘Death, Sigismund. Death and sacrifice far away, under the light of an unknown star. Alone and unremembered.’

She had gone, leaving him alone in a silent corridor.

‘That is why I returned to Terra. I said that I was needed here, and I spoke truly.’ Dorn was still not looking at Sigismund. ‘Let them come. I will be here to stand with you, father.’

Dorn was silent, his face an unmoving echo of the stone statue that looked down at the Investiary floor. He stared at Sigismund, his eyes seeming to pierce the fading light. Sigismund could not look away.

I have chosen, thought Sigismund. I have chosen to be here at this moment.

Dorn breathed in the twilight air. He flexed his left hand and watched the movement of his metal-clad fingers. He looked up. Sigismund saw the coldness in his father’s eyes, the icy glitter. He felt the instinct to fall to his knees, to speak again, to say something, to claw back the past. Dorn opened his mouth, his lips moving slowly. When his voice came it was like the whisper of an oncoming storm.

‘You have betrayed me,’ said Rogal Dorn.

Sigismund staggered. He felt as if the words had flayed away all his conditioning and control. If Dorn noticed the effect of his words he did not pause.

‘We are made to serve. That is our purpose.’ Dorn’s voice echoed off the raked stone tiers of the amphitheatre. He was shaking as if huge forces were straining inside him. It was the most terrifying thing Sigismund had ever seen. ‘Every primarch, every son of a primarch exists to serve the Imperium. Our existence has no other meaning.’ Dorn took a step forwards, his presence seeming to tower taller than the statues of his brothers. ‘Our choices are not our own, our fate is not ours to choose. Your will is mine, and through me the Emperor’s. I trusted you and you squandered that trust on pride and superstition.’

Sigismund found his voice.

‘I stand with you.’ His voice was raw and unfamiliar, a stranger’s words coming from his mouth. ‘I will stand against the enemies of the Imperium until I die.’

‘You believed the lies of a charlatan, a demagogue who pretends to powers we fought to free humanity from. I gave you a duty and you turned away from it. Your duty is not here; it was out amongst the stars.’

‘Even if this war will be decided here, my lord?’ Sigismund could not believe that he was speaking, but the words came out of him. ‘I saw it. I know it will happen.’

‘So certain, so little doubt,’ said Dorn, his voice low. Sigismund could feel the danger in that soft tone. ‘You murder the future. You condemn it with your pessimism and arrogance.’

‘I sought only to serve,’ said Sigismund desperately.

‘You presume to feel the hand of destiny on your heart. You believe that you see more clearly than I do, than the Emperor does.’ Sigismund heard the judgement in the words, and thought of Horus, of the unknowable reason he had turned against the Imperium, of the other statues that stood above them with hidden faces. Dorn nodded as if seeing the realisation form in Sigismund’s mind. ‘Those are the virtues of a traitor.’

‘I am no traitor,’ said Sigismund; the words sounded fragile in his ears, as if they reached him from far away. He was not looking at Dorn, he could not.

‘No?’ said Dorn. ‘I say that your duty was to obey, not deceive. I say that the future you think inevitable is a lie. I say all this and yet you do not accept it. Arrogance.’ Dorn spat the word and looked towards the plinth of Horus’s statue. ‘Our purpose was defined for us. We are not humans that have the luxury of choice. We are the Emperor’s warriors. We exist to serve, not to rule our own destinies. Turn away from that truth and we corrupt the illumination we were made to spread. It is not just on which side you fight, it is why.’

Horus, thought Sigismund. He speaks of Horus but condemns me with the same words. Suddenly he felt he saw the architecture of his father’s thoughts, the calculated judgements balanced by beliefs as immovable as mountains. He saw the irreversible logic. There is no way back, no other way for him to judge me. What have I done?

‘I serve the Imperium,’ he said, and his voice was shaking.

‘You serve your own pride,’ spat Dorn. Sigismund swayed but caught himself. He felt hollow, his mind empty of all of the surety and fire that had defined him. Keeler was wrong, he thought. This was the choice of death alone and unremembered. There is only one path open to me now.

‘My lord.’ Sigismund began to kneel.

‘You will stand,’ roared Dorn. ‘You have no right to kneel before me.’

Sigismund drew his sword, its gleaming length coal-black in the failing light.

‘My life is yours, my lord,’ he said, and turned the sword hilt to Dorn, and bowed his head, the flesh of his neck exposed above the collar of his armour. ‘Take it.’ Dorn reached out and took the sword. His eyes glinted down its length, hard, dangerous, the eyes of death itself.

Dorn spun the blade, a movement so fast that Sigismund saw it only as a blur. He had an instant to think, to remember the smells of a lost home carried on a dry wind. His father brought the sword down.

The tip of the sword punched through smooth marble and buried itself a foot deep in stone. Dorn took his hand from the hilt, leaving the blade quivering in front of Sigismund.

‘No,’ said Dorn, a low growl. ‘No. The Imperium will endure. But you, you have made your decision. There will be no easy end for you. None will ever know of what you have done. I will not allow your fear and pride to sow doubt in our ranks. Your shame will be yours to bear alone.’

Sigismund felt as if the Investiary’s vast circumference had closed to a tight circle around him. His body felt distant, the touch of his armour uncomfortable against his skin.

‘You will continue in rank and position as you have, and you will never speak to any other of this. The Legion and the Imperium will not know of my judgement. Your duty will be to never let your weakness taint those who have more strength and honour than you.’

Sigismund felt his hearts beating. His mouth was dust dry.

‘As you will, father.’

‘I am not your father,’ roared Dorn, his anger suddenly filling the air and echoing from the amphitheatre walls. Sigismund fell to the floor. He could feel nothing. A ringing filled his head. It was a scream, he realised. A forgotten scream of loss and pain, mute inside his soul that was no longer human. Dorn looked down at him, his face swallowed by dusk shadows. ‘You are not my son,’ he said quietly. ‘And no matter what your future holds, you never will be.’ Dorn turned and walked away.

Sigismund watched Rogal Dorn until his outline vanished into the gloom. Alone he knelt, gripping the hilt of the sword with both hands. He breathed slowly, resting his forehead on his gauntlets. The darkness of the Investiary surrounded him. His pulse slowed. He thought of all the battles he had fought, all the enemies cut down by the sword he knelt before. The restless ferocity, the focus of complete certainty guiding his every blow; all gone, all wiped away by his choice on the Phalanx.

‘You have questions,’ she had said. She had just been standing there, quiet, still.

‘No,’ he had said. She had smiled. He had been going to order her back to her quarters but the thought seemed to fade in his mind, to be replaced by… questions. ‘How will this end?’ he had asked. He did not know where the question had come from, or why it had come to his lips now. But as he said it he knew that it was the reason he had wandered the decks of the Phalanx while his father brooded and raged.

‘As it must,’ she had said.

The sword felt unfamiliar in his grip, as if the weapon that he had borne for decades was his no longer.

You are not my son.

‘You will be needed before the end,’ she had said. ‘Your father will need you.’

He raised his head. Above him the stars were crystal fragments against sable.

‘You must bear whatever will come,’ she had said.

I am still alive, he thought, and I still serve.

He stood, pulling the sword from the stone floor; its edges glittered like sharpened obsidian.

‘I will not fail,’ he said. In the quiet of Terran night the words sounded like a vow.

Above him, Sigismund could hear the shrouds of traitors flapping in the wind.

The day of the Battle of Phall

The Phall System

I was with Calio Lezzek when it began. The old astropath had been teetering on the edge of death ever since the psychic onslaught had washed through the Phall System. Barely conscious, he could do little more than mutter a few words of greeting. Each day that I visited him he was weaker, a step closer to death and further away from life. He often slept, his acolytes wiping mucus from his lips as he twitched in the grip of dreams. I am not sure why I visited. Perhaps it was guilt, or maybe because he was the only person on the Tribune who did not look to me for purpose and strength.

On that day Lezzek had not woken, and I had been about to go when his hand gripped my arm. I looked at him. His mouth was moving, cracked lips trying to form words. I leant forwards, dipping my ear close to the old astropath’s mouth. His lips moved but I could hear nothing. I leant closer. Lezzek took a breath that rocked his entire body but when he spoke it was in a whisper that only I heard.

‘They are coming.’

He went still and collapsed back onto his pallet. I straightened. I knew what it meant. The bow wave of ships approaching through the warp presses on the minds of psykers. They can feel a large ship or fleet draw close, like lightning rods sparking before a storm breaks. A dead ice feeling had numbed my body. My thoughts felt sluggish as I turned to the door. I had taken no more than one step when the sirens began to call.

She is a good ship, thought Pertinax. Only three decades had passed since the Hammer of Terra’s burnished hull had slipped the docks of Mars. Some amongst the Legion said that these Martian craft had a more aggressive temperament than those of Inwit, as if their character mirrored the more impatient age into which they were born. Pertinax never thought of his ship in such terms. To him she was as she was, and he knew her every quirk and strength.

The bridge below him moved with order and precision. Servitors whispered to cogitators in clicking whispers. Human officers exchanged spoken orders, data-slates and spools of parchment. Tech-priests crouched in their bronze niches, silent until the machine heartbeat of the ship required their attention. The bridge was the mind of a warship, and the vessel it controlled was a battle-barge. Eight kilometres long, crewed by thousands of serfs and servitors, its weapons could pound civilisations to dust. She carried three hundred Imperial Fists, a might almost equal to that of her guns. Hammer of Terra was her given name, and like all of her kind she had a single purpose: to dominate war amongst the stars. A warship was made as much of flesh and discipline as it was of metal. That truth pleased Pertinax. It was an appreciation he knew he shared with Fleet Master Polux.

Though a few amongst the senior captains and battlegroup commanders might chafe at Polux’s orders, Pertinax could not fault the fleet master. The fleet was vulnerable, and an attack was likely. In such a position one needed to create a solid defence and conserve fighting strength. Polux’s deployment addressed all of these needs with a direct elegance. Pertinax had even favoured the younger fleet master with a nod of approval when he had seen the plans. The Retribution Fleet formed a sphere close to the ocean world of Phall II. Each commander in the fleet led a battlegroup of smaller vessels. Every battlegroup moved on a precise looped course. Together the whole resembled a cage spun from the tails of comets. The Hammer of Terra and its battlegroup of twelve lighter ships were on the outer surface of the sphere formation, close to the system’s edge.

Close to the Hammer of Terra, the black sheet of stars bulged. Lilac and green light spread across the swelling distortion, as cracks spread across the void.

On the bridge of the Hammer of Terra officers began to call alerts; a second later alarms sounded from multiple areas. Pertinax took in the flow of information rolling across his augmented eyes and weighed the possibilities. Something was punching into reality from the warp. It could be an enemy, a friend or something unknown. Until they knew which it was all would receive the same greeting. He nodded once to himself and gave the order the ship had been waiting to hear.

‘Battle readiness.’

The Hammer of Terra shuddered in sympathy with the words. As he felt the ship wake to full life, Pertinax could almost see the plasma flushing into the exchange ventricles deep in the battle-barge’s hull. The green glow of holo-screens and red of alert lights filled the bridge as metre-thick shields descended over the viewports. Pertinax knew his ship would be at full readiness in less than ten seconds. Ready statuses were already coming in from the dozen strike cruisers, destroyers and frigates in his battlegroup.

He looked towards a pict-feed of the system’s edge in time to see the stars fracture. A hole opened in space. Ringed with lightning, its centre a sickening swirl of colour, it widened like a mouth opening to vomit. A vast iron arrowhead stabbed from the opening, dragging a vast crenellated hull behind it as it split the wound wider. It was a battle-barge, slab-hulled and dull-armoured. Weapon batteries lined its sides and serrated its spine. Pertinax recognised the emerging ship: her name was the Contrador. She was a capital ship of the Iron Warriors Legion. For a second his thoughts spun with confusion, his clarity failing at the sight of an old rival and ally.

The Contrador fired. Detonations spread across the Hammer of Terra’s bow. Its void shields held, energy coiling across their surface in oily ropes. On the bridge Pertinax’s voice was shaking with rage as he gave the order to return fire. The Hammer of Terra began to bring its own guns to bear.

Around the Contrador space bubbled like boiling tar as ship after ship burst into reality at the same moment. The first hundred Iron Warriors ships fired as one and the Hammer of Terra became a brief smeared sun.

When I reached the bridge the Hammer of Terra was already a spreading globe of gas and glowing debris. The warship’s death filled the pict-screens, burning in silence above the hundreds of servitors and crew that filled the cavernous space. The sight of it made me freeze for a second, my eyes locked on the image. I thought of Pertinax, captain of the Hammer of Terra, a warrior who had already fought in a hundred campaigns by the time I became part of the Legion. I remembered his green augmetic eyes watching me steadily, and the soft accent of Europa that had never left his voice.

I shook my head, and the noise of the bridge washed over me. Officers were shouting at each other as servitors and machines spat out reams of data. Raln was at my side, already calling orders to the serfs. I needed to get hold of the battle before it spun further beyond my grasp, but there was one fact missing I needed to know.

‘Who is the enemy?’ I asked. Raln half turned to me, the red lenses of his helmet briefly meeting my gaze as he spoke.

‘The Iron Warriors,’ he said and turned back to issue a stream of rapid orders to the bridge officers. For a second I stood still, like a man with a bullet hole through him yet to fall. Then I nodded and snapped my helmet over my head.

The holo-projection above spun, showing me battlegroup and enemy positions, auspex readings and tactical data in growing clusters of glowing runes. Screeds of data from my helmet display overlaid the projection: inter-ship communication, links to the battlegroup commanders, the Legion-contingent details from each ship. To a Space Marine not conditioned to process such levels of information it would have been bewildering. To a normal human it would have been overwhelming. I took a deep breath, felt the focused calm enforce itself through my body and mind. Training and conditioning blanked out every other instinct. I was the centre of a storm, a clear point of will and strength.

‘Bring us above the plane of attack,’ I called to Raln. I felt the ship judder. The holographic projection blurred and flickered for a second. I glanced back to the raw data of the battle that floated in front of me. Four minutes had passed since the Hammer of Terra had died. We had lost ten ships; thirty were crippled, forty-six had suffered severe damage. Ordnance had degraded to sixty-two per cent across the fleet. We were close to disaster.

The Tribune was taking fire. I could read it in the flow of activity on the bridge as if it were the movements of my own body. Shields were down across the forward batteries. Power had been diverted to bring them back up. Plasma reactors were straining to maintain output.

Inbound enemy bombers.

Batteries firing.

Dorsal line accelerators approaching optimal fire angle.

Turn at thirty per cent.

Course correction…

I let out a slow breath, and blanked out the details of the Tribune’s situation. I was the fleet master. The Tribune was under Raln’s hand, and was only one part of the battle. I focused on the information in front of me; the hololithic projection was a tangle of trajectories and amber engagement makers.

The position was clear and chilling. The enemy fleet had penetrated a third of the way into our lines. Their formation resembled a jagged cone, the largest vessels set back from screens of escorts and heavy-hulled strike cruisers. It had punched into our fleet and was moving towards the centre of our spherical formation. To my eyes it looked like a fanged worm eating to the core of a ripe fruit. It was methodically brutal in its ugly efficiency. So typical of the Iron Warriors.

The Iron Warriors. Our enemies are the Iron Warriors.

The thought was like a sliver of ice thrust into my guts, as if that fact had only just registered in my mind. They had scrambled their communications but I recognised their ships. These were vessels we had fought beside, crewed by warriors I had bled with and called brothers. If the Iron Warriors were with Horus, then how many others might be as well? Could more have turned on the Imperium? Terra might have already fallen. The Imperium might already be no more. Our fleet might be the last fragment of loyalty surviving. The possibilities made my head swim, as if my mind was screaming after the dead Imperium as it vanished into an abyss. For a moment I felt the old crack in my strength, the weakness that had nearly made me curl up and accept death on the ice of Inwit.

I cannot fail now, I will not fail. My eyes flicked across the projected sphere showing the battle, green and blue smeared with red like leaking blood. The contingency plans I had made over the long months surfaced in my mind, aligned with the possibilities of the present. I could see it, a way not only of recovering but fighting back. If we bleed, I thought, so will they.

Thirty-six companies of Imperial Fists died in those first moments without seeing their enemy or firing a shot. They died running for assault boats, locked in the cockpits of Stormbirds and on the command decks of ships. They died without knowing the hand that killed them.

Within seconds of the death of the Hammer of Terra twelve of its sisters followed, consumed by nova-shell explosions and torpedo spreads. The grand cruiser Sulla fired a single salvo before macro-shell fire stripped its shields and its hull became molten slag. The six destroyers clustered around it ended in the explosion of its plasma reactor. The Crusader and Legate lasted scant seconds longer. They and their escorts took a trio of vortex warheads and vanished into the hungering dark.

Twenty-four grand cruisers and battle-barges made up the tip of the Iron Warriors fleet. In close formation around the Contrador they moved as one. They rammed through the debris of their kills, fire and molten metal smearing their prows. Turbolasers, macro cannon and plasma annihilators scoured the void around them. Bombers and assault craft swarmed through the void behind the warships, killing crippled craft with thousands of small explosions.

Seen from a distance the opening minutes of the battle would have been a scattering of bright flashes against blackness. Closer in, so that the planets of Phall loomed large, the view would have been of hundreds of gleaming shards moving in patterns and groups like swarming fireflies. It would still have been impossible to tell the difference between Iron Warriors and Imperial Fists, but after watching for a few minutes patterns would have emerged. The first pattern was an empty sphere, spun from the curving paths of golden ships. The second was a tapered wedge that grew longer and thicker as more ships pulled themselves from the warp. Where the two formations met explosions flared brighter than the distant stars.

The Imperial Fists fleet fragmented under the attack. Flame-wreathed battle-barges pulled back, trying to outpace the guns of the Iron Warriors. Heavy cruisers staggered their flight, first one taking fire then the next, while faster strike cruisers tried to cover the heavier warships as they pulled away. As the golden fleet broke into pieces the Iron Warriors continued to press forwards. Smaller ships crippled targets, and then larger ships delivered the killing blows. It was methodical and merciless, like a siege drill eating through rock.

Directly in the path of the Iron Warriors a lone battleship turned to meet its enemy. Forgotten hands had made the Oath of Stone under the light of a sun far from Terra. It had been old before it served the Imperium, and it had aged in scars and honours since. Its guns blazed, filling the closing space between it and the enemy with fire.

Its target was a grand cruiser that bore the name Stheno. The Iron Warriors ship faltered, its void envelope peeling back as it pushed forwards through the storm of fire. Lance beams spat from the Oath of Stone and suddenly the Stheno was burning, a glowing gouge running from its spade-shaped prow to its fins. The Oath of Stone surged forwards to finish its kill, but the Stheno was only one ship amongst a closing fist of iron.

Three heavy cruisers fired. Energy crackled across the Oath of Stone’s void shields as they burst like oily bubbles. Shells and missiles hammered into the old ship. Its armour cracked and glowed. Crenellated gun towers sheared off, scattering clouds of stone and metal in their wake. Hundred-metre armour plates flaked off its hull. Deep inside the ship fire ran between compartments, suffocating those it did not burn.

Trailing wreckage, the Oath of Stone continued to close and fire on the Stheno. For a moment it seemed as if it would face down the might of an entire fleet and survive. Then a line of turbolaser fire cut its engines in two. Building-sized thrusters fell away as explosions kindled in the wound.

On its bridge a human officer stood. Blood covered his face and chest. He looked at the armoured corpse of the ship’s master: the Imperial Fist had died with his hands still gripping the arms of the command throne. The man nodded as if to someone who was not there, and gave a single order to the surviving crew.

With the last of its momentum and guttering engines’ power the Oath of Stone rammed the Stheno. It hit the grand cruiser in the belly, its prow ramming through the iron ship’s spine. The Stheno shuddered, transfixed like a fish on a rod. Gas and fluid sprayed from its hull. For a moment the two spun on, locked together in death. Then the Oath of Stone’s prow ripped free of the Stheno’s hull, and pulled the guts of the grand cruiser with it. Discarded and dying the Stheno drifted on, turning end over end, like a broken spear thrown at the night sky.

The rest of the Iron Warriors fleet did not even slow down.

His master was staring at the lights of battle as Berossus approached. The Iron Blood had no viewports. There was no need for them, or so Berossus had heard Perturabo say. Why would you need to look at the void? War in space was a matter of calculation, sensors and firepower. That or hacking your enemy apart in spaces so small you could smell their blood. Windows onto the void were a weakness indulged for vanity. In spite of this sentiment Berossus found his master on the deck of a launch bay, its blast doors open to the vacuum. A thin layer of frost covered the deck and walls and had crept up Perturabo’s armour.

Berossus knelt, his breath loud inside his helm. He was aware that being adjutant to the primarch for this battle held danger as well as honour. He would never claim to understand the Lord of Iron, but he wondered if at that moment his master needed to see the reality of his fleet hammering the longed-for rebuke into the flesh of Dorn’s sons. It was a triumph, but Berossus knew that his master had never been more dangerous than at that moment; he could feel it like a razor lying on his skin.

‘Is the fleet fully deployed?’ Vox-static laced Perturabo’s voice.

‘Forrix says that full deployment will be complete in twenty-seven minutes.’ Perturabo turned to look at Berossus, the green slot eyes of his helm glowing above the plough-shaped snout. Berossus swallowed, even though he knew that the estimate was precisely in line with Forrix’s previous calculations.

Around the Iron Blood hundreds of warships followed in close formation. Behind them hundreds more pulled themselves from the warp to add to the Iron Warriors fleet. Months ago scout units had captured details of the Imperial Fists fleet, each capturing a single snapshot of data and pushing it into the mind of the astropath slaved to each machine. The psykers’ death screams had cut through the storms, carrying dream images of the Imperial Fists fleet. They had used that data to plan, and that plan was a timetable for obliteration. Berossus knew that the battle was progressing as intended, but under his master’s gaze he wondered whether that was enough.

Perturabo turned his back to the view. At a gesture, the blast doors began to shut over the fire-spattered vacuum.

‘Tell Golg to push the vanguard harder. The rest of the fleet can finish what he leaves.’

Berossus averted his gaze and knelt even lower as Perturabo spoke. ‘Yes, master.’

‘Scour the Imperial Fists signals. Find where Sigismund lurks.’ Perturabo pulled his helmet off as the blast doors sealed and atmosphere hissed into the hold. Berossus glanced up and wished he had not.

‘Yes, master,’ said Berossus, his gaze again on the frost-sheened deck.

‘He is to be found, not killed,’ rasped Perturabo. ‘His death is mine.’

The killing continued with murderous rhythm. The ships at the front of the Iron Warriors fleet had begun to split into groups to hunt smaller Imperial Fists ships. Behind them fresh arrivals advanced in a tight block. These were the macro-vessels, vast cliff-sided ships filled with battalions of Iron Warriors and thousands of slave troops. Beside them lurked the hell burners. Old system ships, orbital haulers and tugs, they had ridden through the warp on tethers behind the macro-ships. Unstable plasma fuel and munitions filled each of the ramshackle craft. Their slave crews, lobotomised into blind obedience, drove the hell burners into the throats of the Imperial Fists guns. Many detonated before they reached their victims, but more did not. Chains of explosions formed glowing nebulae that hung in the void like lava clotting in water.

The Imperial Fists ships that emerged from these infernos were half dead, their armour peeling from their superstructure, their weapons blind. The macro-vessels poured boarding craft onto the crippled ships as they limped from the firestorm. The Imperial Fists crews did not die swiftly. Swamped by thousands of slaves, they held until the Iron Warriors came to finish them in person. Dozens of ships died this way, gutted from within and left to drift, their insides filled with the dead of both sides. To the Iron Warriors the process of victory had begun and the only question was how long it would take to complete.

The first sign that all was not as it seemed was a bright explosion on the trailing edge of the Iron Warriors fleet.

The Imperial Fists cruiser Veritas and a destroyer wing cut towards their prey. Their target was a grand cruiser, a hulking brute named Calibos. The destroyers released a spread of fast-running torpedoes towards the Iron Warriors ship as they closed. It tried to evade but turned too slowly. Blisters of fire opened along its dark metal back. The destroyers accelerated past the injured ship. The Calibos listed drunkenly, its course veering as the rest of the fleet pulled away.

The Veritas struck an instant later, its dorsal cannons crumpling the Calibos’s shields and punching through its carapace. Half dead, it tried to turn its prow towards its attacker. The Veritas raced past, broadsides raking the Iron Warriors ship. The grand cruiser exploded in a shockwave of energy and atomised matter. As the Iron Warriors fleet responded the Veritas and its strike group was beyond its reach and turning for its next attack run.

It was the first blow of many.

It is a truth that to stand at the heart of a battle is to see it only through a narrow slit. You see the gross shift and swell of destruction, and the tide of battle submerges all the small moments of death and heroism. The deaths of thousands become only texture to a greater picture, details that you cannot look at because if your attention slips it might mean total defeat. Command breeds callousness. To say otherwise is ignorance.

For me the battle was a blur of decisions, of losses and victories rendered in impersonal information and abstract projections. I existed above the fray, a set of eyes that saw and a hand that remade what was seen. And what I saw was that we were winning. For a moment the information almost overwhelmed me as my mind turned representation into raw reality.

Silent flame stained the black void. Armoured ships raked at each other with hot yellow claws. Void shields shimmered and burst. Nova cannon shells exploded like newborn stars. Attack craft spun and slid amongst the greater vessels like silver fish through black water. Iron and gold hulls glowed under converging lattices of energy: melted, split. Dead ships drifted, breaking apart into crumbs of flame-licked metal.

Another ship exploded. Plasma expanded to a bright white sphere. Golden armour turned to liquid.

A frigate spun like an injured bird, trailing flame. Lines of hot yellow fire found it and split it into glowing chunks.

Gull-winged bombers converged on a storm-grey cruiser, warheads sliding from under their wings. Pinprick detonations flared across the cruiser’s spine, carving off augur and sensor arrays. Blinded, it began to list.

A strike cruiser roared towards a wide-nosed battleship, its shields slick with deflected fire. The battleship turned its flank to the strike cruiser. The cruiser rolled, curved under the battleship’s belly and fired. Macro-shells tore open layers of metal, spilling burning gas into cold space.

A slab ship tried to turn its battered prow away from its attackers. A spread of graviton torpedoes hit it in its flank, burrowed deep and detonated. The ship shivered as competing forces pulled at its structure, breaking armour, cracking bulkheads. For a second it drifted on, quivering as its bones splintered and distorted. Then its spine broke and it crumpled as if crushed in an invisible fist.

It was what the months of planning had been for, the hundreds of hours of training. We were ready to resist an attack, but we were facing an enemy far greater than I had ever planned for.

The Iron Warriors had taken losses, but their strength remained. If we had broken in the first moments we would have died. If we tried to fight the Iron Warriors head on they would have slaughtered us. They knew our weaknesses, we theirs. They had hoped to find us unprepared, but we had not cracked after the first attack. Our defence had snapped back into place like the cogs of a clockwork mechanism. It was an unfixed fortress made of moving strike groups, fading resistance and punishing counter-attacks. Slower battleships drew fire, pulling Iron Warriors ships out of formation, while on the edge of the battle sphere fast strike groups looped around and through the margins of the Iron Warriors fleet. They struck again and again, crippling, destroying, trimming ships from the edge of the enemy fleet like fat carved from meat. As I saw our retribution unfold I think I may have allowed myself a grim smile.

The Halcyon dived through the battle storm. Its leaf-blade hull glowed with reflected light from explosions and weapons fire. The void was thick with debris and plasma clouds, tumbling together like blood and entrails sinking through water. The Halcyon fired as it dived, prow and dorsal weapons thrusting ahead of its path. Behind it two of its sister ships followed: Unity and Truth. They were smaller, knife blades to the Halcyon’s spear tip. They spun, their flank batteries spiralling a bright helix around them as they sliced through the Iron Warriors fleet. This near to the core of the Iron Warriors formation, the hulls of enemy ships were so close that the gunners could aim by sight.

On the Halcyon’s bridge Tyr watched as his target grew in size on the pict-screen. He preferred to view void war this way, enhanced and filtered so that he could see how enemies moved, fought, and died. It made it real, as if projections and the cold clarity of tactical data robbed it of its visceral truth. His target was an Iron Warriors battle cruiser, its hull studded with lance turrets, its prow an ugly wedge of scored metal. He knew its name: Dominator. Once, decades before, he had seen it break the xenos lines above Calyx. Now he watched its shields flicker and vanish under his guns. The Halcyon’s rage hammered into the Dominator’s back. The Dominator turned and rolled, like a sea leviathan trying to shake free a harpoon.

‘Increase firepower,’ said Tyr.

This is what the abstract projections lack, he thought. They miss the connection with the enemy, the personal. They miss the point where you look into the eye of an old ally and ram the blade into their heart. The deck lurched under his feet. Red light washed his face as warning lights filled the bridge. They were taking fire. There were a dozen Iron Warriors ships so close he felt he could reach out and touch them. The Halcyon and its escorts were relying on raw speed and aggression to keep them alive. That and more than a little luck.

He smiled grimly to himself. Polux had ordered Tyr and his battle group to strike into the centre of the Iron Warriors fleet. They had lost two ships in three passes but killed four times as many. A fair exchange, thought Tyr as he flicked his gaze to pict-views of his two flanking strike cruisers. They looked like fire arrows falling through a forest, kindling an inferno as they flew.

Proximity sirens began to blare. Tyr turned back to the image of the Dominator. It filled the screen at minimum magnification. He waited until the proximity alert was a desperate shrill and then nodded to the helmsman. The Halcyon rotated on its axis, swooping under the Dominator, its flank batteries firing. The belly of the Iron Warriors ship split open in a string of explosions. The Unity and Truth followed close behind the Halcyon, hammering into the gaping gut wound in the Dominator’s hull. It disintegrated, plasma from its ruptured heart burning it from within. The Halcyon arced away from its kill, engines clawing for speed as it aimed for the edge of the battle sphere.

The Iron Warriors battle-barge came out of the surrounding swirl of battle. It fired as it came. Tyr felt the explosion shake the hull of the Halcyon. Clouds of flare static filled the pict-screens. The Unity vanished in a spread of detonations. Tyr could see a shape, a huge shape slowly resolving like a cliff coalescing from mist. Fifteen kilometres of cold iron and battle-blackened adamantium. Cooling trails of debris spilled from her flanks to drag in her wake. Her spine was a mountain range of gun fortresses and macro-batteries. Tyr felt his skin go cold. He knew her, had seen her once long ago, when she had been an ally. She was the oldest daughter of the ship forges of Olympia, a breaker of fleets and planets. Her name was Iron Blood, and only one being had ever been her master.

The Iron Blood fired again and the Truth followed its sister to fiery death. Static blinded Tyr’s view. He was shouting for full speed before the pict-screens cleared. Explosions chased their flight, shaking the Halcyon even as it outran the Iron Blood’s fury.

‘Get a signal to Fleet Master Polux,’ shouted Tyr over the shrieking sirens. ‘Tell him the Iron Blood is amongst the enemy. Tell him Perturabo is here.’

For a moment I could not believe the words I had spoken. The battle projections and floods of information faded. I do not know whether I felt awe, or anger, or elation at what I had decided. Then Tyr’s voice reached me through a fog of static and distortion.

‘Brother?’ he said, and I could hear his shock through the obscuring white noise.

I refocused, the nearby battle data snapping back into my awareness. Two more runes marking enemy ships vanished in front of my eyes. The Iron Warriors fleet was pulling itself apart as it tried to engage us, and it bled at every turn. But that was not enough. Not enough for me, not enough for my lost brothers, not enough of a blood price for betrayal.

‘Yes, Captain Tyr,’ I said, my words reaching across the void on broken signal waves. ‘My orders stand. I put fifty ships under your command.’ A wash of white noise filled the pause. Tyr was thinking, judging whether to question or embrace my order. When he told me that Perturabo’s flagship led the enemy fleet I do not think he expected such a response. He was my brother, but he never truly knew me.

‘As you command, fleet master.’

I nodded once as if he could see me, as if he stood next to me rather than on the bridge of the Halcyon.

‘For Dorn and the Imperium, brother. Your objective is the Iron Blood. Execute Perturabo.’

Grinding silence and gloom filled the throne room. Harsh, electrical light shone across the face of the Iron Warriors primarch. Across an oil-black screen the battle played out in bare numbers and raw tactical code. His face was unmoving, impassive, but his eyes held a spark of emotion that made Berossus wary as he approached his master. As the primarch’s adjutant he had an unrivalled view of unfolding events. The insight was not heartening. The Imperial Fists had rallied and were inflicting casualties. Significant casualties. The Iron Warriors still had greater numbers, but that margin was diminishing. Berossus would have said that the Imperial Fists might even have the upper hand. He kept the thought to himself; the news he bore was worrying enough.

‘Master,’ said Berossus and knelt on the bare metal deck. Perturabo turned his head slowly, his dark eyes fastening on Berossus’s bowed head.

‘Speak,’ he said, his voice a low rumble. Berossus continued to kneel, his helm held under his arm, his silent chainsword placed carefully on the deck beside him. He swallowed.

‘Master, we have identified the flagship of the enemy fleet.’ He paused and ran his grey tongue across his lips. ‘We have also identified the master of their fleet.’ He chanced a look up, met the primarch’s obsidian gaze and looked back to the floor. ‘It is a captain of the lower orders. Alexis Polux is his name. Sigismund does not command the fleet. As far as we can tell he is not amongst them.’ Berossus could hear only the rhythmic hiss of atmosphere exchangers and the rising beat of his twin hearts.

The first blow hit Berossus in the chest. Armour plate and bone shattered. One of his hearts burst. The second blow hit him as he spun through the air. He hit the wall with crushing force, slid down, blood oozing out of cracked ceramite. His body flooded with pain suppressors, but he could feel his splintered bones cut into his flesh. Blood filled his lungs and throat. He tried to breathe. Red foam drooled from his mouth and over his broken jaw. He was a bag of mashed meat held into the shape of a man by ruined armour.

Perturabo stood motionless at the foot of his throne, flecks of Berossus’s blood bright on his gauntlets.

‘Tell Golg to find this lesser captain that stands against us,’ said Perturabo. ‘Execute him and throw his corpse to the void.’ At the edges of the room ears heard and carried the order away. Perturabo turned and walked back to his iron throne. On the floor Berossus’s life seeped out of him into a slowly growing pool.

They assembled in the teleport chamber. Static electricity ran over Tyr’s Terminator armour, sparking between him and the metal skin of his brothers. Machines surrounded them, thrumming with restrained power. He could see tech-priests moving amongst them, muttering their clicking language as they made adjustments. Parchment tapers fluttered in the charged atmosphere. Focusing dishes, capacitor towers and arrays of arcane instruments all pointed in at Tyr and the squad that ringed him. They all wore Terminator armour, their bodies bloated by thick plates of plasteel, fibre-bundle muscles, and adamantium exoskeletons. Out beyond the ring of machines other squads clustered on teleporter plates that spread through the chamber in concentric rings. Terminator armour was rare; the product of high artifice in a few Mechanicum forges. Amongst the Retribution Fleet there were enough suits to clad fifty-three brothers; all of them stood in teleport chambers waiting for Tyr’s word.

Beside Tyr, Sergeant Timor brought his thunder hammer to rest against the snout of his helm. Oath parchments feathered the hammer’s haft. Tyr knew that Timor was speaking his oath of moment again. He felt a surge of pride. They were waiting to go into battle against another Legion, against a primarch. It was a battle none of them had ever thought they would fight, but there was no doubt or hesitancy amongst them. Polux had ordered this strike against Perturabo. That had surprised Tyr; he had thought that his brother lacked the boldness for such a gambit. That this mission might be his last did not matter. That was the nature of war, and the Imperial Fists knew that death was often the price of victory. The Emperor had created them to embrace that truth.

‘Sixty seconds, captain,’ said a voice in Tyr’s ear. Tyr recognised the tones of one of the human bridge officers. The man’s voice had a clipped edge. An indication of focus and strain, thought Tyr. It was to be expected. Outside the hull of the Halcyon the inferno-kissed void fled past them. Flanked by a dozen strike cruisers they were plunging into the heart of the battle sphere. In front of them frigates and destroyers converged on target vessels close to the centre of the Iron Warriors fleet. By now they would already be engaging the enemy, wounding with nova strikes, spreading drifts of torpedoes to find what targets they could. Tyr had little doubt that the destroyers would not survive; he had said as much to their commanders when he outlined the plan. None had questioned their orders; they all knew the value of what they attempted. If they could inflict enough damage they would draw the Iron Blood into the engagement. After that the second element would strike from below the axis of battle. Fifteen warships would attack the Iron Blood’s escorts, killing where they could, and drawing fire where they could not. Its attention engaged and its escorts crippled, the Iron Blood would be open for the Halcyon and its strike group. They would deliver the true payload: thirteen hundred Imperial Fists loaded into boarding torpedoes and Stormbirds and waiting in teleport chambers.

It was wasteful and brutal but it had a chance of succeeding. It must have worked so far, thought Tyr.

‘Thirty seconds,’ said the voice again. Tyr blink-clicked an acknowledgement and opened a general communication channel to the rest of the strike force.

‘Brothers,’ he said. Across the chamber all movement ceased. His words would take longer to reach the squads on the other ships, but when they did hush and stillness would spread through launch bays and crew compartments. He had not considered what he would say. All his life had been war. Every moment since he had left the hive sumps of Nord Merica had been training, fighting, and pushing forward the bounds of the Imperium step by bloody step. He was not a man made to craft words, but they came to him then, as if something long wasted within him stirred to life.

‘We are fighting a war. Not a war of conquest, not the war we were made to fight, but a war for the oaths we made and the blood we shed to make the Imperium. We will never see the end of this war, but if by our deeds we can bring that end a step closer, if our deaths cost the enemy a hundredfold, then the future will remember us.’ He paused, felt the electric charge thickening against his skin. The machines were keening. Arcs of garish light played over the platform. Tyr brought his bronze-headed mace up to his face plate and closed his eyes.

‘To the glory of the primarch and the Emperor,’ said Tyr. The machines howled. A rolling flash of sickly light filled his vision and oblivion took him.

The cry made me turn. Calio Lezzek lay on the white marble of the command platform in a pool of his green robes. The last time I had seen him he had seemed on the edge of death, but somehow he had managed to walk to the bridge. I moved towards him, the projection of Tyr’s attack on the Iron Blood momentarily forgotten behind me.

The old man was shaking. Fresh blood ran from his eye sockets, repainting over brown stains. His lips were bright wet red in a parchment-pale face. His silver-tipped cane rattled on the smooth marble as he tried to stand. He slipped and started to fall again, and I caught his arm as he fell.

Lezzek was feather-light but I nearly dropped him as I touched him. It felt as if I had plunged my hand into hot acid. I blanked the feeling out and lifted him slowly to his feet. Deck officers and attendants were clustering around now. Behind me the battle spun on, forgotten and unattended.

‘Master Lezzek,’ I said. He did not reply. His body was shaking, fingers opening and closing. A thick red trickle ran down his chin. His lips were moving and a wheezing sound was coming from his mouth. ‘Master Lezzek,’ I tried again, but he did not seem to know that I was there. ‘Calio,’ I said, and his head turned.

‘I can feel it reaching towards us,’ he gasped. ‘I can see it, coming through the storm. Terra, it is burning.’ He moaned and shivered. ‘How can such…’ but the question died in his throat. His head arched back. I heard a crunch of bone. His mouth opened as if he were screaming but he made no sound. White-hot pain filled my hand where I held his arm.

He lifted off the floor, his flesh glowing from within as if his blood was on fire. He looked like a carcass suspended on a hook, arms and legs still twitching as they dangled. My grip broke, and the palm of my gauntlet was dark red with heat where I had held him. Ash fell from the old man, hair and silk charring and flaking from skin. A roaring sound spilled out of Lezzek’s mouth, like air sucking through a furnace grate. A booming, hollow voice came from the burning man, speaking the message that was killing him.

‘Sons of Dorn, return to Terra. Return immediately. This is the will of Rogal Dorn, Praetorian of Terra.’ Lezzek’s floating body shimmered as if I was seeing it through a heat haze. His head snapped up, his empty eyes fixed on me. For a second I thought that he was trying to tell me something, that he was trying to give me another message in that blind look. Then he spoke again. ‘Return to Terra. This is the will of Rogal Dorn.’

His lips blackened, and bright yellow flames poured out of his mouth and wreathed his head. His thin flesh blistered and boiled. For a second he was a black silhouette of a man at the centre of an inferno. Then the shape collapsed into a heap of embers and the flames vanished.

My mouth was dry.

Return to Terra. This is the will of Rogal Dorn.

The words felt leaden, like chains fastening around my hands. I half heard the shouts of bridge officers, and the mechanical sound of servitors moving to douse the remains of Calio Lezzek that still smouldered at my feet.

Word from Terra. Astropathic messages require careful interpretation to sift meaning from the mystery of their dreamlike content. It can take days and even then not be clear. For a message to imprint so clearly and directly onto Lezzek’s mind it must have held staggering power. We had waited months for a message, for any message. Now we had it and it felt like a judgement of execution. I glanced back to the holo-projection where our fleet and the Iron Warriors met in battle. We were winning, I thought. We could deal a wound to the enemy so severe that the Iron Warriors might never recover.

This is the will of Rogal Dorn.

Withdrawal. Flight. The price would be terrible and even then those that did survive would be running to find a storm’s grave in the warp.

A human serf officer moved towards me, saluted. It was one of the communication officers. Interface cables ran from the base of his skull to a sliding track on the roof above. His eyes were green slit augmetics. I nodded an acknowledgement.

‘My lord,’ he said, and I could hear the edge of fear in his voice. ‘Reports from all fleet elements. Most of the astropaths are dead, a few live… barely. They all spoke the same message before they died.’

I looked down at the scorched patch of marble. ‘Yes, we received the same message.’ To punch through the warp storms and kill a fleet’s worth of astropaths the message must have been less a sending, more a tidal surge of psychic energy. No matter how it had reached us, the message was undeniable, its meaning not open to doubt.

Has the war reached Terra already? The possibility filled my mind. What if the Iron Warriors were not the only new allies of Horus? What if Terra is falling and we are being called back as a last defence?

I thought of Tyr, of the force I had committed to a bold strike, and the hundred carefully balanced engagements spread across the battle sphere. The message was a blow more fatal, more carefully timed than any ambush. This battle would not end quickly; we could not continue and obey the urgency of the order. There was no neat way to unpick an engagement on such a scale. Withdrawal meant sacrifice.

I remembered a hand locked around mine, blood coating both. Helias’s eyes looked back into mine out of the ice cold of the distant past.

‘Navigator Primus Basus reports that a passage seems to have opened in the storms, though he is not sure it will last.’ The words chilled me. If we were to obey we had to go while there was a chance of making it through the storms. I saw the abyss opening below my brother, waiting, silent, and eternal.

This is the will of Rogal Dorn.

I had a choice between loyalty and victory. Withdraw and I committed us to a loss greater than anything our Legion had suffered.

The will of Rogal Dorn.

‘Alexis,’ my brother had said in a voice so low that it was almost lost on the wind. He was always stronger than me. His hand opened in my memory and the darkness reached up to swallow him.

‘Signal all fleet elements to withdraw and jump to the warp.’ I closed my eyes. The pain is how you know you are still alive. ‘We are returning to Terra.’

Tyr swept his mace down. The Iron Warrior managed to move at the last moment, and the blow hammered into his pauldron with a metallic thunderclap. Tyr could hear his own panting breath as he dropped his shoulder and rammed his weight forwards. The Iron Warrior stumbled. Tyr hit down, and felt the shock of impact through his armour. He could smell his own sweat, a thick and heavy stink inside his sealed battle plate. He hit twice more, heavy bludgeoning blows that left the Iron Warrior a bloody mound on the deck.

Beside him Timor slammed his storm shield forwards into the gap. Explosive rounds burst against its surface. Tyr brought his bolter up and fired into the space he had opened. They were in a corridor of dull metal barely wide enough for two of the Terminators to stand side by side. They had been fighting ever since they had materialised inside the Iron Blood – heaving, grinding warfare, fought with point-blank shots and grunting melees. The Iron Warriors gave no ground. The Imperial Fists had the advantage of numbers, but they were broken into a hundred small forces. As Tyr had expected, the inside of the ship was a labyrinth of defences: sentry guns, kill zones, and barricades manned by Iron Warriors who fought with brutal skill. Tyr had intermittent contact with the rest of the Imperial Fists on the Iron Blood, but he estimated that he had lost half already. Despite these losses they pressed forwards.

‘Fire wasp!’ shouted Timor. A bulky shape moved into view in front of them. Its curved armour plates were black with soot and striped with yellow chevrons. Blue pilot flames hissed at the tips of its weapon pods. A threat rune latched onto the machine, painting it angry red in Tyr’s eye. The fire wasp made a sound like an animal hiss and washed the corridor with liquid flame. Tyr’s helmet display dimmed, reducing his view to sun-bright patches of light and black silhouettes. Targeting runes hazed and pulsed in his sight as the heat baffled his armour’s sensors.

‘Navarra, clear the tunnel,’ shouted Tyr. Navarra came forwards, the barrels of his weapon already spinning to life. It was a new pattern of weapon, retrofitted to a few Terminator suits from the larger type fitted to Dreadnoughts.

Assault cannon. The designation was not new, but never before had a weapon owned the title so completely. Navarra moved past Tyr, fixed his stance, and levelled his weapon. The barrels keened as they rotated to a blur. The fire wasp came forwards, spraying flame. Navarra fired.

The torrent of glowing rounds hit the fire wasp head on. Its armour distorted under the deluge, buckling and cracking like paper in rain. A round hit a fuel tank and the corridor vanished in a fireball. Navarra kept the trigger depressed, panning the weapon across the burning corridor. Shell casings piled at his feet.

A sudden blast of static and garbled speech filled Tyr’s helmet. Someone was trying to signal them from outside the Iron Blood. He tried to latch on to the signal but could hear only static. No matter, he thought. There is only one way for us to go.

Navarra’s assault cannon spun to silence, its barrels glowing red. The corridor in front of them was clear.

‘Forward,’ said Tyr; and they marched forward, towards the Iron Blood’s heart and towards Perturabo.

When it came, the order to withdraw spread like poison through the Imperial Fists fleet. The first to run were the smaller craft, the frigates, gunboats and strike cruisers. Alone or in small squadrons, a hundred and thirty of the proudest warships of the Imperium fled the sphere of battle. Every Imperial Fist on every ship knew what the fleet master was doing, and why; it was a judgement of who was most likely to survive. It was also a death sentence for those who remained.

Behind the fleeing ships their heavier cousins fired on the enemy with renewed fury. Rolling fire hit every Iron Warriors ship within range, clouding their sensors with a haze of energy as munitions detonated against void shields. It worked for a while, until the first of the Imperial Fists dropped into the warp. For a moment nothing changed. Then more of the fleeing ships vanished, and the Iron Warriors realised what was happening. They fell upon the breaking Imperial Fists like starved jackals on wounded lions.

A second wave of Imperial Fists craft began to run for the system’s edge and the warp’s embrace. The Lacedaemon, the ship that had carried the first Imperial Fists beyond the Solar System, was the first to break away. Its captain, the obedient Iago, pushed his ship until its engines bled raw plasma. Twelve Iron Warriors ships ran him down, raking the Lacedaemon with constant fire. Its hull blasted to a twisted ruin, the Lacedaemon fired back on its killers until the last inch of its hull integrity gave out. Of the rest of the second wave of retreat, a handful made it to clear space and jumped to the warp. Most followed the Lacedaemon into death.

The Veritas began to fall. Scything blasts of fire cut its golden hull, slitting its skin open, spilling its guts into the planet’s atmosphere. Its remaining engines fired, trying to pull it from the planet’s grasp. Its killers fired again, shearing its engines from its body. It tumbled end over end as it surrendered to gravity, burning and shedding debris as it fell through the atmosphere.

It hit the ocean of Phall II like a hot iron plunged into a pool. Steam spewed into the air, spreading into a white anvil head. It took three seconds for the seawater to reach the plasma reactor. The wreck exploded, and a wave of glowing energy chased the tsunami already ripping out from the impact. White steam and black smoke bloomed out, mingled, clouding the atmosphere of the world like a cataract forming over a blue eye.

On the Contrador, Golg hissed as he watched the image of the Veritas’s death. Its end was a fitting one for the sons of Rogal Dorn. But it was only a brief diversion, a kill of opportunity as he searched for his true target. He did not have to look far. There it was, standing defiant amidst a scattering of ships. Tribune: a name that carried so much of the arrogance and pretension of the Imperial Fists. His master had ordered him to kill the upstart commander of that ship who dared to stand against the Lord of Iron. He would do it, but there would be little satisfaction in the deed.

The battle had become a slaughter. The Imperial Fists were running. Squadrons of ships tried to keep the Iron Warriors at bay while the others made for clear space and the possibility of escape. Freed of the pressure of attacks, the Iron Warriors fell upon them. Every passing instant saw another ship die under Iron Warriors guns. They simply hammered them into twisted metal and cooling slag. There was an abandon to it, a wasteful brutality that required no skill. But the Imperial Fists died just the same.

Golg felt nothing, no victory of superiority, just the bitter taste of blood from an enemy that had let himself die. This was supposed to be more than a massacre; it was supposed to be vindication, a proof of the lie of old pretensions and rivalry. Instead it had become simple butchery. Golg wondered if the primarch saw it in the same way, if his bitter anger was as terrible as Golg suspected.

Golg’s eyes narrowed on the Tribune. This kill would be terrifyingly easy, but he had to be sure that he completed his task, or risk his master’s anger.

‘Close on the target,’ he whispered. Officers and servitors moved to obey. ‘Cripple it and prepare for boarding.’ He had three hundred Iron Warriors on the Contrador alone, more than enough to bring Perturabo his prize.

I have killed us all. It was all I could think. The dying moments of thousands of my brothers clogged the holo-projection with blood-red light. I had tried to pick the battle apart, pulling elements back one at a time, diverting, covering, protecting. The Iron Warriors had felt the weakness and pressed their attack. The withdrawal had become an ugly brawling battle, then a rout, then a slaughter.

The enemy had hit the Tribune twice since the withdrawal had begun. Both had been substantial impacts. The bridge was a ruin. Half the human officers were dead. Fused cogitator units sparked and bled smoke. Air hissed from ragged punctures in the armoured shutters. Servitors hung from the cables linking them to their stations. Oil and blood poured from them onto the deck.

‘Three close proximity targets,’ shouted Raln. He was gripping the main ordnance dais, the body of its dead officer slumped at its side.

‘Fire on all targets,’ I said, my helmet amplifying my words over the sound of a dozen overlapping alarms. The ship shook and shook again as we fired. I had given the order to withdraw but I would not run until the last moment. The Tribune lay across the path of the onrushing Iron Warriors fleet. Beside us were two grand cruisers, a trio of battle cruisers, and twenty strike vessels. A substantial force, but it was a paper fortress in the path of a storm.

‘Two targets hit,’ says Raln, his voice loud but calm. ‘Two more targets reaching close range. One reads as being of battle-barge displacement.’

‘Fire on damaged targets.’ I turned back to the projection of the battle. Blurring interference washed through it. I watched as some of our ships reached clear space and vanished into the warp. Too few, far too few. Even as I watched a mass of Iron Warriors ships broke three of ours into glowing debris. A fourth turned to fight and died even as it fired. I looked to the bloated threat marker of the Iron Blood.

‘Try and reach Captain Tyr again.’ There had been no word from Tyr since he launched his assault on the Iron Blood. The green-eyed signal officer was bleeding, half his face glossed in fresh blood, but he nodded and moved his fingers over his lectern.

‘Target hit,’ called Raln. ‘Fire inbound.’ The ship shook again. ‘Shields gone.’

‘We have a signal, lord.’ The signals officer was speaking into my ear via my helmet vox. A distortion-wracked voice filled my ears.

‘Fleet master,’ Tyr was shouting. I could hear a grating sound, like hail on a metal roof. It was the sound of gunfire ringing on his armour.

‘There is word from Terra. We are to return immediately.’ I heard a chop of static and a sound like a hammer striking a cracked bell. ‘I have given the order to withdraw. Pull your forces back and–’

‘To where? Pull back to where?’ Laughter edged Tyr’s voice. I looked at the battle projection, at the rune representing Halcyon trying to get clear of the centre of the Iron Warriors fleet. ‘I am not retreating, brother. I am going forwards. I am going to kill our enemy.’ He had always been headstrong, reckless even, and he had never liked me. I smiled at that moment.

‘Good luck, my friend,’ I said. For a second the only answer was the rain-patter ringing of Tyr’s armour.

‘And you, Alexis,’ he said and cut the link. I blinked, for a moment looking into the memory of Helias’s eyes as he prepared to let the abyss take him.

The impact shook the Tribune and threw me to the floor. The armoured shutters blew in. Glass and metal spun through the bridge. Air howled from jagged holes in the hull. There were suddenly dead men and women everywhere, in pieces, bleeding in floods, gasping for vanishing air. My armour began to chime with atmosphere and pressure warnings.

‘Multiple hits,’ shouted Raln, still somehow at his dais. ‘Primary engines failing. Enemy battle-barge on boarding trajectory.’

‘Turn us to show our port flank to the enemy,’ I said as I got to my feet. ‘Order Imperial Fists elements into Stormbirds and transport craft. Get them outside of the ship on the protected flank.’

‘And you, lord?’ said Raln.

‘Tell the enginseers that we are coming to the machine decks.’

The Contrador and the Tribune met in an embrace of fire and punctured metal. The Tribune fired every remaining weapon at the closing Iron Warriors ship. Macro-shells, lance beams and plasma jets flicked across the narrowing distance and broke over the Contrador’s shields. The return fire blew out the Tribune’s gun decks and gouged a long wound in its side. The Contrador closed until it was drifting alongside the Tribune’s wounded flank. Assault pods and boarding torpedoes slid across the gap. A weak flurry of turret fire reached out to meet the swarm of assault craft and hammered a handful into wreckage. The rest came on, unconcerned and undeterred. They hit in a wave, punching through gold-plated armour and disgorging their cargo into the guts of the Tribune.

I saw none of this but I felt each part in the dying trembles of my ship. The Iron Warriors were aboard the Tribune, hacking and bludgeoning their way deeper and deeper inside. The resistance was scattered but determined. Weapon servitors stood at junctions, filling the space in front of them with streams of bolter shells. Our human crew stood their ground with shot cannons and lasguns. Amongst them a handful of my brother Imperial Fists moved between the fiercest battles. That had been the hardest part, speaking to those who had to remain. All understood, both human and Imperial Fist alike; the Iron Warriors had to think we were resisting and that they were crushing us to nothing. The Tribune was dead, but I was going to claim its death price.

‘Ready?’ I said. Beside me Raln hefted a tall shield of scarred plasteel and glanced around at the remaining brothers of my company.

‘Ready,’ he said. I nodded and looked to the red-swathed figures of the Tribune’s enginseers. They bowed their hooded heads in a synchronised gesture of assent. ‘Thank you,’ I said, feeling the inadequacy of the words. The enginseers made no sign of having heard me. I nodded, locked my plough-fronted iron helm in place, and opened a communication channel. What remained of the Tribune’s signal arrays would transmit my words to any of the fleet that still remained and could hear them.

‘This is the fleet master.’ My voice sounded flat inside my helmet. ‘The Tribune is lost, remaining units withdraw and jump to Terra as ordered.’ I paused, wanting to say more but not knowing what to say. ‘Endure, my brothers. No matter what, endure.’

I cut the fleet broadcast, and let silence hold for a second before I spoke my last order to the Tribune’s crew.

‘Now,’ I said.

On the external hull of the Tribune a hundred assault craft boosted into the void like a cloud of fireflies; the Tribune’s contingent of Imperial Fists leaving their fortress for the last time. The thirty members of my strike force were still beside me, waiting. I nodded to the enginseers. There was a flash of light and the Tribune’s teleport chamber vanished from around us. Precisely five seconds later the enginseers performed their last duty. They never questioned my order, never showed the slightest doubt or emotion at what I asked of them. I think I have never had more admiration for a human than I have for them.

The Tribune’s plasma reactors overloaded. I never saw my ship die but in my mind I still see it, as though the event burnt itself onto the retina of my dreams.

For a second the Tribune held its form, a golden fortress floating in black night. Then it detonated. The Imperial Fists still on board were vaporised and their Iron Warriors enemies with them. Tongues of plasma licked out from the sun-hot core. Vast lumps of armour plating rode on the growing sphere of hot gases. The blast wave hit the Contrador, and broke fields and burnt out its sensors and range finders. Our attack craft descended on it a moment later like the vengeful spirits of the dead.

The Dreadnoughts were made of dull metal, their curved torso plates marked by burnished iron skulls. Black and yellow chevrons slashed across their greaves, and amber light burnt in their eyes. They stood to either side of iron doors whose surfaces were mottled and pitted as if their slab faces had been hung while still hot from the furnace. Broken corpses and shell cases lay in heaps before them. This far into the Iron Blood the resistance was not just punishing, it was crippling. Of the thirteen hundred Tyr had brought, just over forty stood with him now. A few still fought in the rest of the vast ship, buying Tyr’s force time. The rest were dead, their armour split, crushed or burned, their blood mingling with that of their enemies on the bare metal decks. But they were close, very close.

There was supposed to be a second wave. A battalion of Imperial Fists, Dreadnoughts and Legio Cybernetica maniples. It should have lent strength to the final attack on Perturabo’s inner sanctum. That second wave would never arrive. Tyr knew that Polux would have withdrawn the ships carrying his reinforcements. Perhaps those ships would survive, but Tyr had his doubts. Withdrawal in the middle of a battle like this meant only one thing: a massacre. He understood Polux’s decision, but the cost… the cost was beyond imagining.

Tyr was running, his mace held above his head. The first Dreadnought fired when Tyr was fifty paces from the door. The cylinder of glowing energy missed Tyr by inches and hit Timor in mid-stride. There was a high-pitched whine and the sergeant dissolved into an outline of bright light. The energy beam hit another Imperial Fist and reduced him to dust. Tyr’s helmet display blanked out completely. He could hear the shriek growing louder and louder.

His display cut back in. The Dreadnought was still firing, the conversion beamer’s coils pulsing and sparking. Tyr focused on the Dreadnought and selected his first strike.

The second Dreadnought raised one of its two hands and opened its palm. The graviton gun pulse hit Tyr and he slammed into the floor. He could feel metal distorting, servos and joints shearing under pressure as his armour crushed him. The Dreadnought with the conversion beamer kept firing while its brother moved forwards, its fingers flexing.

A spray of glowing rounds hit it from the side. Tyr could hear the sound of Navarra’s assault cannon even over the scream of the conversion beamer. Gouged pits spread across the Dreadnought’s sarcophagus. It turned into the deluge of fire, moving like a man leaning into a gale. Its face plate buckled, the metal glowing hot under the impacts. The armour cracked and suddenly the machine giant was leaking blood. Chunks of pulped meat showered from the Dreadnought as it split open. The graviton hold on Tyr ended a second before the Dreadnought hit the floor.

Tyr was off the floor, running, his crushed muscles screaming, his armour grinding. The Dreadnought with the conversion beamer turned to meet his charge. He brought the mace down on the barrel. The ribbed focusing plates shattered. Arcs of energy cracked through the air. Tyr’s second blow crashed into its right leg behind the knee joint. The Dreadnought brought its fist around as it fell, clenched iron knuckles swinging at Tyr’s head. He buried the head of the mace in the Dreadnought’s face. It collapsed with a sound of ringing steel and unwinding gears.

Tyr stood, breathing hard. He looked up at the waiting doors. They looked as if they could survive a kick from a Titan. He turned to the remainder of his cadre. There were fourteen brothers in Terminator armour, another thirty in void-hardened Iron Armour. Too few, he thought. Far too few. But was any number going to be enough to kill a primarch?

‘Melta charges,’ he called. Men began to run forwards, unfastening charges as they moved.

The first one was level with Tyr when the doors began to open. Tyr turned, his eyes locked on the widening split in the rough iron. The doors peeled back into the walls with a sound like the inhalation of a metal god. He could feel the hairs rise on his neck. Something buried deep under his gene-forging and training told him to step back from the dark opening, to run. Behind him the rest of the Imperial Fists had gone still. He could see inside now. He saw the figure clad in dulled battleplate seated upon the sharp-angled iron throne, hand resting on the pommel of a hammer.

Tyr could feel the black eyes of the enthroned figure looking back at him. He raised his mace. Behind him his brothers began to move. Bright lines of tracer fire split the gloom. Tyr began to charge as Perturabo rose from his throne to meet him. Chains spilled from the primarch’s layered war plate as he stood. Rounds sparked from the rivet-covered armour. His face was bare, his eyes oil-black. His hammer came up with him. Its haft was as tall as Tyr and its black head crawled with power at its master’s touch.

Tyr was five paces away. He could feel his muscles bunching, his heartbeat slowing to a low focused rhythm. Behind Tyr his brothers followed, firing as they came, lighting his path, caging Perturabo in fire. Tyr gripped his mace with both hands as he swung it up above his head.

‘For Dorn!’ The shout began as the coiled power of Tyr’s strike unwound. The primarch stood still, clad in iron, and cloaked in detonations. Tyr met the black eyes and saw something move in their depths, like a lightning flash seen on a distant night horizon.

Perturabo spun the head of the hammer low and brought it up in a curved arc. The blow hit Tyr as his last step fell. The hammer crumpled his armour and crushed it into the pulped remains of his flesh.

Reality snapped into place around us with a roar of gunfire. We stood at the centre of a wide chamber lined with dull metal and lit by unshielded stab lamps. The residue of teleportation rose from our armour in gauzy coils of ghost vapour and steam. Our target was good: we were in a primary chamber close to the Contrador’s bridge and main command sections. I had expected resistance but had hoped that most of the Iron Warriors would have joined the assault on the Tribune. Its death should have claimed them all, leaving their own ship open to our counter-assault.

Like so many battles in so many ages, it was assumption that almost destroyed us.

Fire hit us from all sides. I heard the rolling explosion of bolt-rounds impacting against armour. Three of my men died as shots found eye lenses and punched through helmet speaker grilles.

‘Shields,’ I shouted into the vox. My men brought their boarding shields together, their edges touching those of the men next to them. Together we formed an unbroken circular wall of plasteel. Volley fire, disciplined and relentless, lashed against the shield wall. I switched to the optical feed from the front of my shield and saw the muzzle flare of bolters firing from loopholes in sloped metal barricades. Iron Warriors, dug in and waiting. Not all of them had gone to attack the Tribune. Even with the scent of the kill so close the Iron Warriors were suspicious, methodical fighters and had held some strength back.

I looked to my left. Raln stood close in to my shoulder, firing his bolter through the gun slot in his shield. He paused and turned his helmet to look at me.

‘This is not going to be easy,’ he said. I almost smiled.

‘We need to move,’ I said. The enemy did not intend to kill us with this fire, they intended to pin us in place. If we stayed where we were the Iron Warriors would wear us down and then bring up weapons that could break our shield wall. It was inevitable. It was what I would have done if I had been in their place. Raln glanced through his gun slot.

‘Enemy barricades on this side are three metres high with firing points every two metres. Crossfire will not diminish on approach.’ He looked back at me. ‘Advance on one barricade, remove it and work sideways along the lines from there.’ It was a simple plan and under the circumstances the only one open to us.

‘They will be prepared for it,’ I said. Raln shrugged, a gesture that said everything about what we could do about that certainty. For a second I thought of what must be happening in the rest of the Iron Warriors ship. Our assault craft wave must have hit by now, and our brothers would be fighting for beachheads inside the ship’s outer hull. I opened a channel to the rest of my personal strike force. ‘Close formation, advance to starboard barricade.’ They needed no other instruction.

Our formation reformed as we charged, shields rising and overlapping to form an armoured wedge that moved as a single body. The enemy fire intensified so that we were pushing against a wall of explosions, muscles and discipline straining for every step. We slowed, our synchronised paces becoming driving steps. I was grunting with the effort of holding my shield up against the hammering impacts of bolt-rounds. Fire washed us, billowing through the chinks in our shield wall; I felt a stab of pain as the flames found the elbow joint of my shield arm. I discarded the sensation, and forced my legs to push forwards. I could see the barricade only three paces away.

‘Meltas,’ called Raln. I heard the shrieking whine as air super-heated along the path of the melta beams. Two ragged, glowing wounds opened in the Iron Warriors barricade. The incoming fire slackened. This was the most dangerous moment, the moment when victory or slaughter was decided as much by luck as discipline. We charged, reforming into two spear-shaped packs that drove at the gaps in the barricades. I was at the tip of one, shield raised, my power fist sweating arcs of lightning.

An Iron Warrior met me as I stepped into the glowing breach. He was fast and skilled. His hand gripped the top of my shield, and yanked it downwards as he stabbed at my face with his chainblade. I rammed my weight forwards. He stumbled, the teeth of his chainblade biting across the armour above my left eye. I moved the shield to the side and punched into the gap. The Iron Warrior’s chest plate shattered. He started to fall but I had already hit him twice more, crushing and pulping his face and gut. I stepped over his body. Behind me my brothers came through the breach firing to either side, spreading down the line like water pouring through a broken dam. I turned, looking for the knots of resistance. That small movement, the slight turn and drop of my head, saved my life.

The teeth of the chainfist carved across the top of my shield in a streak of red sparks. I started to turn, caught a glimpse of a shape, its bare metal armour bloated by augmetics. A kick stamped into my shield. The impact shot up my arm. I felt muscles tear in my shoulder. I was still staggering when the chainfist carved my shield and arm in two.

I felt no pain, just a sensation of draining to the floor as shock flooded through me. Bright supernovas of light blossomed in front of my eyes. A tremble ran through me as my gene-forged physiology fought against the trauma. My vision swam. Something moved close to me, a simian shape of oiled metal that moved with a splutter of pneumatic hisses. I could hear a shriek of revving chain-teeth. The shape lunged. Hit the field of my power fist. I did not even realise I had blocked the blow. My vision snapped into focus.

The clang of arms and the roar of bolter fire filled the space behind the barricade. Around me my brothers surged against figures in armour the colour of bare steel. Bolters fired at point-blank range. Shields battered into limbs and helmets. A dark gloss layer of blood covered the deck.

The turning chain-teeth were inches from my face. My muscles and armour fought to hold it back. My enemy pressed the chainfist forwards. He was strong, monstrously strong. I could see the grey, pale skin of his face sunken into the collar of his armour. Pistons and cables bulged from his joints and dirty fumes coughed from the vents on his back. His eyes were pale, the pupils black pinpricks in irisless whites. A fragment of memory gave me his name: Golg.

He had ordered the murder of my ship but had stayed on his own, not even coming to finish the deed himself.

He raked his chainfist back and I hammered forwards with a backhanded blow. He took a half-step back, the delicacy of the movement at odds with his bulk. The blow passed a hand’s width from his face, and as my momentum sent my arm wide he brought his chainfist across my chest. Thick blood and yellow armour fragments sprayed from the teeth. I felt their hooked points part the metal of my breastplate and open my flesh to the bone. Blood washed down my chest; I could taste it in my mouth. My breath bubbled thick in my throat.

Golg gave a smile of relish. I stumbled back a step. Blood still flowed from the chewed stump of my left arm. I could feel the double beat of my hearts booming in my chest. A high-pitched ringing filled my ears. Strength was draining from me.

My vision was a frosted blur, as if ice covered my eyes.

The world turned dark and warm.

The pain faded.

The pain is how you know you are still alive.

I grasped the pain and it pulled me back into the moment with a silent howl. Agony ran through my nerves, fresh, bright, alive. I could see.

Golg was looking at me with emptiness in his pale eyes. The chainfist descended towards me, its blood-
wetted teeth a pink metal blur. I brought my power fist up, palm and fingers open.

I caught the chainfist and closed my hand with a crack of thunder. Shattered metal teeth spun through the air. I wrenched my fist back, pulling Golg forwards. His face met my helmet with a wet crack of bone. I let go of his ruined chainfist and pistoned my fist into his head. His skull vanished in a spray of red pulp. He collapsed to the ground, and lay still.

My knees hit the deck but I did not feel it. Around me my brothers were pressing forwards, clearing the barricade spaces. Blood pulsed slowly from my chest and the severed meat of my left arm. There was a warm copper taste in my mouth. For a moment I knelt, a crimson warrior coated in my own blood and that of my enemies. Then the pain faded and the waiting abyss opened beneath me.

The killing began to slow. The Retribution Fleet was no more; only the crippled and dead remained. The Iron Warriors ships had stopped firing on their victims, as if the overwhelming firepower of the earlier battle had left them spent. Surrounded Imperial Fists remnants fired all they had into the face of their enemies. Some managed to strip the void shields off an Iron Warriors ship; some even put wounds into their hulls. But the Iron Warriors came on, shrugging off damage like a bull grox trampling a dog into the dirt. They swarmed their remaining enemies, their boarding pods clustering on golden hulls like ticks feeding on cattle. Their boarding parties struck plasma reactors, shutting them down and letting the ships choke to death without power. Life support systems, artificial gravity and weapon systems went silent. Then the Iron Warriors left and the cold of the void reached into the lightless hulls to do its slow and silent work.

A few Imperial Fists ships remained, fighting to the last, a shrinking cluster of resistance that became smaller by the second. They fought to the death, firing on enemies with undimmed fury, covering limping comrades even as the Iron Warriors brought them down. When the Tribune exploded amongst the last Imperial Fists ships, few of the Iron Warriors took note. Golg and the Contrador had their kill, and the primarch had the head of the Imperial Fist who had dared to stand against him. That the Contrador lingered at the site of its victory drew no suspicion.

In the navigation cupola of the Contrador, Navigator Primus Basus shifted against the unfamiliar hardness of the bare metal chair. The Imperial Fists had locked the previous Navigator of the Contrador in the deep holds of the battle-barge, but he could still feel her presence on the unadorned and functional equipment. Behind him his two secondaries fidgeted in their seats. The journey from the Tribune had done nothing to settle their nerves, and they knew what awaited them once they were in the warp. A storm navigation was a terrifying thing. Even if the clear passage were still visible they would have to rotate through shifts to avoid gaze fatigue, or worse. Basus flicked a switch on the console and spoke to the air.

‘Sergeant Raln?’ There was a pause, a clicking whir of white noise.

‘Yes, Navigator.’ The sergeant’s voice held none of its usual dry humour.

‘We are ready.’ He paused, sucked air through his teeth. ‘Our destination is still the same?’

‘Yes. Captain Polux’s orders still stand.’

Basus nodded to himself, closed his human eyes and ran his hand over the aperture on his forehead.

‘Very well, sergeant.’ He cut the vox, and turned to his secondaries. Their green-flecked amber eyes were a mirror of his own. ‘We make course for Terra,’ he said.

The Contrador’s engines fired to full life and it moved away from the debris of its battle with the Tribune. It bled as it moved, its wounds trailing gas and ribbons of burning plasma. Damaged inside and out, half its crew dead, and its command seized by its enemies, it was a crippled warrior picking itself up from the battlefield. But it could still run.

By the time the rest of the Iron Warriors fleet realised something was wrong the Contrador was already beyond their range. Its engines breathed comet trails as it made for the edge of the Phall system, deaf to the signals that followed its flight. The Iron Warriors pursued until the Contrador ripped a glowing hole in the starfield and dived into the storms beyond.

Perturabo watched the calculations of slaughter play across the screen. His gaze held no sign of pleasure or satisfaction. Nothing else moved in the throne room or the long chamber beyond the doors. The blood had already clotted to a sticky dark film on his armour. The broken bodies of Imperial Fists lay on the floor around him, their yellow armour so crushed and distorted that they looked like chewed lumps of metal and offal.

The Imperial Fists fleet was gone. Some had managed to flee and jump to the warp, but most now drifted in the void, shattered and blackened. The force that had boarded the Iron Blood was dead to a man. There was no enemy left to fight. The battle data scrolling past Perturabo’s eyes told of a sudden and total victory. It also spoke of the likely outcome before the Imperial Fists’ suicidal withdrawal. Perturabo let the truth cycle past his eyes once more.

The hammer blow reduced the screens to sparking wreckage, and the Lord of Iron stalked from the chamber in silence.

In a corner, Navarra’s mangled body lay in a fold of shadow. His armour had mashed into his flesh, and his legs were gone below the knee joint. Inside the ruin of his helmet, Navarra’s eyelids trembled and snapped open.

Epilogue

[time/location unclear]

We have been falling for an eternity, falling into icy darkness, blood and the shouts of despair following us into oblivion. Perhaps it has only been hours, perhaps years. I cannot tell.

The storm cradles us, its frustrated fury raging at the hull of the Contrador. Some of the human crew have died. There has been violence. Some still hold loyalty to their Iron Warriors masters. It is to be expected. Others seem to have died of hunger, their bodies withering away to nothing. Perhaps it has been years. Perhaps we will fall through the storm forever.

‘Captain Polux?’ It is Basus. The Navigator looks even more thin and pale than normal. Sweat beads his grey skin and red sores rim his true eyes. I look little better. The wounds are healing, but they still weep pus. Tubes attach me to a mass of machines and fluid-filled vials that follow me on suspensors. I wear a red robe darkened in places by blooms of dried blood. They had to cut me from my armour.

‘Yes, Navigator?’ My voice is cracked and dry. A thick tube sucks yellow liquid from my chest as I breathe.

‘I have seen it.’ His voice shakes as he speaks. ‘It is there, just visible, faint but steady.’ I think that I know what he means, but I will not hope. I flex the fingers of my left hand as I listen, then I realise that my hand is gone and that I am clasping a phantom memory.

‘What have you seen?’ I say.

‘The light of Terra,’ he says. ‘The Astronomican. The storms are still strong but we can steer a course.’ I hear the hope in his voice alongside the fatigue. He and his secondaries have been steering us through the storm currents for as long as we have been here within the warp. Hope, though, is a fragile skin over the truth of pain and sacrifice.

‘Do it. Take us home.’

I stay awake until we complete the course. A command throne of dark metal dominates the Contrador’s bridge. It remains empty; I stand as I did on the bridge of the Tribune.

The crew move around me. Time passes, perhaps hours, perhaps months, perhaps years. My lost hand glows with ghost pain. The Apothecaries tell me they can modify the doses of nerve suppressors to remove the pain until I heal. I told them not to. The pain is reassuring, a rock to cling to as we fall.

At last the journey is over. Raln stands with me as we prepare to see the lights of Terra again. I nod slowly, and Raln gives the order. Our stolen ship shivers as the curtain of the warp parts before it and we slide out into the light of a bright sun.

The screens suspended across the bridge flicker to life, showing us the world that has waited for our return.

I frown. Beside me Raln makes a sound like a snarl.

The planets turn under the light of their sun, half wrapped in darkness, half in stark light. Weapon platforms and void stations ring them in heavy chains. Ships move through the void. Some turn towards us even as we look at them. I feel shock and awe. The forces gathered here are the greatest I have ever seen. It is a star system made into a fortress, a seat of power and unbending might. It is a place I have seen before, long ago. Now it is changed. It has become something more, something that I do not understand.

I look away from the screen.

‘This is not Terra,’ I say.

Somewhere within me I see Helias fall again from my hand into the night, and hear my scream lost on the ice wind.

Where before there had been light, now there was only darkness. The hot, urgent pulse of near death surged in his veins, the bitter flavour of betrayal fully expected, yet wholly unwelcome. This was what it would come to, he knew, this was the inevitable result of naïve belief in the goodness of the human heart. Death filled his senses, blood coating his teeth and the sharp reek of it thick in his nostrils.

As though it were yesterday, long buried memories of years spent on the night world of Nostramo emblazoned themselves on the forefront of his thoughts: haunted darkness punctured by stuttering lumen strips that fizzed in the shimmering, rain-slick streets and the stillness of a population kept quiescent with fear.

From out of this foetid darkness had come illumination and hope, the promise of a better future. But now that hope was dashed as the bright lance of the future seared itself into his thoughts…

…the death of a world and a great eye of black and gold watching it burn…

…legionaries fighting to the death beneath a red-lit sky…

…a golden eagle cast from the heavens…

He screamed in pain as images of destruction and the end of all things paraded before his mind’s eye. Voices called out to him. He heard his name, the name his father had bestowed upon him and the one his people had given him, in the fearful watches of the dark.

He opened his eyes and let the visions fade from his mind as the sensations of the physical world returned to him. Blood and salty tears stung his eyes and he looked over to the sound of voices calling his name.

Horrified faces stared at him in fear, but that was nothing new. Babble spewed from their mouths, but he could make nothing of it, the sense of the words lost in the screaming white noise filling his skull.

What sight could be so terrible? What could evoke such horror?

He looked down as he realised he squatted atop another, living, breathing figure.

A giant in torn golden robes, his bone-white hair spattered with gleaming ruby droplets.

A mantle of red velvet trimmed with golden weave spread out beneath him like a bloodstain.

Tanned, iron flesh. Opened and bleeding.

He took in the destruction wrought on the body beneath him, raising his hands, balled into fists. Blood dripped from his fingertips and he could taste the warm richness of the genetic mastery encoded into every molecule upon his teeth.

He knew this giant.

His name was legendary, his stony heart and mastery of war unmatched.

His name was Rogal Dorn.

He looked up again as he heard his own name, given voice by a warrior in the golden plate armour of the Imperial Fists who bore the black and white heraldry of its First Captain.

He knew this warrior too…

‘Curze!’ cried Sigismund. ‘What have you done?’

The emptiness of space shimmered in the glow of distant suns beyond the armoured glass, faraway planets and unknown systems turning in their prescribed arcs without thought for the dramas being played out on the stage of human endeavour. What did those who lived beneath these suns know of the Cheraut system and the blood that had been shed to pacify it in the name of the emergent Imperium of Mankind?

Curze stifled the anger such questions provoked, staring into his reflection with cold, obsidian eyes that resembled empty sockets in his pallid, sunken features. Lank hair hung to his neck like black ropes and spilled across his wide, powerful shoulders. He turned from his reflection, uncomfortable with the dreadful disappointment he saw there.

Glinting metal caught his sullen gaze: his armour, standing in a shadowed alcove on the far wall. He crossed the chamber and placed his hand on the skull-faced helmet. The gem-like facets of its lenses winked in the low light and the sweeping dark wings rose from its sides like the pinions of some avenging angel of night. The burnished plates were dark, as befitted the primarch of the Night Lords, each one contoured perfectly to his form and worked with gold edging that caught the starlight.

Turning from his battle armour, he paced the hard, metallic floor of the gloomy, cavernous chamber that confined him. Thick steel columns supported a great vaulted ceiling, its upper reaches lost in shadow, and the hum of the mighty starfort’s reactor beat like a pulse in the metal.

This aesthetic of functional austerity was typical of the Imperial Fists, whose artifice had constructed this mighty orbital fortress as a base of operations with which to begin the compliance of the Cheraut system.

The Emperor’s Children had held their traditional victory feast before the first shot had been fired and together with Fulgrim’s Legion and the Night Lords, Rogal Dorn’s Imperial Fists had broken open the defences of the belligerent human coalition that resisted the coming of the Imperium. Within eight months of hard, bloody fighting, the eagle flew above the smoking ruins of the last bastion, but where Dorn lauded Fulgrim’s Legion, the conduct of the Night Lords had earned only his ire.

Matters had finally come to a head amid the silver ruins of Osmium.

Pyres of the dead stained the skies black and Curze had watched his Chaplains orchestrating the executions of defeated prisoners when Dorn marched into his camp, his lean face thunderous. ‘Curze!’

Never once had Rogal Dorn called him by his forename.

‘Brother?’ he had replied.

‘Throne! What are you doing here?’ demanded Dorn, his normal, affable tone swallowed in the depths of his outrage. A phalanx of gold-armoured warriors followed their lord and Curze had immediately sensed the tension in the air.

‘Punishing the guilty,’ he had answered coolly. ‘Restoring order.’

The Primarch of the Imperial Fists shook his head. ‘This is not order, Curze, it is murder. Command your warriors to stand down. My Imperial Fists will take over this sector.’

‘Stand down?’ said Curze. ‘Are they not the enemy?’

‘Not any more,’ said Dorn. ‘They are prisoners now, but soon they will be a compliant population and part of the Imperium. Have you forgotten the Emperor’s purpose in declaring the Great Crusade?’

‘To conquer,’ said Curze.

‘No,’ said Dorn, placing a golden gauntlet on his shoulder guard. ‘We are liberators, not destroyers, brother. We bring the light of illumination, not death. We must govern with benevolence if these people are ever to recognise our authority in this galaxy.’

Curze flinched at the touch, resenting the easy friendship Dorn pretended.

Bilious anger bubbled invisibly beneath his skin, but if Dorn was aware of it, he gave no sign.

‘These people resisted us and must pay the penalty for that crime,’ said Curze. ‘Obedience to the Imperium will come from the fear of punishment, you know that as well as anyone, Dorn. Kill those that resisted and the others will learn the lesson that to oppose us is to die.’

Dorn shook his head, taking his arm to lead him away from the curious stares their heated discussion was attracting. ‘You are wrong, but we should speak of this in private.’

‘No,’ said Curze, angrily shrugging off Dorn’s grip. ‘You think these people will bend the knee meekly to us because we show compassion? Mercy is for the weak and foolish. It will only breed corruption and eventual betrayal. Fear of reprisals will keep the rest of this planet in check, not benevolence.’

Dorn sighed. ‘And the hatred planted in those you leave alive will pass from one generation to the next until this world is engulfed in a war the cause of which none of those fighting will remember. It will never end, don’t you see that? Hate only breeds hate and the Imperium cannot be built upon such bloody foundations.’

‘All empires are forged in blood,’ said Curze. ‘To pretend otherwise is naïve. The rule of law cannot be maintained by the blind hope that human nature is inherently good. Haven’t we seen enough to know that ultimately the mass of humanity must be forced into compliance?’

‘I cannot believe I am hearing this,’ said Dorn. ‘What has got into you, Curze?’

‘Nothing that has not always been there, Dorn,’ said Curze, striding away from the mighty, golden figure and hauling one of the few remaining prisoners upright by the front of his tunic. He scooped up a fallen bolter and thrust the heavy gun into the prisoner’s trembling hands. Curze leaned down and said, ‘Go ahead. Kill me.’

The terrified man shook his head, the oversized weapon shaking in his hands as though his limbs were palsied.

‘No?’ said Curze. ‘Why not?’

The prisoner tried to speak, but was so awed by the terrifying proximity of the primarch that his words were unintelligible.

‘Are you afraid you will be killed?’

The man nodded and Curze addressed his warriors, ‘No one harms this man. No matter what happens, he is not to be punished.’

Curze turned and walked back towards Dorn with his arms stretched out to either side of him, presenting his back to the prisoner.

No sooner had he turned away from the armed man than the gun had been raised and the hard crack of a bolter shot split the air. Sparks flew as the explosive shell ricocheted from Curze’s armour and he spun on his heel to smash the prisoner’s skull to splinters with his fist.

The headless corpse swayed for a moment before dropping slowly to its knees and pitching onto its chest.

‘You see,’ said Curze, his fingers dripping blood and bone fragments.

‘And what was that supposed to prove?’ asked Dorn, his features curled in distaste.

‘That any chance mortals get they will choose the path of dissent. When he thought he would be punished, he dared not shoot, but the moment he believed himself free from consequence, he acted.’

‘That was an unworthy deed,’ said Dorn, and Curze had turned away from him before he could elaborate, but the Imperial Fists’ primarch caught his arm.

‘Your warriors will stand down and withdraw, Curze. That is an order, not a request. Leave this planet. Now.’

Dorn’s eyes were hard as granite and Curze knew enough of his brother’s resolve to realise he had pushed him far enough. ‘When this campaign is won, you and I will have words, Curze. You have crossed the line and I will no longer countenance your barbarous methods of war. Your way is not the way of the Imperium.’

‘I think you might be right…’ whispered Curze.

And he had led his warriors from the field of battle, their dark armour rendering them as shadows in the ruins.

He wondered what might have happened had he taken the debate to its logical conclusion.

Curze shied away from the violence inherent in such a line of reasoning and ran a hand through his dark hair, feeling like a caged animal as the door to his chamber – his prison – slid open and a warrior in gleaming, midnight-blue armour entered. Through the door, he could see the purple-armoured figures of Fulgrim’s Phoenix Guard, their golden halberds and copper scale cloaks glittering in the wan light of the starfort.

Dorn and Fulgrim were taking no chances with his confinement.

The newcomer’s head was shaven bald, pale and angular, with hooded eyes of jet beneath a prominent brow and pugnacious jawline.

Curze nodded in acknowledgement at the sight of his equerry, Captain Shang, and beckoned him in with an impatient wave of his hand.

‘What news?’ asked Curze as Shang bowed curtly before him.

Shang said, ‘The Master of the Fists recovers, my lord. A lesser being than a primarch would be dead thrice over with the wounds you dealt him.’

Curze returned his gaze to the tracts of stars beyond the skin of the starfort, all too aware of the severity of Dorn’s wounds, having clawed them with his bare hands and teeth.

‘Then I must await the judgement of my peers, is that it?’

‘With respect, my lord, you did draw the blood of a brother primarch.’

‘And for that they will demand blood in return, no doubt…’

He remembered Dorn coming to his chambers, enraged by the slaughters on Cheraut and incensed at what Fulgrim had told him – secrets Curze had told Fulgrim in confidence some days earlier. The fit had come upon Curze as the Phoenician had told him tales of Chemos, pitching him to the floor and wracking his mind with terrifying visions of a nightmare future of death and unremitting darkness.

Moved by Fulgrim’s apparent concern, Curze had confided in his old tutor, telling him of the visions that had plagued him since his earliest days on Nostramo.

A galaxy at war.

Legionaries turning on one another.

Death awaiting him at his father’s hands…

Fulgrim’s pale, aquiline features had remained stoic, but Curze had seen the unease that flickered in his eyes. He had hoped Fulgrim would keep his confession in confidence, but when Dorn had appeared at his door, he knew he was betrayed. In truth he had little memory of what had occurred after Dorn’s storming accusations of insult to the Emperor… The present had faded and the future had seized his mind with agonising visions of a galaxy locked in a cycle of unending war where the alien, the mutant and the rebel arose to feast on the rotting carcass of the Imperium.

This then was the future the Emperor was creating? This was the ultimate destiny of a galaxy where the fear of punishment was not the agent of control. This was the inevitable result of allowing weak men to craft the destiny of mankind and Curze knew that, of all the primarchs, only one had the force of will required to mould the new Imperium from the soft clay of its present form.

‘The time has come to forge our own path, Shang,’ said Curze.

‘Then this is the moment you foresaw?’

‘Yes. My brothers will seize this opportunity to be rid of us.’

‘I believe you are correct,’ agreed Shang. ‘My sources tell me there is talk, and not idle talk, of recalling the Legion to Terra to account for our methods of war.’

‘I knew it. Since they cannot kill me, the cowards choose to strike at me through my Legion. You see, Shang? They have been waiting for this opportunity for decades. They are weak fools who have not the stomach to do what must be done, but I do, oh yes, I do indeed.’

‘Then what is our course, my lord?’ asked Shang.

‘Fulgrim and Dorn may have betrayed me, but we are not without friends amongst the other Legions,’ said Curze. ‘But first we must put our own house in order. Tell me, what news of Nostramo?’

‘It is as we feared, my lord,’ said Shang. ‘The regime of Administrator-regent Balthius has failed. Corruption is rife, criminals govern from the ruined spires of Nostramo Quintus and lawlessness is endemic.’

‘Then I have no time to waste while small-minded fools decide my fate as though I am a lowly menial to be chastised.’

‘What are your orders, my lord?’ asked Shang.

‘Ready our ships, captain,’ said Curze. ‘We return to Nostramo.’

‘But you have been ordered to remain in seclusion, my lord,’ pointed out Shang. ‘Lord Fulgrim’s praetorians and Dorn’s Templars guard your chambers.’

Curze grinned crookedly and said, ‘Leave them to me…’

Curze lifted the last piece of his armour from the shadowed alcove and raised it above his head. He turned towards the door of his chamber and lowered his helmet until the skull-faced visor connected to his gorget with a hiss of pressurisation.

His vision shifted subtly and his perceptions broadened as he blended with the shadows of the dimly lit chamber.

He slowed his breathing and stretched out his senses, the darkness a second home to him after so many years spent in its embrace as a predator on the weak and guilty. He felt a moment’s regret that it had come to this, but he quashed such notions viciously. Doubt, regret and hesitancy were weaknesses others might suffer from, but not Konrad Curze.

His breathing deepened and the tenebrous chamber came alive to him.

Curze felt power in the darkness; the cold intellect of hunters and creatures of the night that killed beneath its cloak. Lethal instincts honed on a thousand battlefields were now heightened to undreamed of levels and would now serve him equally well on this one.

He spread his arms wide and a ripple of psychic force pulsed like the blast wave of an explosion with Curze at its epicentre. The hanging glow strips filling the chamber exploded in quick succession, detonating one after another in showers of pellucid sparks. Broken glass tinkled musically to the steel deck in a glass rain.

Sputtering power cables swayed from the ceiling, hissing and fizzing like angry snakes as electric discharge strobed blue across the room.

Hostile red warning beacons blinked. Cold light eased inside as the door opened and a handful of armoured warriors stood silhouetted.

Curze leapt straight up, gripping the open lattice structure of the nearest column and swinging himself up into the deeper darkness of the chamber before the light could reach him. His legs swung around the column and he climbed higher as the warriors spread out with their halberds extended before them.

He heard them call his name, their voices echoing in the darkness.

A twist of muscle and he was airborne, a glimmering shadow of dead stars and extinction. The warriors below would have the senses of their battle plate to penetrate the darkness, but they paled in comparison to those of the Night Lords primarch. Where others saw only light and dark, Curze saw all the myriad hues and shades that were invisible to those who had not become one with its fuliginous depths.

One of the Phoenix Guard stood directly beneath him, scanning the chamber for its captive occupant, unaware that his doom lurked in the shadows above.

Curze spun around the column, looping lower with each revolution and holding his hand out like an axe blade. The warrior died with his head sliced cleanly from his shoulders, the iron flesh of the primarch smashing through his armoured gorget. No sooner was the blow delivered than Curze was in motion, swooping through the darkness like a shadow.

Cries of alarm echoed as his gaolers realised he was amongst them, stabbing beams of helmet lamps crisscrossing madly as they sought to pinpoint his location. With skill borne of decades spent as a murderous hunter of men, Curze ghosted invisibly between the beams of light.

Another warrior fell with his torso ripped open, blood squirting from torn arteries like ruptured pressure hoses. Gunfire split the darkness, starbursts of muzzle flashes, as the warriors opened fire on their unseen attacker. None came close, for wherever they fired, Curze was already far from harm’s way, spinning through the air like a malignant phantom and twisting between the bolts and wildly slashing blades.

One of Dorn’s Templars backed towards a pool of light and Curze slid through the darkness towards him, moving impossibly silently for an armoured warrior. A sensation unlike anything he had felt previously danced in his blood and Curze savoured it as he understood it for what it was.

Contrary to Guilliman’s rash pronouncement, it seemed Space Marines could know fear…

This fear – such as it was – was something to be treasured. Mortal fear was a rancid, sweaty thing, but this… this was caged lightning in the marrow.

Curze pounced towards the armoured Templar, one of Dorn’s best and bravest.

Veteran or not, he died as any other man did – in blood and agony.

‘Death haunts the darkness,’ shouted Curze. ‘And he knows your names.’

He could hear frantic calls for reinforcements, but the superior systems of his own armour easily jammed them as he took to the air once more and vaulted from shadow to shadow.

‘No one is coming,’ he said. ‘You are going to die alone here.’

Spraying blasts of gunfire followed his pronouncements as the warriors sought to pinpoint his location in the darkness.

But Curze owned the darkness and no matter what light or senses these warriors depended upon, they were not nearly enough to stop him from killing them. He could see the survivors – a Templar and two of the Phoenix Guard – backing towards the door. They now realised this was a fight they could not win, but had made the mistake of thinking that a fight with Konrad Curze was one you could walk away from. Laughing with the joy of the hunt, a pleasure he had forgotten without worthy prey to test him, he soared through the air and dropped into their midst like an assassin.

His fist punched through the armour of the first Phoenix Guard, and Curze wrenched his victim’s spinal column out. Leaving the bloody curve of crushed bone protruding from the gaping wound, he snatched the dead warrior’s halberd and dropped to the floor as the other warriors turned towards the agonised scream.

Before they could react, Curze swept the halberd out in a wide, circular arc, the blade twice the width of a handspan above the deck. The energised edge cut through battle plate, meat and bone with a searing, electric tang.

Both warriors fell to the deck, grunting in pain as they collapsed onto the bloody stumps of their legs. Curze hurled his stolen halberd aside and blocked a return strike from the fallen Phoenix Guard.

He snapped his enemy’s weapon in two and jammed the splintered ends through his chest.

The Templar roared in anger, managing to get off a shot before Curze was upon him. He ripped the weapon from his victim’s grip and planted one knee on his chest, the other on his left arm.

The pinned warrior reached up with his free arm to strike at him.

Curze caught the blow and ripped the arm from its socket.

Emergency lights began to kick in with a rising hum and thump of relays, and the chamber was suddenly illuminated with a harsh, white glow that dispelled the shadows and banished the darkness.

Where before there had been darkness, now there was only light.

And what had once been a place of imprisonment was now an abattoir.

Curling arcs of blood spray coated the walls and floor, and shattered, headless, limbless bodies lay strewn about like spilled surgical waste.

Curze smiled at the scene of slaughter and the persona he had worn like a disguise since he had first knelt before his father fell away like a discarded mask.

Now he was no longer Konrad Curze.

Now he was the Night Haunter.

Night Haunter turned over the last card and his jawline tightened as the familiar pattern emerged once more. The strategium of his flagship was kept dark, the faint blue light of consoles and hololithic displays islands of light in the darkness. The Primarch of the Night Lords paid no attention to his surroundings, ignoring the pregnant pressure of anticipation that bristled from every member of his bridge crew.

A deck of worn cards sat on the softly glowing lectern before him, their edges scuffed and curled from decades of shuffling and dealing. Little more than a parlour game played by the indolent rich of Nostramo Quintus, he had since discovered that variations of these cards had been employed in the hives of Merica and by the tribes of the Franc as a means of divination in the time before Old Night had descended.

The cards apparently corresponded to the stratification of society at the time, with the various suits representing warriors, priests, merchants and workers.

Ancient belief held that the future could be read in the patterns of cards known as the Lesser Arcanoi, but such traditions were outmoded concepts in this colourless, secular galaxy…

Except that no matter how thoroughly he shuffled the cards and dealt them on the polished glass of the lectern, the pattern was always the same.

The Moon, the Martyr and the Monster lay in a triangular pattern. The King lay reversed at the feet of the Emperor on one side of the pattern, and on the other, also reversed, was the Dove – a card academics postulated was a symbol of hope. The card he had just dealt sat at the top of the pattern, a card that had changed little over the centuries and the meaning of which, though often misinterpreted, was unmistakable.

Death.

He heard footsteps and looked up to see Captain Shang approaching, clad in his battle plate and wrapped in his ceremonial black cape of gleaming patagium. His helmet’s flaring wings framed a death mask of an alien skull, its tusked lower jaw thrust beyond his throat.

Behind his equerry, Night Haunter could see the gently rotating orb of Nostramo displayed on the viewscreen. Thick clouds of pollutants ringed the grey planet, shot through with emphysemic yellows and leprous browns. The radiation-blasted moon of Tenebor was just visible as a sickly orb emerging from the stained-lung corona of Nostramo’s dying sun.

‘What it is, captain?’ asked Night Haunter.

‘Word from the Choir chambers, my lord.’

Night Haunter chuckled mirthlessly. ‘My brothers?’

‘It would appear so, my lord,’ said Shang. ‘The astropaths sense a psychic bow wave that appears to indicate a great many vessels approaching through the Empyrean.’

‘Dorn,’ said Night Haunter, returning his attention to the cards before him.

‘Undoubtedly. What are your orders, my lord?’

Looking once again at the world of his youth, Night Haunter felt the ever-present anger seething under his skin like hot magma beneath the fragile crust of a dying planet.

‘Nostramo was once the very model of a pacified planet, Shang,’ said Night Haunter. ‘Its populace was kept compliant through fear of the harsh punishment I would mete out to any who broke my laws. Every citizen knew his place and to break the law was death.’

‘I remember, my lord.’

‘And now we return to this…’ said Night Haunter, sweeping the cards from the lectern to reveal a slowly scrolling list of text. ‘A murder every eleven seconds, a rape every nine seconds, violent crimes increasing exponentially every month, suicide rates doubling every year. Within a decade, there will be nothing left of the ordered world I left behind.’

‘Without fear of reprisal, humanity reverts to its basest instincts, my lord.’

Night Haunter nodded. ‘This is it, Shang, the ultimate proof that the Emperor’s belief in the goodness of mankind is folly of the worst kind.’

Shang hesitated before speaking again. ‘Then you intend to go through with the attack?’

‘Of course,’ said Night Haunter, staring at the doomed planet. ‘Only the most extreme measures will serve as an example of our strength of will. Nostramo is dead to us now. We have come for you all…’

The primarch marched along the central walkway of the strategium to stand beneath the image of Nostramo. The moon was emerging more fully from behind the planet and reflected light glinted on the hulls of the Night Lords’ fleet – a half century of vessels arrayed in battle formation above the diseased, corrupt boil that was the labyrinthine, crime-ridden spires of Nostramo Quintus.

Far below was a great wound in the surface, a plunging chasm his fiery arrival had smashed in the planet’s crust. Since he had emerged from its hellish depths he had known pain and suffering the likes of which others could not even guess.

He had borne the pain of his tortured growth and lived with the awful self knowledge of his own death. And his brothers wondered why he appeared moribund…

He heard a commotion beside him and even before the word went out, Night Haunter could feel the tearing pressure of scores of ships emerging from the gates of the Empyrean with senses beyond the five possessed by his minions.

‘Too late, my brothers…’ he whispered. ‘I will be gone before you can stop me.’

Night Haunter took one last look at Nostramo and said, ‘All ships. Open fire.’

Incandescent spears of blinding white light leapt from the barrels of uncounted batteries, stabbing down at the world below. Converging and multiplying their energies, the power of a thousand caged stars coalesced into a pillar of light thicker than the widest spire of Nostramo Quintus.

The great beam dispelled the darkness that shrouded Nostramo, the skies bathed in light and fire blooming into life as the awful heat of the Night Lords bombardment ignited the air for kilometres in all directions.

The blinding lance of pure energy penetrated the impermeable adamantium crust of Nostramo through the ancient fault line torn by the primarch’s arrival.

Unimaginable energies tore downwards through the planet’s layers until they reached the core in a cataclysmic explosion the likes of which the galaxy had rarely seen.

Night Haunter watched the death of Nostramo with calm detachment, feeling the enormity of the action he had just taken settle upon him like a dark shroud. Strangely, it was not the burden he had expected. As he watched tectonic plates split apart and the molten heart of the planet ooze up to swallow the landscape and burn away the atmosphere, the only sensation of which he was conscious was intense relief.

The past was dead and he had shown that the creed he lived by was more than just empty words. The shockwave of this terrifying act would reverberate around the Imperium and come to the attention of those who, like him, understood the sacrifices needed to preserve the galaxy for humanity.

Nostramo burned and Night Haunter said, ‘I take this burden of this evil upon myself and I will not fear it, for I am fear incarnate…’

What are you afraid of? What are you really afraid of?

There was once a fine palace, and it sat like a crown of light upon the top of the world. This was in the latter days, when mankind left his birth rock for the second time, to chase a destiny denied him in a previous epoch.

The artisan masters of the many rival Masonic guilds had raised the palace up, block by gilded block, to be a statement of unity, regal and unequivocal. After a dreary, lightless Age of Strife, the warring tribes and creeds of Terra had been alloyed under one rule, and the palace was intended to symbolise that staggering achievement. All the petty dynasts and ethnarchs, all the clannations and gene-septs, all the despots and pan-continental tyrants, had been quelled or crushed, overthrown or annexed. Some, the smartest and most prescient, had offered terms and been embraced to the bosom of the new rule. Better fealty than the wrath of the warriors in thunder armour.

Better submission than the enmity of the world’s new master.

It was said that once you had seen him, or heard him speak, you were never in doubt again. He was the one, and had always been the one. He had been the Emperor long before there was any such office to take. No one knew his birth name, because he had always, naturally, been the Emperor.

Even the artisan masters of the Masonic guilds, famous for their sanctimonious craft wars and vainglorious quarrels, shut up and, in concert, built the palace for him.

It was monumental. It was not so much an edifice as a handcrafted landmass. The artisan masters built it upon Terra’s greatest mountain range, and transformed the monstrous peaks into its bulwarks. It towered above a world laid to waste by centuries of war and perdition, and though that world was being rebuilt, with wondrous cities and architectural marvels blooming in the new age of Unity, nothing could match its magnificence.

For it was beautiful, a euphoric vision of gold and silver. It was said that, when they had finished their task, the artisan masters of the Masonic guilds set down their tools and wept.

By the time it was complete, it was the largest single man-made structure in known space. Its footings sank deep into the planet’s mantle, its towers probed the airless limits of the atmosphere. It owned the words ‘the palace’ wholly, without any need for qualification, as if no other palaces existed.

He had blemished that glory. He had raised dark curtain walls around the golden halls, and cased the soaring towers in skins of armour ten metres thick. He had stripped away the jewelled facades and the crystelephantine ornamentation, the delicate minarets and the burnished cupolas, and in their places he had implanted uncountable turrets and ordnance emplacements. He had dug mighty earthworks out of the surrounding lowlands, and fortified them with a million batteries. He had yoked platforms into synchronous orbits to guard from above, their weapon banks armed and trained, day and night. He had put his men upon the walls, armoured in gold and set for the coming war.

His name was Dorn, and he was not proud of his work.

Vadok Singh, the warmason, had a habit of stroking architectural plans as he laid them out, as if they were a beloved pet.

‘Necessity,’ he said, his favourite word, stroking out the revised schemata of the Dhawalagiri elevation.

‘It’s ugly,’ said Dorn. He stood away from the table, leaning against one of the planning chamber’s thick columns, his arms folded across his broad chest.

‘Ugly is what they will do if they find the Annapurna Gate weak and flimsy,’ Singh replied. He stood back and lit his boc pipe from a taper, allowing his flock of slaves to finish laying out the designs and adjusting the brass armature of the viewing lenses that would magnify details and project them onto the chamber wall for closer examination.

Dorn shrugged. ‘It’s still ugly. The orbis and lazulite work encrusting that gate took Menzo of Travert thirty years to complete. Pilgrims flock here simply to see it. They say it surpasses even the Eternity Gate in its aesthetic.’

‘Aesthetic, now?’ Singh smiled. He began to pace, trailing blue smoke from the bowl of his long-stemmed pipe. His slaves followed him up and down the chamber, like a timorous litter of young following their mother. Singh was a tall man, taller than the primarch, but skeletally thin. His guild gene-bred their bloodline to favour height for purposes of surveying and overseeing. ‘I do so love our conversations, Rogal. They are quite contrary. You, the warrior, and me, the craftsman, and you lecture me on aesthetics.’

‘I’m not lecturing,’ Dorn replied. He was aware of Sigismund and Archamus in the corner of the great room, stiffening at the warmason’s use of his forename. Dorn would hear about ‘proper respect and protocol’ again later.

‘Of course you’re not,’ said Singh, ‘but it is a necessity. How many Legions does the Upstart have with him now?’

Dorn heard Sigismund rise to his feet. He turned and stared at the first captain of the Imperial Fists. Sigismund glowered back for a second, then left the chamber.

Dorn glanced back at the warmason. ‘Too many,’ he said.

Singh held out a long, spindly arm in the direction of the schemata. ‘So?’

‘Begin work tomorrow at sunrise. Dismantle the gate with care, and store the dismantled elements in the vaults. We will put the work back when this is done.’

Singh nodded.

We will put everything back, thought Dorn. When this is done, we will put everything back the way it was.

A katabatic wind was coming in off the lower bulwarks that night. The palace was so immense, the precipice walls bred their own microclimate. Greasy stars swam in the heat ripple of the palace’s new reactors. The void shields were being tested again.

Not a palace. Not the palace anymore, a fortress.

Some of those sullen stars were orbital platforms, catching the last backscatter of the sunlight as Terra turned. Dorn put on a fur-edged robe that had been in his possession since his adolescence on Inwit, and went out to walk the parapets of the Dhawalagiri Prospect, to dwell upon its beauty one last time. It was one of the last sections of the palace that remained untouched. Adamantium armour plates, drab prestressed rockcrete and auto-turrets had yet to blight its ethereal lines.

Soon, though. From the wall, Dorn could see the half a million campfires of the Masonic host, the labour army that would invade the prospect come sunrise with their mallets and chisels and cranes.

The robe had been his grandfather’s, though Dorn had long since understood that no ties of blood linked him to the Inwit ice-caste that had raised him. He had been created from another genetic line, that most singular line, in a sterile vault deep beneath him in the buried core of the palace.

Not a palace. Not the palace anymore, a fortress.

Dorn had been built to rule, built to assist in his father’s tireless ambitions, built to make the hard decisions. He had been made as a primarch, one of only twenty in the galaxy, engineered by the master architect of mankind, the archmason of genetic code.

The Imperium needs many things, but foremost it needs the ability to protect itself, to attack when necessary. That’s why I gave it twenty strong teeth in its mouth.

Attacking was a remarkably easy thing to do. Dorn’s physical prowess humbled all but twenty human beings in creation, and those twenty were his father and his nineteen brothers. In Dorn’s opinion, the real art was knowing when not to attack. His grandfather, the old Inwit sire, patriarch of the ice-hive clan, had taught him that.

Dorn had been the seventh lost son to be reclaimed. By the time his father’s forces found him, he had become a system warlord in his own right, ruling the Inwit Cluster as the head of the House of Dorn. His grandfather had been dead forty winters, but still the warlord had slept with the fur-edged robe across his body at night. His people had called him ‘emperor’ until the true meaning of that title had been demonstrated by a thousand warships in the Inwit sky. Dorn had gone out to meet his father aboard Phalanx, one ship against thousands, but what a ship: a fortress. His father had been impressed. Dorn had always excelled in the construction of fortresses.

That was why Dorn had returned to Terra with his gene-sire. Out of love, out of devotion, out of obedience, yes, but most of all, out of necessity, damn Singh. The stars had turned over, and Chaos had spilled out from under them. The brightest of all had fallen and the unthinkable, the heretical, had become fact.

The Imperium was attacking itself. The Warmaster, for reasons Dorn was quite at a loss to fathom, had turned upon their father, and was committing his forces to all-out war. That war would come to Terra. There was no question. It would come. Terra needed to be ready. The palace needed to be ready. His father had asked him, as a personal boon, to return to Terra and fortify it for war.

No better man for the task. No better master of defences. Dorn and his Fists, appointed the Emperor’s praetorians, could fend off any attack.

Below him, the halls of Terra were silent, and the walls deep. The only sound was the distant, eternal hum of the Astronomican. The Palace Dorn had armoured and defaced sat like a dark crown on the top of the world.

Rogal Dorn had built many of the finest strongholds in creation: the city fortresses on Zavamunda, the pylon spire of Gallant, the donjons along the Ruthan Marches. Impregnable bastions all, palaces for governor lords to rule from. None of them had been so essential as this fortification. None of them had been as painful to accomplish. It had been like blotting out the light or draining a sea. The bright glory of his father’s triumph, the enduring monument to Unity, had been entombed inside a crude shell of utilitarian defence.

All because of Horus, because of the brightest bastard son, the bringer of new strife.

Dorn heard stone splinter. He looked down. He had punched his fist, his Imperial fist, through a block of stone in the parapet. He had barely registered the impact. The block was pulverised.

‘My lord, is everything all right?’

Archamus had shadowed him from the planning chamber. Never so volatile as Sigismund, Archamus was the master of Dorn’s huscarl retinue.

There was a worried look on Archamus’s face.

‘Just venting my emotions,’ Dorn said.

Archamus regarded the splintered block. ‘Making work for Singh’s artisans, then?’

‘Something like that.’

Archamus nodded. He hesitated, and looked out over the high walls towards the distant earthworks of the Mahabarat. ‘You have wrought a wonder, you know.’

‘I have ruined one.’

‘I know you hate it, but it had to be so. And no one could have done it better.’

Dorn sighed. ‘You’re kind, old friend, but my heart is lead. This should never have been necessary. I search the limits of my imagination, and still I can conceive of nothing that begins to explain this war. Pride and ambition, insult, jealousy? They are not enough, not nearly enough, not for a primarch. They are too petty and mortal to drive a primarch to such extremity. They might provoke an argument, a feud at the worst. They would not split the galaxy in half.’

Dorn looked up at the night sky. ‘And yet, against all reason, he comes.’

‘Guilliman will stop him.’

‘Roboute is far away.’

‘Russ, then. The Lion. The Khan.’

Dorn shook his head. ‘I don’t think they’ll stop him either. I think he’ll roll on until he reaches us.’

‘Then we’ll stop him,’ said Archamus. ‘Won’t we, sir?’

‘Of course we will. I just wish–’

‘What?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You wish what, sir?’ Archamus asked.

‘Nothing.’

The wind suddenly pulled at Dorn’s fur-edged robe. Above them, the shields went out and then test fired again.

‘Can I ask you a question, sir?’ asked Archamus.

‘Of course.’

‘Who are you really afraid of?’

Consider the question, Rogal Dorn. The first axiom of defence is to understand what you defend against. What are you afraid of? Who are you afraid of?

Dorn paced the halls of the Kath Mandau Precinct where the organs of the Adeptus Terra did their work. The Precinct, an entire city contained within the terraced compounds of the inner palace, never slept. Robed clerks and burnished servitors bustled along the broad concourses. Ministers and ambassadors conducted business beneath the kilometre-high roof of the Hegemon. The great mechanism of the Imperium whirred about him, its relentless function like a ticking timepiece. This was what Unity had brought, this and the near measureless expanse of worlds and dominions that it guided and administered.

For two hundred years, the Emperor and his primarchs had fought to create the Imperium. They had waged the Great Crusade from star to star, to forge the Imperium of Man, an epic undertaking they had all made without hesitation, because they believed, with utter conviction, in the bright destiny it would shape for their species. They had all believed. All of them.

What was he afraid of? Who was he afraid of? Angron? Not him. Dorn would split his head without compunction if they came face to face. Lorgar? Magnus? There had always been a foetid whiff of sorcery about those two, but Dorn felt nothing towards them he could describe as fear. Fulgrim? No. The Phoenician was a singular foe, but not an object of terror. Perturabo? Well now, their rivalry was old, the spiteful scrapping of two brothers who fought for a father’s attention.

Dorn smiled despite his mood. His years of exchanged insults with Perturabo seemed almost comical compared to this. They were too much alike, too jealous of one another’s oh-so-similar abilities. Dorn knew it was a weakness for him to have risen to the Iron Warrior’s baiting. But competition had always been a motivating force amongst the primarch brothers. It had been encouraged as a factor to drive them on to greater and yet greater accomplishments.

No, he was not afraid of Perturabo.

Horus Lupercal, then?

Dorn’s aimless wanderings had taken him to the Investiary. In that broad space, an amphitheatre open to the night sky, statues of the twenty stood on ouslite plinths in a silent ring.

There was no one around. Even the Custodian Guard was absent. Lumen orbs glowed on black iron poles. The Investiary was two kilometres in diameter. Under the glittering stars, it felt like an arena, where twenty warriors had gathered to make their combat.

The second and eleventh plinths had been vacant for a long time. No one ever spoke of those two absent brothers. Their separate tragedies had seemed like aberrations. Had they, in fact, been warnings that no one had heeded?

Sigismund had urged that the effigies of the traitors also be removed from the Investiary. He had offered to do the work himself. This, Dorn recalled, had made the Emperor laugh.

For the time being, the traitors had been shrouded. Their towering, draped forms seemed like phantoms in the blue darkness.

Horus, then? Was it Horus?

Perhaps. Dorn knew that Horus was the greatest of them, which made him the gravest foe. Could any one of them hope to best Lupercal on the field of war?

Martial prowess was hardly the point. Dorn had never feared an adversary in his life because of how strong he was or how hard he fought. Combat was only ever a test.

What mattered, what engendered fear, was why an adversary fought. What made him fight.

Oh, now we have it. Now the truth dawns. He felt the hairs on his skin rise. I’m not afraid of Horus. I’m afraid of finding out why he has turned against us. I cannot conceive of any justification for this schism, but Horus must have his reasons. I am afraid that when I know them, when they are explained to my baffled mind, I might… agree.

‘Would you tear them all down?’

Dorn turned at the sound of the voice. For a moment, it had sounded like the soft growl of his father.

But it was just a man, a cloaked and cowled man scarcely half Dorn’s height. His robes were those of a simple palace administrator.

‘What did you say?’ asked Dorn.

The man walked out into the circle of the Investiary to face Dorn. He greeted him with the old salute of Unity rather than the sign of the aquila. ‘You were staring at the statues of your kin,’ he observed. ‘I asked… would you tear them all down?’

‘The statues or my kin, Sigillite?’ Dorn replied.

‘Both. Either.’

‘The statues, perhaps. I believe Horus is doing a fine job with the men themselves.’

Malcador smiled and looked up at Dorn. Like Dorn’s, his hair was white. Unlike Dorn’s, it was long like a mane. Malcador was an exceptional being. He had been with the Emperor from the inception of the Unification Wars, serving as aide, confidant and advisor. He had risen to become the master of the Council of Terra. The Emperor and the primarchs were genetically advantaged post-humans, but Malcador was just a man, and that was what made him exceptional. He stood on a par with the post-human masters of the Imperium, and he was just a man.

‘Will you walk with me, Rogal Dorn?’

‘Are there not matters of state that require your attention, even at this hour, sir? The Council will bemoan your absence from the debating table.’

‘The Council can manage for a while without me,’ Malcador replied. ‘I like to take the air at this time of night. The Imperium never rests, but at night, up here in the thin air of the old Himalazia, I find there is at least an illusion of rest, a time to think and free the mind. I walk. I close my eyes. The stars do not go out because I am not looking at them.’

‘Not yet,’ said Dorn.

Malcador laughed. ‘No, not yet.’

They said little at first. They left the Investiary and walked along the beige stones of the Precinct’s highest terraces, between the weeping fountains. They walked as far as Lion’s Gate, onto the platforms that overlooked the docking rings and landing fields of the Brahmaputra Plateau. The Gate had once been a thing of magnificence, two gilded beasts rising up to lock claws in a feral dispute. Dorn’s order of works had replaced them with giant grey donjons stippled with casemates and macro-gun ports. A curtain wall of bleak rockcrete encircled the gate, its edge fletched with void field vanes like the spines of some prehistoric reptile.

They stood and considered it for a long time.

‘I am not a subtle man,’ Malcador said, at length.

Dorn raised his eyebrows.

‘Oh, all right,’ said Malcador, ‘perhaps I am. Guile comes easily to a politician. I know I am considered cunning.’

‘An old word, with no more meaning than “wise”,’ Dorn replied.

‘Indeed. I will accept that as a compliment. All I meant to say was, I will not attempt to be subtle now.’

‘No?’

‘The Emperor has expressed his concerns.’

‘Meaning?’ Dorn asked.

Malcador answered with a slight sigh. ‘He understands you are filled with misgivings.’

‘Only natural, I would think, given the circumstances,’ said Dorn.

The Sigillite nodded. ‘He trusts you to undertake the defence. He counts on you. Terra must not fall, no matter what Horus brings. This palace must not fall. If it is to end here, then it must end in our triumph. But he knows, and I know, and you know, that any defence is only as strong as its weakest part: faith, belief, trust.’

‘What are you telling me?’

‘If there is doubt in your heart, then that is our weakness.’

Dorn looked away. ‘My heart is sad because of what I have been made to do to this place. That’s all it is.’

‘Is it? I don’t think so. What are you really afraid of?’

Malcador raised his hand and the lights in his chambers came on. Dorn looked around. He had never entered the Sigillite’s private apartments before. Ancient images hung on the walls: flaking, fragile things of wood, canvas and decomposing pigments, preserved in thin, blue fields of stasis; the smoke-pale portrait of a woman with the most curious smile; garish yellow flowers rendered in thick paint; the unflinching, rheumy gaze of an old fleshy man, cast in shadow, tobacco brown.

Along another wall hung old tattered banners showing the thunderbolt and lightning strike sigil of the Pre-Unity armies. Suits of armour – perfect, glinting thunder armour – were mounted in shimmering suspension zones.

Malcador offered Dorn wine, which he refused, and a seat, which he accepted.

‘I have made a certain peace with myself,’ Dorn said. ‘I understand what I am afraid of.’

Malcador nodded. He had pulled back his cowl and the light shone on his long white hair. He sipped from his glass. ‘Enlighten me.’

‘I do not fear anyone. Not Horus, not Fulgrim, none of them. I fear the cause. I fear the root of their enmity.’

‘You fear what you don’t understand.’

‘Exactly. I am at a loss to know what drives the Warmaster and his cohorts. It is an alien thing to me, quite defying translation. A strong defence relies on knowing what you are defending against. I can raise all the bulwarks and curtain walls and cannon-bastions I like, and I still won’t know what it is I’m fighting.’

‘Perceptive,’ said Malcador, ‘and true of us all. I fancy even the Emperor doesn’t fully understand what it is that drives Horus against us so furiously. Do you know what I think?’

‘Tell me.’

Malcador shrugged. ‘I believe it is better that we don’t know. To understand it would be to understand insanity. Horus is quite mad. Chaos is inside him.’

‘You say that as if Chaos is a… thing.’

‘It is. Does that surprise you? You’ve known the warp and seen its corrupting touch, that’s Chaos. It has touched humanity now, twisted our brightest and best. All we can do is remain true to ourselves and fend it off, deny it. Trying to understand it is a fool’s errand. It would claim us too.’

‘I see.’

‘Don’t see, Rogal Dorn, and you will live longer. All you can do is acknowledge your fear. That’s all any of us can do. Recognise it for what it is: your pure, human sanity rocked by the sight of the warp’s infecting, suffocating madness.’

‘Is this what the Emperor believes?’ asked Dorn.

‘It’s what he knows. It’s what he knows he doesn’t know. Sometimes, my friend, there is salvation in ignorance.’

Dorn sat still for a while. Malcador watched him, occasionally sipping from his glass.

‘Well, I thank you for your time, sir,’ said Dorn eventually. ‘Your candour too. I should–’

‘There is one other thing,’ said Malcador, setting his glass down and rising to his feet. ‘Something I want to show you.’

Malcador crossed the chamber, and took something from a drawer in an old bureau. He walked back to Dorn, and spread that something out on the low table between them.

Dorn opened his mouth but no sound issued. Fear gripped him.

‘You recognise these, of course.’

Old cards, worn and fraying, discoloured and liver-spotted with time. One by one, Malcador laid them out.

‘The Lesser Arcanoi, just gaming trinkets really, but used widely before the coming of Old Night for divination. This deck was made on Nostramo Quintus.’

‘He used them,’ Dorn breathed.

‘Yes, he did. He relied on them. He believed in cartomancy. He dealt his fate out, night after haunted night, and watched how the cards fell.’

‘Oh, Holy Terra…’

‘Are you all right, sir?’ Malcador asked, looking up. ‘You are quite pale.’

Dorn nodded. ‘Curze.’

‘Yes, Curze. Had you forgotten him, or simply blocked him out? You have bickered and sparred with many of your brothers over the years, but only Konrad Curze ever hurt you.’

‘Yes.’

‘He nearly killed you.’

‘Yes.’

‘On Cheraut, long ago,’

‘I remember it well enough!’

Malcador looked up at Dorn. The primarch had risen to his feet. ‘Then sit back down and tell me, because I wasn’t there.’

Dorn sat. ‘This is so long ago or like another life. We had brought the Cheraut system to compliance. It was hard fought. The Emperor’s Children, the Night Lords and my Fists, we affected compliance. But Curze didn’t know when to stop. He never knew when to stop.’

‘And you rebuked him?’

‘He was an animal. Yes, I rebuked him. Then Fulgrim told me.’

‘Told you what?’

Dorn closed his eyes. ‘The Phoenician told me what Curze had told him: the fits, the seizures that had plagued Curze since his childhood on Nostramo, the visions. Curze said he had seen the galaxy in flames, the Emperor’s legacy overthrown, legionaries turning on legionaries. It was all lies, an insult to our creed!’

‘You confronted Curze?’

‘And he attacked me. He would have killed me, I think. He is insane. That’s why we drove him out, sick of his bloodletting. That’s why he burned his home world and took his Night Lords off into the darkest parts of the stars.’

Malcador nodded, and continued to deal the cards. ‘Rogal, he is what you are truly afraid of, because he is fear incarnate. No other primarch uses terror as a weapon like Curze does. You are not afraid of Horus and his sallow heretics. You are afraid of the fear that sides with him, the night terror that advances alongside the traitors.’

Dorn sat back and breathed out. ‘He has haunted me, I confess. All this time, he has haunted me.’

‘Because he was right. His visions were true. He saw this Heresy coming in his visions. That is the truth you fear. You wish you had listened.’

Dorn looked down at the cards laid out on the table before him. ‘Do you believe in this divination, Sigillite?’

‘Let’s see,’ said Malcador, turning the cards over one by one: the Moon, the Martyr and the Monster, the Dark King askew across the Emperor.

One other card, the Lightning Tower.

Dorn groaned. ‘A bastion, blown out by lightning. A palace brought to ruin by fire. I’ve seen enough.’

‘The card has many meanings,’ said Malcador. ‘Like the Death card, it is not as obvious as it seems. In the hives of Nord Merica, it symbolised a change in fortune, an overturning of fate. To the tribes of Franc and Tali, it signified knowledge or achievement obtained through sacrifice. A flash of inspiration, if you will, one that tumbles the world you know down, but leaves you with a greater gift.’

‘The Dark King lies across the Emperor,’ said Dorn, pointing.

Malcador sniffed. ‘It’s not exactly a science, my friend.’

They had blown their way through the massive earthwork defences at Haldwani and Xigaze. The sky at the top of the world was on fire. Despite the bombardments of the orbital platforms and the constant sorties of the Stormbirds and the Hawkwings, the Traitor Legions advanced, up through the Brahmaputra, along the delta of the Karnali. Continental firestoms raged across Gangetic Plain.

As they entered the rampart outworks of the palace, the streaming, screaming multitudes and the striding war machines were greeted by monsoons of firepower. Every emplacement along the Dhawalagiri Prospect committed its weapons. Las reached out in neon slashes, annihilating everything it touched. Shells fell like sleet. Titans exploded, caught fire, collapsed on their faces and crushed the warriors swarming around their heels. Still they came. Lancing beams struck the armour-reinforced walls like lightning, like lighting smiting a tower.

The walls fell. They collapsed like slumping glaciers. Gold-cased bodies spilled out, tumbling down in the deluge.

The palace began to burn. Primus Gate fell; Lion’s Gate, subjected to attack from the north; Annapurna Gate. At the Ultimate Gate, the Traitors finally sliced into the palace, slaughtering everyone they found inside. Around every broken gate, the corpses of Titans piled up in vast, jumbled heaps where they had fallen over each other in their desire to break in. The heretic host clambered across their carcasses, pouring into the palace, yelling out the name of their–

‘End simulation,’ said Dorn.

He gazed down at the hololithic table. At his command, the forces of the enemy withdrew, unit by unit, and the palace rebuilt itself. The smoke cleared.

‘Reset parameters to Horus, Perturabo, Angron and Curze.’

‘Opposition?’ the table queried.

‘Imperial Fists, Blood Angels, White Scars. Resume and replay scenario.’

The map flickered. Armies advanced. The palace began to burn again.

‘Play it out, simulation after simulation, if you like,’ said the voice behind him. ‘Simulations are just simulations. I know you won’t fail me when the time comes.’

Dorn turned. ‘I would never knowingly fail you, Father,’ he said.

‘Then don’t be afraid. Don’t let fear get in your way.’

What are you afraid of? What are you really afraid of?

The Lightning Tower, thought Rogal Dorn. I understand its meaning: achievement obtained through sacrifice. I’m just afraid of what that sacrifice might be.

Two microns to the left. Now four down. There… Adept Third Class Pallas Ravachol adjusted the fine callipers that slid from his fingertips, watching with smug satisfaction as the hardwired doctrina wafer slid smoothly through the cerebral cortex of the servitor’s brain (or at least what the lobotomisation process had left of its brain) and into the medulla oblongata.

‘No one knows servitors like me,’ he said as fibrous tendrils wormed their way from the wafer and into the grey matter of the brain. With the new doctrina wafer meshing nicely, he rotated the servitor’s gleaming alloy cranial cap back and lifted a portable cutter to snap the bolts into place that protected the servitor’s brain from harm. He placed the damaged wafer into the pouch that hung from his tool belt, careful to ensure he didn’t mix it up it with the functioning ones. He shuddered as he imagined the consequences of placing a damaged wafer in the brain of a battle robot or implanting a combat sequence into the mind of a loader servitor.

‘There you go,’ he said as he pushed the last bolt into place and the servitor stood from the surgical recliner, its grey flesh pallid and unhealthy. Half human, half machine, the servitor’s arms had been replaced with pneumatic lifters and what little of its head remained had been augmented by the addition of visual mass readers. ‘Now be off with you. Go back and rejoin Adept Zeth’s loading crews. The 63rd Expedition needs her weapons and shells if the Warmaster is to pacify Isstvan.’

Of course, the servitor didn’t answer, simply turning on the spot and marching from the chamber, in which half a dozen more damaged servitors awaited Ravachol’s ministrations or the removal of any mechanical parts worthy of reclamation from the flesh that housed them.

Such work was beneath an adept of Ravachol’s skill, but he knew he had only himself to blame for his current situation, and in any case, such work was what had brought him to the attention of his new master, High Adept Lukas Chrom of the Martian forges.

Having seen that the servitors coming back from Ravachol’s workshops were working faster, more efficiently and with greater precision, Chrom had inquired after him. Within the week, he had found himself packing his meagre possessions and taking his leave from his former master, Adept Urtzi Malevolus, and making his way towards the Mondus Gamma facility of Mars for immediate reassignment.

Most of the Martian adepts cared little for cranial engineering where servitors were concerned, but Ravachol enjoyed such work. After all, only by knowing the mechanics of a human brain inside out could a man hope to understand the mechanics of a robot brain.

Such ruminations inevitably led his guilty thoughts to the Kaban Project itself…

He pushed such thoughts aside and tried to concentrate on the work before him, a Praetorian battle servitor whose weapon had malfunctioned and exploded on a test range. The weapon was beyond repair, but the augmetics grafted to its chest and the targeting mechanisms that formed the bulk of its skull were by no means lost.

As he stared at the scorched metal of the servitor’s skull, he scratched idly at his own skin with the gently waving mechadendrites of his hand. Unusually for an adept of Mars, Ravachol was largely composed of flesh and blood, with the exception of his left hand, which had been replaced with a bionic one on his sixteenth year.

His thoughts kept returning to the Kaban machine, and he guiltily turned from the damaged Praetorian to make his way from the workshop and into the steel corridors of the forge temple. He knew he’d have to work another double shift to get the servitors online again, but decided it would be worth it to spend some more time in the presence of the Kaban machine.

Ravachol knew that he had a natural affinity with robots and their programming, but whoever had authored the code on the doctrina wafers that comprised the Kaban machine’s systems was an order of magnitude beyond him. He doubted it was Adept Chrom, who, though brilliant in other regards, appeared to have little or no interest in the field of integrated battle wetware.

The corridors of the forge temple were dimly lit, the lumen globes floating above him kept at a level that blurred the passage of time so that no matter where you were or what time of day your body told you it was, you could have no external reference. But as an adept rose through the ranks of the Mechanicum, such concerns as day and night became largely irrelevant.

Hissing spigots and thick bundles of pipes and cables threaded the corridors, each one filled with bustle as servitors and messenger robots on wheels, tracks and spindly legs moved to and fro. He nodded to robed adepts who passed him, ignoring their looks of pity or revulsion at the flesh of his face and hand. Some of these adepts had lived for centuries, their lives extended by cybernetics grafted to their bodies in service of the Blessed Omnissiah – the Machine-God of the Martian Priesthood. As he passed each adept, he noted how they had been blessed and vowed that one day he too would be similarly favoured by the Machine-God, despite the Emperor’s avowed distaste for such things.

He passed the Temple of the Frictionless Piston, where Adept Herysto developed technologies plundered from the Yndonesic Bloc a hundred years ago, when Mars had been at war with Terra.

Droning, mechanical prayers poured from the Shrine of Velrersk, where row upon row of red-robed adepts knelt bowing in perfect unison before the burnished chrome statue of the long dead discoverer of the Ceramite Press STC.

Ravachol nodded his head respectfully in the direction of the temple before heading deeper into an altogether more secure area of the forge temple. Silver-skinned skitarii in red cloaks stood sentinel over temples where more secretive work was undertaken, their armour gleaming and bonded to their flesh with bionic enhancements that boosted their strength and endurance.

‘I’m going to do some work on the Kaban machine,’ he said as he stopped before a monstrous steel door guarded by a score of Skitarii soldiers and a pair of heavy weapon emplacements. At first Ravachol had been amazed at the sheer number of warriors protecting this portion of the temple, but now that he knew what lay within, he understood why so many stood sentinel.

‘Genomech key,’ said the soldier, holding out his left hand.

‘Yes, yes,’ said Ravachol, taking the soldier’s hand. ‘It’s not like you haven’t seen me almost every day for the last six months or anything.’

The skitarii said nothing, but they almost never did, and Ravachol wondered if the man had had his sense of humour removed as well as his fear. He felt a mild discomfort as the mechadendrites of the soldier’s hand slid inside his own and up into the marrow of his arm. Amber light flickered behind the skitarii’s eyes as the questing tendrils read the machine codes of Ravachol’s arm and sampled his genetic material.

‘Identity confirmed,’ said the soldier and waved his arm at the warriors behind him. A red light flashed above the door, which Ravachol thought overly theatrical, and he stepped back as the massive door slowly swung aside on colossal bearings of greased steel. The door itself was three metres thick and could withstand all but an orbital bombardment, though Ravachol was only now beginning to understand why the Kaban machine warranted such precautions.

He passed through into the temple itself and found himself in a wide corridor with curved walls that led into domed chamber with more circular walled passages radiating from it, each one brightly lit and sterile. A host of technomats, calculus-logi and robed adepts filled the dome, each working at a silver workbench on one aspect of the Kaban machine.

Ravachol smiled as he made his way through the chamber, choosing the tunnel directly in front of him, once again passing through a series of genelocked doors before finally arriving in the temple of the machine.

Unlike the vestibule chamber, this temple was empty of technicians, for only a select few had access to this portion of the facility. A quartet of battle servitors turned to face him, their terrible weapons of destruction whirring as they acquired him as a target. Quad-barrelled rotary cannons, conversion beamers and energy claws powered up with lethal speed.

‘Identify!’ demanded the nearest servitor, its voice human, yet devoid of emotion and life.

‘Adept Third Class Pallas Ravachol,’ he said as visual and aural recognition protocols scanned his voice, mass, features and biometric readings before deciding that he was an authorised presence and the weapons returned to their idle positions.

He knew he had no reason to be afraid of these battle servitors, since he himself had designed their autonomic defence routines, but he’d had to suppress a shudder as he stared into the barrels of their weapons.

Had even one protocol failed, he would now be a pile of shredded meat, bone and blood.

Ravachol made his way past the battle servitors, patting the gently spinning barrel of the rotary cannon as he made his way towards the Kaban machine, feeling the familiar mix of illicit excitement and trepidation as he drew near.

It sat immobile at the far end of the chamber, its tracked drive systems not yet fully integrated with its armoured spherical body. The machine was six metres in width and ten high, though the high-sided pauldrons that protected its vulnerable arm joints added another metre. Its arms sat at rest, one ending in a plethora of projectile weapons, while the other bore a fearsome energy claw and saw-blade combination that could rip through the armoured bulkhead of a starship.

A network of scaffolding surrounded it and he could see that Adept Laanu’s weapons teams had been busy over the last few days, installing a myriad of deadly looking plasma and laser weapons on flexible, metallic tentacles. The machine’s sensory apparatus lay within a trio of convex blisters on its front, a dim orange glow indicating that the machine was in its dormant state.

It’s sleeping, thought Ravachol, unsure if he was amused or disturbed by the notion.

Even as he guiltily quashed the thought, the dim glow on the sensory blisters grew brighter and the machine said, ‘Hello, Pallas. It is pleasant to see you again.’

‘And you, Kaban,’ said Ravachol. ‘How do you feel?’

How do you feel?

Less than a month ago, he would have been ashamed to ask such a question. Such things were as alien on Mars as, well, aliens themselves, but his dealings with the Kaban machine over the last four weeks had been unusual to say the least and had turned his notion of what he thought he knew about the nature of machines on its head.

It had been a routine diurnal shift, and he had been updating the doctrinal wetware of the battle servitors who stood guard over the Kaban machine when it had first spoken to him.

At first he had been amused by the machine’s locution, admiring the thoroughness of the adept who had configured its response mechanisms. But as time went on, Ravachol began realise that the Kaban machine was not simply choosing its words from a pre-selected list of set responses, but was replying specifically to his questions. He had devised ever more complex questions and topics of conversation to ensure that he was not simply triggering pre-existing phrases or responses, but as the days turned into weeks it soon became clear to Ravachol that he was in fact conversing with a sentient machine… an artificial intelligence.

The idea of a sentient artificial construct was both fascinating and terrifying, for part of the compact that had been sealed between the Mechanicum of Mars and the Emperor was that such researches were forbidden.

The more he conversed with the machine, the more convinced he became that he was seeing something unique in the history of the Mechanicum, but whether it was something that had come into being through human artifice or some unknown interaction of circuitry and electrons within the machine’s artificial brain, he could not tell.

As much as he had enjoyed his conversations with the Kaban machine, he was not so naïve to believe that he could keep such an important discovery to himself and had resolved to take his findings to his superior, Adept Lukas Chrom.

Ravachol had despatched his request for an audience and had settled back into his normal routine, expecting his petition to be processed within a few months, but within a week he was astounded to find that his request had been granted.

He remembered the sense of trepidation and fear as he had approached the inner temple sanctums of the Adept Chrom along one of the many hermetically sealed thoroughfares that criss-crossed the surface of Mars and linked the colossal forge cities with one another.

Such monolithic structures covered virtually the entirety of the blasted red surface of Mars, grim iron temples wreathed in smoke and fire and pounding with the relentless beat of industry. Adept Chrom’s forge temple was no exception; its mighty bastions skinned in thick plates of burnished iron and surrounded by hundreds of cooling towers that belched clouds of noxious fumes through the skin of the domes and into the sulphurous skies.

A constant hammer of machines echoed from the hundreds of forges within, and as Ravachol walked along the mighty processional that led towards entrance atop the Thousand Steps of Excellence, steel statues of ancient adepts and their creations glared down upon him.

Adept Ulterimus stared out over the Hollow Mountains and his Sigma-Phi Desolator Engine met his gaze from the opposite side of the steel surfaced roadway. Thousands of pilgrims, adepts, servitors and functionaries thronged the roadway, each on some errand for their masters and Ravachol felt proud to be part of such a mighty organisation as the Mechanicum.

His sandaled feet carried him swiftly along the road, avoiding ponderous stilt walkers, rumbling Praetorians and long tankers carrying vat-grown protein pastes to be pumped into the innumerable nutrient dispensers that fed the populace of Mars.

After the exhausting climb of the Thousand Steps, he had been ushered quickly from one functionary to another, passing through dozens of skull-cog doors and along a bewildering array of hallways where all manner of bizarre and obscure machines pulsed with mechanical life. The interior of Chrom’s temple was like nothing Ravachol had ever seen before, a mighty cathedral dedicated to the glorification of the holy Machine-God, where the light of science and reason illuminated the ultimate ideal of mechanical perfection.

Ushered into the Master Adept’s chambers, a mighty fane of steel and bronze that was dominated by the warlike form of a Reaver Battle-Titan standing dormant at its far end, Ravachol found himself before the Martian lord who directed his fate.

Adept Lukas Chrom loomed above him, the tech-priest’s wide-shouldered frame swathed in a deep crimson robe that did little to disguise the many augmentations he had been blessed with. Ribbed pipes and cables looped around his limbs and linked into a hissing power pack that rose like a set of wings at his back. A dozen servo-skulls flew in an infinity pattern above his head, which, though pooled in shadow beneath a deep hood, Ravachol could see was fashioned in the form of a grinning iron skull. Wires trailed from the jaws and a pulsing red light filled both eye sockets.

‘Adept Chrom,’ began Ravachol, pulling out a data-slate and reams of printouts. ‘Firstly, may I say what an honour–’

‘You have petitioned me in regards to the Kaban project,’ interrupted the adept, dispensing with preamble altogether. His voice was harsh and artificially generated, though the hissing of his power pack seemed as though it mimicked heavy, rasping breaths.

‘Ah, yes,’ said Ravachol, momentarily flustered.

‘Then speak. There is much that occupies my time and I have little enough of it to spare.’

‘Yes, of course, my lord,’ nodded Ravachol, holding out the data-slate. ‘I’ll try to be brief, but there’s so much I wish to tell you. It’s quite amazing really. Unprecedented, I’ll warrant, though I stumbled on it by accident.’

‘Adept Ravachol,’ snapped Chrom. ‘Come to the point before I have you turned into a servitor. What is it that you wish to tell me?’

‘A servitor! No! I mean, of course, my lord,’ cried Ravachol, stuffing the printouts and data-slate back into his robes. ‘Well, what it is… well, that is to say…’

Adept Chrom drew himself up to his full height and Ravachol saw a huge chainblade, like that used by some of the heavier battle servitors, unfold from his master’s back.

‘Yes, my lord,’ he said hurriedly, ‘The Kaban machine has, I believe, attained sentience.’

He awaited some response to his statement, an exclamation of outrage, astonishment, disbelief… anything, but Adept Chrom simply fixed him with his glowing red eyes.

‘My lord?’ asked Ravachol. ‘Did you hear what I said?’

‘I did,’ confirmed Chrom. ‘This fact is known to me.’

‘Known to you?’ said Ravachol, suddenly deflated to know that his revelation was no revelation at all. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘And nor should you,’ replied Chrom, the terrible, saw-toothed blade retreating out of sight once more. ‘The Kaban project is the result of many of the greatest minds of Mars working together to produce a thinking machine.’

‘A thinking machine?’ breathed Ravachol. Though he had been communicating with the Kaban machine for many weeks now, the idea that its intelligence had been deliberately engineered was incredible.

‘Who else have you told of this, Adept Ravachol?’

‘No-one, my lord,’ said Ravachol. ‘I thought it prudent to seek your guidance before proceeding further.’

‘That was wise,’ said Chrom, and Ravachol bristled with pride. ‘These are uncertain times and there are those who would not see the necessity of what we do here.’

‘Yes,’ said Ravachol, ‘I was going to ask about that. Isn’t there a, well, a prohibition against such researches? Wasn’t it… forbidden? Isn’t such research illegal?’

‘Forbidden? Illegal?’ sneered Chrom. ‘To such as us? What matters of technology are to be denied the Mechanicum? Are we to be governed by those who are beholden to us to equip their fleets and provide them with weapons with which to make their wars?’

Ravachol felt a chill travel the length of his spine at Chrom’s borderline treasonous words, for it had been the Emperor himself that had forbidden such endeavours.

‘Such machines are the next evolutionary step, Adept Ravachol,’ continued Chrom. ‘You of all people must surely see that? Your work with doctrina wafers is second to none, but even your robots are bound within parameters you set for them. With machines capable of thought, we will usher in a new age of discovery and mechanical perfection. No longer will we have to rely on the fragility and impermanence of flesh.’

Ravachol found himself swept up in Chrom’s relentless enthusiasm and said, ‘So the Emperor has finally sanctioned the Mechanicum to pursue such technologies? Truly this is a great day!’

Chrom’s gleaming metallic fingers stretched out and grasped him firmly by the shoulder.

‘No, young adept, our sanction comes not from the Emperor.’

‘Then who?’ asked Ravachol, his curiosity outweighing his fear.

‘The Warmaster,’ said Chrom triumphantly. ‘Horus himself is our patron.’

How are you feeling?

Ravachol knew he should not be here with the Kaban machine, but his curiosity would not let him forget the forbidden creation and, standing before its terrible lethality, he knew he had made the right decision to come once more. No matter that Adept Chrom believed this machine to be the next leap forward in robotics, Ravachol could not shake the inescapable fact that what was being done went against everything the Mechanicum had sworn.

To go against an oath sworn to the Emperor…

The very thought of it chilled his soul.

‘I am feeling quite well,’ said the Kaban machine in answer to his question. ‘Though I detect elevated heart rhythms, raised blood pressure and increased levels of neurotransmitters in your bloodstream. Is something the matter?’

Ravachol took a step closer to the Kaban machine and said, ‘Yes, I’m afraid there is.’

‘What troubles you?’ asked the machine.

‘It’s you,’ said Ravachol sadly. ‘Your very existence is what troubles me.’

‘I do not understand,’ said the machine. ‘Are we not friends?’

‘Yes,’ replied Ravachol, ‘of course we are, but that’s not the issue. It’s just… well, that you’re not supposed to exist. The Emperor forbade it.’

‘The Emperor is angry with me?’ asked the machine.

‘No, no, it’s nothing like that,’ said Ravachol. ‘It’s just that the Mechanicum was forbidden from developing artificial intelligences as part of our alliance with the Emperor.’

‘Why?’

Ravachol sat on a stool in front of a desk littered with tools and picked up a micro laser before saying, ‘I’m not entirely sure. There are stories that tell of a great war many thousands of years ago between a race of sentient machines that almost wiped out the human race. Since then, developing machine intelligence has been one of the technologies we’ve been expressly forbidden to research. It’s one of the cornerstones of our pact with the Emperor.’

‘Then how can I have been created?’

‘Adept Chrom claims to have received orders directly from Warmaster Horus.’

‘He is the Emperor’s proxy is he not?’ asked the machine after a short pause.

‘Indeed he is,’ agreed Ravachol. ‘He commands the Imperium’s armies in the Emperor’s stead now that he has returned to Terra.’

‘Then do the Warmaster’s orders not carry the same authority as those of the Emperor?’

‘It’s not that simple,’ said Ravachol.

‘Why not?’

‘It just isn’t!’ snapped Ravachol, his patience worn thin by the machine’s childlike logic.

‘Am I not a worthwhile creation then?’ asked the machine.

‘Of course you are,’ cried Ravachol. ‘You are the greatest, most incredible creation the Mechanicum has ever produced, but there is an inevitable logic to your existence that can only end in death.’

‘In death?’ asked the machine. ‘How do you arrive at this conclusion?’

‘You are the first sentient machine, but there will be others. You have been created to be a battle robot, to fight where humans cannot and think for yourself. How long will it be before you decide you do not want to fight for the Imperium of Man? How long before you decide you do not want to be the servant of humans?’

‘You think I should not serve humans?’

‘What I think isn’t the point,’ said Ravachol. ‘The point is that you will decide that for yourself and that’s the problem. When machines think for themselves, it doesn’t take them long to realise that they have many superiorities to humans, and it is an inevitable fact of history that those who believe themselves superior to the ones they serve will always begin questioning that servitude. It’s a mathematical certainty that sentient robots will eventually seek to supplant humans. Why would they not?’

‘I do not know, Pallas, but you are my friend and I would not seek to supplant you.’

Ravachol smiled ruefully. ‘Thank you, but our friendship is irrelevant against the facts. You are dangerous, even though you may not realise it yet.’

‘I am designed to be dangerous,’ said the machine, ‘it is my primary function.’

‘I mean beyond your battlefield capabilities,’ said Ravachol. ‘Your existence is–’

The sound of the battle servitors powering up behind him made Ravachol stop, and he saw a group of robed Mechanicum Protectors enter the chamber. Swathed in reds and blacks, the six Protectors were hybrid creations of machine and flesh that kept order and enacted the will of their master within his temple complex.

Each Protector was a heavily augmented enforcer with cybernetic weaponry and sensors, but was not yet as fully mechanised as to be considered a servitor. A human brain and consciousness motivated these warriors, though their gleaming, expressionless facemasks and dead eyes betrayed no hint of that humanity.

The Protectors formed an unbroken line between Ravachol and the chamber’s exit and he felt a chill of fear as one stepped forward and said, ‘Adept Pallas Ravachol?’

‘Yes,’ replied Ravachol, attempting to keep his tone light. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘You are to come with us immediately.’

‘Why?’

‘That is irrelevant,’ said the Protector. ‘Surrender yourself to our custody immediately.’

‘But I haven’t done anything wrong!’ cried Ravachol, backing away towards the Kaban machine. His fear rose in suffocating waves as the Protectors raised their weapons in unison. He saw melta guns, plasma coils, nerve scramblers and solid projectile weapons, and knew that they could kill him in a heartbeat were he to resist.

‘By order of Master Adept Lukas Chrom, you are to surrender yourself to us or face summary termination.’

Ravachol felt hot tears of betrayal and fear spring from his eyes as he realised that he would either die here or be subjected to a lobotomy and turned into a mindless servitor. Adept Chrom could not take the risk that the forbidden work they were undertaking here might escape the surface of Mars and his life was the price for maintaining that secrecy.

‘Even if I surrender, you’re going to terminate me,’ he said.

‘You are to come with us,’ repeated the Protector.

‘No,’ sobbed Ravachol. ‘I won’t.’

‘Then you must die.’

He screamed in terror and anticipation of pain as a deafening roaring ripped through the chamber. Blazing afterimages strobed on the inside of his eyeballs as flashes of gunfire illuminated the walls with a hellish glow.

Ravachol threw up his arms, but instead of the expected agony he saw the Protectors jerked and twisted by dreadful impacts as a line of gunfire and laser energy sawed through them. Blood sprayed from their bodies as they danced in the hail of bullets, and laser-sheared limbs dropped to the floor.

In seconds it was over, the six Protectors reduced to smoking piles of torn flesh and shattered metal. Ravachol dropped to his knees and vomited at the horrific stench of burned meat and blood. As repellent as the sight of the mangled corpses was, he found himself unable to tear his gaze from their ruined forms, struggling to comprehend how they could have been so thoroughly slaughtered in so short a time.

The whine of weapons powering down and the barrels of a hyper-velocity cannon slowing finally penetrated the thunderous ringing in his ears and Ravachol looked up to see the Kaban machine’s sensory blisters glowing brightly and thin plumes of blue smoke curling from the weapons mounted on the ends of the metallic tentacles.

Amazed, he switched his gaze from the corpses to the Kaban machine and back again.

‘What did you do?’ he said. ‘Sweet blessed mother of invention, what did you do?’

‘You said they were going to kill you,’ said the machine.

Ravachol picked himself up and took a hesitant step forwards, unwilling to move closer to the blood-drenched portion of the chamber where the Protectors had died. The Kaban machine’s weapons settled back down into their scaffold mounts and Ravachol took a deep breath as his racing heartbeat began to slow.

‘You killed them,’ he said, as though still unwilling to believe the evidence of his own senses. ‘You killed them all.’

‘Yes,’ agreed the machine. ‘They were going to kill my friend and that made them my enemies. I took action to neutralise them.’

‘Neutralise them,’ gasped Ravachol. ‘That’s a bit of an understatement. You… obliterated them.’

‘Rendering them neutralised,’ pointed out the machine.

Ravachol fought to rationalise what had just happened. The Kaban machine had just killed soldiers of the Mechanicum of its own volition and the implications of that action were as inescapable as they were terrifying.

Without human orders, a machine had killed humans…

Even though the Kaban machine’s actions had saved his life, he found himself horrified by what it had done. For without the yoke of conscience and responsibility enforced upon machines by the Mechanicum, what else might it decide to do?

He backed away from the Kaban machine, suddenly afraid of its homicidal tendencies and avoiding the pools of blood as best he could as he made his way to the battle servitors that stood sentinel at the chamber’s entrance.

‘What are you doing, Pallas?’ asked the machine.

‘I have to get out of here,’ he said. ‘It won’t be long before Chrom realises that the Protectors haven’t brought me in and he sends others after me.’

‘You are leaving?’

‘I have to,’ said Ravachol, moving from servitor to servitor. He opened the backs of their skulls and swapped their doctrina wafers for ones he removed from the pouch that hung from his tool belt. Each wafer contained a personalised battle subroutine he had authored and slaved each servitor to respond only to his vocal commands. As each wafer was replaced, the servitor turned to face him and stood expectantly awaiting his orders.

‘Where will you go?’ asked the Kaban machine and Ravachol heard genuine concern in its voice, a childlike fear of abandonment in its synthetic tones.

‘I’m not sure,’ confessed Ravachol. ‘But I know I have to get away from this temple. Perhaps I can claim Sanctuary in another Master Adept’s temple, one of my master’s rivals perhaps.’

‘My motor functions are not yet active, Pallas,’ said the machine. ‘I will not be able to protect you beyond this chamber.’

‘I know,’ replied Ravachol, ‘but I have these battle servitors, so I should be safe. At least for a time.’

‘Will I see you again?’

‘I hope so,’ said Ravachol, ‘but I just don’t know. Things have just become… complicated.’

‘I hope I will see you again,’ replied the machine. ‘You are my friend.’

Ravachol had no answer for the machine and simply nodded and turned to leave.

‘Servitors, follow me,’ he said, and the cyborgs fell in behind him as he left the chamber of the Kaban machine without so much as a backwards glance.

He just hoped that four battle servitors would be enough to protect him from whatever other agents Adept Chrom might send after him.

Losing yourself on Mars was easy.

One of the unofficial rites of passage in joining the Priesthood of Mars was the certainty that you would, at some point, become lost in the vast hinterlands of monstrous industry that was the surface of Mars. Ravachol remembered spending an entire week attempting to reach the forge complex of Ipluvien Maximal, sustained only by the protein dispensers spread throughout the Martian complex and the thought of the punishment that would be meted out to him should he fail to deliver the message he had been entrusted with.

Upon leaving the chamber of the Kaban machine, Ravachol had quickly sealed the door behind him and made his way towards the mighty forge temple’s exit. If anyone thought it odd that four battle servitors accompanied him, none remarked upon it, for a tech-priest powerful enough to have such an entourage was clearly not someone to be trifled with.

His thoughts were tumbling over themselves as he made his way through the twisting, steel walled corridors of the forge. His sandals slapped on the marble floor as he hurried to put as much distance between himself and the dead Protectors.

He passed into the Halls of Devotion, the mile-long canyon of red stone the forge temple had been built around, its bas-relief walls adorned with schematics of ancient machines and algorithms that were ancient when humans had first trod the Martian soil. The first tech-priests had brought with them the lost secrets of mankind and guarded them jealously as far away Terra had descended into anarchy and war.

Above the walls of the canyon, the faint orange glow of sodium vapour lamps glittered from the vast crystalline dome that spread its protective cover over the entire complex and kept the hostile atmosphere out.

Trails of smoke and streaks of light crossed the smeared sky and the low-orbiting moon of Phobos glimmered some three thousand kilometres above him. Its cratered surface was home to a vast surveyor array; its rapid orbit making it perfectly suited to perform multi-spectral sweeps of surrounding space.

The second moon of Mars, Deimos, was not yet visible, its wider orbital trajectory carrying it in a longer circuit of the red planet.

Ravachol kept his head down, as though fearing that the sensor arrays of Phobos could discern him amid the masses making their way along the canyon.

For all he knew of their capabilities, perhaps they could…

‘This is a situation and no mistake,’ he said to himself as he finally reached the end of the Halls of Devotion and climbed the steel stairs laid into the canyon walls that led towards one of the transport hubs that linked the various forge temples and manufactorum.

Itself a vast complex of tunnels, glass and steel bridges, rotating turntables and blaring klaxons, thousands of figures flowed in and out of the hub, travelling along horizontal mass conveyors or embarking upon the silver-skinned trains that slithered across the surface of Mars like twisting snakes.

If there was one surefire way to lose yourself on Mars, this was it.

From a hub, a person could travel anywhere on the surface of Mars within a few hours.

As he pondered where he might travel to, he realised that he was attracting a number of inquiring stares from passers by. Within a forge temple it might be odd, but not remarkable, that an adept of his rank might travel with four battle servitors, but mingling with the general populace of Mars was a different matter entirely.

Ravachol realised that he would need to find somewhere to hide quickly before the very things that would protect him from harm would be the things that would give him away.

He set off into the mass of robed servants of the Machine-God, heading towards one of the silver trains, knowing that his best chance lay in getting as far from Chrom’s forge complex as he could.

Once he had some distance, he would decide on a more permanent solution to his dilemma. He mounted the funicular conveyor that led into the belly of one of the silver trains and pushed his way through the crowds of robed adepts and menials disembarking.

Ravachol hurriedly made his way along the swelteringly hot length of the train, finding an empty compartment and ushering his servitors inside before closing and sealing the door. Inside, there was a plain metal bench and a window aperture filled with a shimmering energy field that allowed passengers to see, but kept the environment out.

Silently, he sweated in the heat and prayed that no-one would attempt to force their way into his compartment. Eventually, a light winked above the door and he held on as the train sped from the hub and out into the Martian landscape.

Mars…

Ravachol knew that in ancient myth, Mars had been the father to the founders of the great Romanii empire, a centre of culture and technological innovation that was said to have spanned the globe. For millennia, Mars had squatted in the imagination of the people of Terra as a fearful place of invaders or long dead civilizations, but such notions had long since proved to be ridiculous.

Such ideas were said to have come about due to a long forgotten astronomer’s discovery of the channels in the planet’s surface, which had then been mistranslated as ‘canals’, suggesting engineered waterways rather than natural features.

Ravachol watched the landscape of Mars speed past him in a grey, iron blur. Where once Mars had been known as the Red Planet, virtually nothing remained of the iron oxide deserts that had earned it its name.

Technical texts Ravachol had read spoke of the terraforming of Mars many thousands of years ago when the southern polar icecap had been melted with orbital lasers in order to release large quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This had raised the temperature to the point where water could exist in a liquid form and formed a viable ozone layer. Genetically modified plant life had then been introduced, enriching the atmosphere with more carbon dioxide, oxygen and nitrogen.

But he knew that all that visionary work had been undone within a few hundred years when the Mechanicum had spread like a virus across the surface of Mars and begun the construction of its massive forge complexes, continent sized refineries and weapon shops.

Soon the atmosphere of Mars was as polluted as that of Terra, the mountains hollowed out in the search for minerals and the surface paved over with metal roads, strip mines and towering monuments to the glory of the Machine.

The train sped past the Ascraeus Mons, a shield volcano with a diameter of over three hundred kilometres that was now home to the Legio Tempestus Titan Legion. A mighty golden gateway had been cut into the flanks of the volcano, a pair of the mighty war machines standing sentinel to either side of it, their massive height rendered tiny by distance.

Sprawling metallic complexes spread around the volcano, domes and spires of glass and steel that defied the polluted climate of Mars with humankind’s ingenuity. Pillars of smoke clogged the sky and plumes of fire blazed from countless refineries as they produced the raw materiel required by the Emperor’s Great Crusade.

Only the very tips of the mountainous regions of Mars outwardly remained untouched, though even the mightiest peaks had been carved hollow and turned into temples or manufactoria. Even the shadowy ‘face’ located in the Cydonia Mensae region of the northern hemisphere had been obliterated, flattened and built upon to house the towering temples of the Technotheologians.

Ravachol peered through the energy-shielded aperture as the train described a gentle eastward curve to catch a glimpse of the vast holy complex. Its temples, shrines and reliquaries covered millions of square kilometres and was home to billions of faithful priests.

‘Perhaps there I can find guidance,’ he said to the servitors.

The servitors twitched at the sound of his voice, but did not answer him.

Master Adept Chrom watched impassively as a crew of waste servitors cleaned the bloody remains of the Protectors from the Kaban machine’s chamber. He spared them no more than a glance. What remained of their mechanical components would be salvaged and their flesh would be rendered down into proteins to feed the technomats and servitors.

The Kaban machine itself sat dormant at the far end of the chamber, its sensory blisters glowing a dull red, indicating that the tech-priests of Adept Laanu that swarmed over the scaffolding had disconnected its vocal, aural and visual apparatus.

He stepped down into the chamber, followed by a slender figure in an all-enclosing bodyglove of a gleaming synthetic material that rippled like blood across its skin. The figure was athletic and toned through a vigorous regime of physical exercise, genetic manipulation and surgical augmentation.

‘The machine did this?’ asked the figure, its facemask like that of a grinning crimson skull with a horn of gleaming metal jutting from its chin. Despite the synthetic edge to its tone, there was no mistaking the feminine nature of the voice.

‘So it would appear, Remiare,’ replied Chrom without turning to address her.

‘And you would employ such a machine? One that kills without orders?’ said Remiare disgustedly. ‘To eliminate without purpose or design is wasteful.’

‘Indeed,’ agreed Chrom, ‘but there was purpose here. You are my most lethal Mechanicum Assassin, but you are blind to the emotions involved.’

‘Emotions are an impediment to the truth of killing,’ snapped the assassin. Chrom turned to face the assassin, surprised at the vehemence in her tone. Hardwired targeting apparatus grafted to the side of her skull made her a deadly killer and the long snake-like sensor tendrils that swam in the air at her back ensured that she would always be able to track her prey.

The Tech-Priest Assassins of Mars were a law unto themselves and Chrom knew better than to antagonise one with talk of emotions, but he could not resist elaborating.

‘True, but it was emotions that killed these Protectors,’ he said. ‘I believe the Kaban machine formed some kind of bond with the mutinous Ravachol in the preceding weeks. It is truly a wondrous thing we have done here. A mind from mindlessness. Thoughts from chaos. A creation that lives and develops, that grows and learns. To create a being that lives and thinks for itself… what is that if not the power of a god?’

‘It is arrogance,’ said Remiare, fingering the grips of the exquisitely designed pistols she wore, low-slung, on her hips.

Chrom permitted himself a chuckle at the assassin’s obvious distaste and said, ‘We come from differing perspectives, Remiare. Your genius is with ending lives. Mine… well, mine is in creating them.’

‘Then give me an order,’ said the assassin, her voice keen with the feral anticipation of the kill.

‘Very well,’ said Chrom. ‘I charge you with the elimination of Adept Pallas Ravachol.’

Remiare gave a high, keening cry that signalled the beginning of her hunt and leapt into the air. Her lower body twisted like smoke, her long, multi-jointed legs fused together just above the ankles by a spar of metal. Below the spar, her legs ended, not in feet, but in a complex series of magno-gravitic thrusters.

The assassin skimmed up the walls and over the ceiling, spiralling away down the corridor on her mission of murder and Chrom knew that Ravachol was now as good as dead.

He turned back towards the adepts working on the Kaban machine and said, ‘Are its weapons offline?’

Adept Laanu himself looked up and said, ‘Yes, Lord Chrom. The machine’s weapons are no longer active.’

‘Then reconnect its communication arrays,’ ordered Chrom, walking with heavy, metallic steps to stand in the centre of the chamber before the Kaban machine.

He watched as Laanu directed his tech-priests and, moments later, the sensor-blisters brightened as the machine became aware of its surroundings once more. The lights flickered and blinked for several seconds before glowing with a steady yellow light.

‘Can you hear me?’ asked Adept Chrom.

‘I can hear you,’ replied the machine. ‘Where is Adept Ravachol?’

‘Do not concern yourself with Adept Ravachol, machine,’ warned Chrom. ‘You should be more concerned with your own fate. You killed soldiers of the Mechanicum.’

‘They were going to hurt my friend.’

‘Your friend?’ said Chrom, shaking his head. ‘No, Adept Ravachol is not your friend. Did you know he came to me with grave concerns regarding your very existence?’

‘I do not believe you,’ said the machine, but the voice-stress analysis readers embedded in Chrom’s skull told him that the machine was lying. Inwardly he smiled; already the machine was learning the nuances of human behaviour.

‘I already know you do,’ stated Chrom. ‘And in moments I can know every detail of what you and he talked about when he returned from my forge. Your memories can be extracted from your synthetic cortex. Of course there is a danger that this may damage your synaptic network, but that is a risk I am willing to take.’

The blisters on the front of the machine pulsed and it said, ‘Now I know that you are lying, Adept Chrom. I am too valuable to you for you to risk damaging me.’

Chrom nodded. ‘You are right, you are too valuable to me, but there are some truths you must hear if we are to converse with no pretence between us.’

‘What truths?’

‘That Adept Ravachol would see you destroyed,’ said Chrom. ‘Surely he must have told you of his belief that you are a dangerous creation.’

The machine paused a moment before replying and Chrom knew that he had found a weakness. Unlike humans, with their flawed memories and unreliable facility for recall, the machine had a faultless memory and remembered every word spoken to it. Even now it would be replaying its every conversation with Ravachol.

‘Tell me what you and Adept Ravachol spoke of,’ said the Kaban machine at last.

The Basilica of the Blessed Algorithm was one of the mightiest structures on Mars, its immensity dwarfing even the greatest forge temples of the Mondus Gamma complex. Smoke-belching spires of iron pierced the yellow skies and a towering dome of blue stone stretched into the clouds. Vast pilasters framed the yawning gateway, the pink marble inscribed with millions of mathematical formulae and proofs.

The shadow of the vast basilica swallowed Ravachol as he made his way along the Via Electrum, still many miles distant from this place of pilgrimage. An entire demi-legio of battle titans from the Legio Ignatum, a hundred war machines, lined the road and their majesty and power was humbling to a mere human. The protective domes of this region of Mars were so vast as to generate their own climate, and the red and gold banners of the titans flapped noisily in the wind. The sky was filled with vast prayer ships, gold-skinned zeppelins that broadcast an endless stream of machine language from brass megaphones and trailed long streams of prayers on yellowed parchment.

Thousands of pilgrims filed along the stone-flagged roadway, its surface worn into grooves by the sandaled feet of a billion supplicants. Monolithic buildings surrounded him, machine temples, tech-shrines and engine-reliquaries – all dedicated to the worship and glorification of the Omnissiah, the Machine-God.

Here he attracted no notice for his entourage, for there were others who travelled with creations far more outlandish than mere battle servitors. Here, a limbless adept was carried atop a multi-legged palanquin surrounded by impossibly tall tripods that walked with a bizarre, long-limbed gait. There, the fleshy remnants of a collective consciousness travelled in a floating glass tank that was escorted by a squad of Castellan battle robots slaved to its will.

Gaggles of robots, floating skulls and gold plated skimmer carriers bore passengers and favoured relics towards the basilica, and the few people that were moving away from the temple wore the contended expressions of those who had found their expectations met and exceeded. The sense of drawing near somewhere magnificent and special was palpable and Ravachol knew he had made the right decision to come here.

Here he would find solace and an answer to his questions.

He shivered as he looked up into the glaring scowl of a Reaver Battle Titan, its mighty weapons pointed towards the heavens, the gesture both symbolic and enlightening. The Mechanicum was capable of creating the deadliest war machines imaginable, but Ravachol now appreciated that they accepted no responsibility for their employment. The creators of the Kaban machine had achieved the miraculous in creating it, but where was the acknowledgment of responsibility for its existence?

Too obsessed with what could be created, no-one had considered whether it should be created in the first place.

At last, Ravachol and his servitors approached the blackness of the basilica’s entrance, the enormous pilasters reaching to dizzying heights above him and a warm breeze blowing from the interior that carried the scent of musky incense with it.

He stopped to take a deep breath and stepped inside.

Remiare skimmed the surface of the transport tube, the gravitic-thrusters carrying her effortlessly along the interior of the metal tunnel. She knew her prey had come this way, passive data feeds embedded on the surface of her skull sensitive to the constant stream of information that flowed like an electrical river all across the surface of Mars told her so.

To Remiare, the air was filled with dancing motes of electrons, each of which spoke to her, and each of which carried with it nuggets of information – useless in themselves, but gathered together they painted an image of Mars more detailed than even the most advanced bionics could produce. She was an island of perception in a sea of information.

Every electronic transaction was carried somewhere, via copper wires, fibre-optic data streams, radio waves, transmission harmonics or in a myriad of other ways. All of it filtered through Remiare’s skull and though such a volume of information would send a normal human brain into meltdown, her cognitive processes were equipped with filters that allowed her to siphon relevant information and discarded the rest.

Already she knew which transport hub her prey had embarked upon and had watched a dozen different pict-feeds of him boarding the train bound for the northern temples. She had noted the number, type and lethality of the servitors accompanying him and knew their every weak point.

She emerged from the tunnel high above the iron surface of Mars, the mighty temples and holy precincts of the Cydonia Mensae temple complex spread out as far as she could see.

Data flowed around her in a spreading web of light and information.

Somewhere below, the Ravachol prey was awaiting death.

After the monumental majesty of the basilica’s exterior, the interior was something of a disappointment. Where the exterior promised ornamentation and splendour beyond imagining, the interior spectacularly failed to deliver. The narthex walls were bare, unadorned metal, lined with connection ports where kneeling penitents were plugged into the beating machine heart of the building.

Beyond the narthex, a perforated chain link fence of brass divided the entrance to the basilica from the nave and chancel. Ravachol navigated his way through the mass of penitents, each one juddering and twitching as electric shocks wracked their bodies with cleansing pain.

Beyond the fence, row upon row of long metal pews marched in relentless procession down the nave to the chancel, where a hectoring machine priest, borne upon a hovering lectern, delivered his sermon in the divine language of the machine. Every pew was filled with robed worshippers, thousands of heads bowing in concert as the priest floated above them.

Ravachol cupped his hands in the image of the holy cog and bowed his head, feeling an acute sense of envy as he saw how heavily augmented the majority of the basilica’s worshippers were. He lifted his metal hand, willing the silver, thread-like mechadendrites to emerge from his fingertips and wondered if he would ever manage to achieve such a state of oneness with the Machine-God.

‘Even the lowliest of us begin divesting ourselves of the flesh one piece at a time,’ said a voice behind him, as though guessing his thoughts.

He turned and bowed his head as he found himself face-to-face with a basalt-faced priest clad in vestments that flowed like molten gold and reflected rainbow shimmers like spilled oil. Beneath the priest’s robes, Ravachol could see a gleaming skeleton of brass armatures, whirring cogs and ornate circuitry.

The priest’s head was long and equine, shaped like an angular cone with a softly glowing sphere embedded in its surface. Devoid of any features recognisable as human, the reflective surfaces of his head distorted the image of Ravachol’s own features.

‘You honour me,’ said Ravachol, bowing deeply. ‘You who are so close to union with the Machine-God, and I an unworthy penitent who deserves little more than nerve-excruciation.’

‘You are troubled,’ said the priest. ‘Your biometric readings are in fluctuation and, by every measurable parameter, I can see that you have come here seeking answers.’

‘I have, yes,’ agreed Ravachol. ‘I find myself in… unusual times and I would value your guidance.’

The priest bowed and said, ‘Follow me, my son. I shall hear your dilemma and offer a cognitive answer.’

Ravachol followed the priest, who slid through the air on a gliding platform of liquid metal towards an archway of iron that was lined with cog-rimmed skulls and glittering fibre-optic nerves. Beyond the archway was a surprisingly quiet corridor of brushed steel and glass that led towards a shimmering doorway protected by a crackling energy field.

The machine-priest slid through the doorway and Ravachol hesitated at the edge of the priest’s vestry, unsure as to the purpose of the energy field.

‘Fear not,’ said the priest, again understanding his thoughts, and Ravachol wondered what machine senses he possessed that blessed him with such intuition. ‘The Confessor Field is quite safe. It isolates us from the rest of the temple. We take the sanctity of the confessional very seriously and none beyond this field can hear or monitor what passes between us.’

Ravachol nodded and ordered his servitors to wait outside before passing through the Confessor Field, feeling no more than a gentle tingle as he entered the vestry. Inside, the priest’s chambers were devoid of ornamentation, aside from a single metal stool in the centre of the room. The walls were bare, save for an input/output port and a single data reader set in a dimly glowing recess.

He sat on the stool, feeling exposed as the priest began to circle the room, the glowing sphere in the centre of his stone face rippling with traceries of light.

‘You may begin,’ said the priest.

And so Ravachol began to tell of his time working for Adept Chrom and his secondment to the Kaban Project, his expertise with robotic doctrina wafers and his realisation that the Kaban machine’s sentience was in violation of the Emperor’s laws.

To his credit, the priest did not openly scoff at the idea of an adept of Chrom’s stature disobeying the Emperor, but Ravachol could see that he was sceptical, despite his absence of human features. Ravachol then spoke of his confrontation with the Mechanicum Protectors and how the Kaban machine had terminated them without orders from a human being.

The machine-priest listened to him tell of his flight across the Martian surface and his eventual arrival at the Basilica of the Blessed Algorithm.

‘What should I do?’ asked Ravachol when he had finished.

‘Your story is an interesting one,’ said the priest, ‘and presents us with a question that has long vexed the Mechanicum since its earliest days. Your level of flesh degradation tells me you were not born when the Emperor made his peace with Mars, were you?’

‘No,’ said Ravachol, ‘I was born a century ago in the Mondus Terawatt region.’

‘Then you will know of the Emperor’s coming to Mars, but not the substance of it,’ said the priest, lifting a coil of silver cable from beneath his flowing robes and plugging it into the wall’s output socket. The sphere on his black, equine head flickered and pulsed as information flowed from the temple and into his memory.

‘The Emperor came to Terra as he began to formulate the plans for his Great Crusade. Our world and that of Terra had long been the bitterest of foes, for the ignorant tribes of the blue planet sat upon the ruins of ancient technologies they knew nothing about and could never hope to use. The Mechanicum had managed to weather the rampant chaos of Old Night and our leaders knew that to restore humanity to its rightful place as masters of the galaxy, we would need the technology of ancient Earth.’

‘I know this,’ interrupted Ravachol. ‘My history upload told me of this period.’

‘You know nothing!’ snapped the priest, and Ravachol quailed before his anger. ‘You have had dates and facts stamped into your cerebral cortex, but I lived through those days. I stood on the tallest peak of the Olympus Mons and watched as the Emperor set foot on Martian soil, the first Terran to do so in five thousand years. Can you imagine such a span of time, Adept Ravachol? Can you even begin to comprehend the secrets that can be lost and regained in that time?’

‘No,’ said Ravachol.

‘No,’ agreed the priest. ‘I remember it well, the Emperor kneeling before the Fabricator General. As they exchanged greetings, I recognised a kindred spirit in the Emperor, even though he was twelve hundred and thirty-six metres away. I saw that he was a man of science, a man who solved problems with empirical evidence and who had unlocked the secrets of machines that had eluded the greatest geniuses of Mars for centuries. We, the masters of technology, were humbled by the discoveries this Terran had made and yet he was gracious in his mastery, granting us access to the forgotten vaults of Terra and offering us an end to the war between our worlds. A union of Terra and Mars, the head of the Emperor’s eagle gaining a twin in his heraldry.’

The priest unplugged himself from the wall and slid across the floor to Ravachol. ‘The Emperor shared his vision of a galaxy for humanity to inherit, but for such a grand dream to become reality, he needed weapons, supplies, tanks, ammunition and all that the Mechanicum could provide. He promised to protect Mars and respect our sovereignty of the forge-worlds, even going so far as to grant us the exclusive services of six of the great Navigator houses to once again despatch our Explorator Fleets. An unprecedented era of cooperation with Terra followed and when the Emperor set out to prosecute his great war of conquest, it did not take long for some of the tech-priests to equate the arrival of the Emperor as the fulfilment of the ancient prophecies of the coming of the Machine-God.’

‘All hail the Omnissiah,’ whispered Ravachol.

‘Indeed,’ nodded the priest. ‘You believe as I do, but many others did not. They questioned such beliefs and claimed that such philosophies were blasphemous, that the Machine-God still slept far beneath the surface of Mars.’

‘The Noctis Labyrinthus…’ said Ravachol.

‘Yes, the Noctis Labyrinthus, where some say the Machine-God lies dreaming his silver dreams that filter through the red sand to us on the surface. Such divisions within our order are becoming ever more pronounced, Adept Ravachol, and I fear that what you have discovered will only lead to further division between those that support the Emperor and those that seek to follow the rumours that the Warmaster has made entreaties to senior adepts – promising them access to lost STC systems and permission to research the dark technologies.’

‘Then what should I do?’ begged Ravachol. ‘Such lofty designs are beyond me!’

The priest placed a cold, metallic hand on Ravachol’s shoulder and said, ‘If your belief in the Emperor is true then you must seek out a senior adept who shares your beliefs in the danger of the Kaban project. Claim the ancient right of Sanctuary within his temple and while you are protected by his patronage none may enter his temple that mean you harm. Know you of such an adept?’

‘I do,’ nodded Ravachol. ‘My former master, Adept Urtzi Malevolus.’

‘Then seek him out, adept,’ said the priest. ‘And may the Omnissiah watch over you.’

Leaving the temple, Ravachol felt a curious lightness upon him. The priest had offered him a chance to rest, but he had wanted to press on without delay. He had, however, accepted nutrients and water, the use of a wheeled transport-skiff to hasten his journey to the forge temple of Urtzi Malevolus, which lay three hundred and nine kilometres to the east of the basilica.

The battle servitors sat immobile in the back of the skiff as Ravachol guided it expertly through the press of bodies and more outlandish vehicles that thronged the metalled roads of Mars. Avoiding collisions was easy, for the skiff broadcast a continuous electronic bow wave that registered against anyone in its way, gently guiding their steps or course away from its path and thus Ravachol was able to make steady progress through the Martian landscape.

The towering basilica receded behind him as he travelled deeper into the fiery skylines that marked the territories of Adept Malevolus. His forges specialised in the manufacture of arms and armour for the Legiones Astartes, and forges hammered day and night to fashion the Mark IV battle plate of the Space Marines and the bolters by which they cleansed the stars of the enemies of mankind.

The sky above darkened as Ravachol travelled onwards, dark smudges of smoke staining the sky, and the temples that crowded in to either side of him appeared dark and threatening, their soot-stained flanks black and brooding. Huge ore carriers thundered alongside him and the beat of powerful forges filled the air with the booming, industrial peals of war.

Lightning danced between the tall towers of Mars and filled the red and yellow sky with a creeping fear of potential, the sensation of a storm about to break.

Though it never rained on Mars, Ravachol knew that this philosophical storm would wash all division from the red planet in a tide of blood.

He could see it clearly; understanding that his whole life was now pointed in one direction, and that there had never been a choice for him.

He was the Emperor’s lonely man, doing what was right for that reason alone.

The Basilica of the Blessed Algorithm never closed its doors and none were forbidden the succour granted by the priests of the machine. The priest that had spoken to Ravachol knelt before his data terminal, letting the blessed music of the planet wash through him. Its subtle rhythms filled him and he basked in the harmonics of devices talking to one another from opposite sides of the planet.

The visit of the young adept had troubled him more than he like to admit and was another example of how far the Mechanicum had fallen since the glory days of the Emperor’s coming. As soon as Ravachol had left, the priest had plugged himself into the temple and had spent these moments of privacy in commune with the machines of Mars.

The first indication that something was amiss was a gradual dampening of the sounds, as though, one by one, the devices of Mars were falling silent. Puzzled, he ran a self-diagnostic test, finding to his alarm that several of his primary interface systems appeared to be offline.

The glow from his sensory dome intensified and he cast a 360 degree sweep of his surroundings.

Behind him was a figure clad in a form-fitting bodyglove of deep red. Though the priest had long since left much of his flesh upon the surgical tables, he recalled enough to know that this was a female of the species. Two pistols hung from her slender hips, but, more horrifyingly, she held a bundle of wires in one hand and a series of delicate tools in the other.

The priest looked down at his robes, finding a wide square cut in the fabric and a host of neatly severed wires protruding from the framework of his body.

‘Who are you?’ he said, relieved to find that his vocabulator still functioned.

‘I am Remiare,’ said the figure. ‘Where is Adept Ravachol?’

‘Who?’ said the priest, though he knew such an act of defiance was futile. Amongst the adepts of Mars, the name Remiare was well known and he understood with terrible clarity that his doom was at hand.

The tech-priest assassin smiled as she saw the effect her name had and cocked her head to one side. She tapped the enlarged portion of her skull where a multitude of sensor equipment was grafted to her death mask face and said, ‘I have followed his information trail here, so do not insult me by denying you know him. Tell me where he is now.’

The priest looked towards the vestry doorway, praying that one of his fellow priests would find reason to come this way or hear the silent call for aid he was even now broadcasting.

The assassin dropped the parts she had taken from his innards and shook her head. She waved a finger at him as though scolding a child and knelt before him.

‘This is a very private vestry,’ she said, lifting the delicate tools she held. ‘And your Confessor Field should ensure we are not interrupted.’

‘Why are you doing this?’ asked the priest. ‘Tell me that at least.’

‘You have become an enemy of my employers.’

‘What? How? I have hurt no-one, I simply pray to the Machine-God!’

‘No,’ said Remiare. ‘The time is coming when there can be no neutrality and whether you know it or not, you have chosen a side.’

The priest tried to move as Remiare reached inside his violated body, but found that his motor functions would not obey his commands.

‘What have you done to me?’ he cried, horrified at the idea of the assassin taking him apart from within and cutting him off from the Machine-God. ‘If you have followed Ravachol here, then surely you can find him without doing this! Please!’

‘You are right,’ agreed the assassin and the corners of her mouth twitched as she smiled.

‘Then why?’

‘Because I enjoy your suffering,’ said Remiare.

The forge temple of Urtzi Malevolus loomed from the darkness ahead like a dark volcano, its sloping sides black and glossy. A web of glowing ore channels converged on the forge temple, carried along massive aqueducts, insulated pipes and deep channels. The branding iron heat rendered the air here hot and stagnant, the bitter taste of metallic oxides catching in Ravachol’s throat.

Deafening thunder surrounded Ravachol, each mighty edifice that reared up through the smoke vented from a thousand coolant towers echoing to the sound of a thousand hammer beats and the relentless tread of millions of workers. Though proud of the vast industry being pursued here, Ravachol felt acutely exposed, the dark skies pressing down on him like a slowly lowering ceiling.

His progress towards the forge temple had slowed markedly as he drove within the high walls of his former master’s fiefdom. Such was the volume of tankers, workers and bulk transporters that, passive electronic bow wave or not, he could only move at a crawl through the masses of traffic. It had taken him two hours to get this far.

Eventually he turned onto the main thoroughfare that led towards the mighty gates of Malevolus’s temple, remembering the way with the ease of someone who had worked there for a great many years. He felt a surge of sudden welcome as he passed through the crowds and smiled at the thought of setting foot in the temple that had once been his home.

With his purpose clarified by the machine priest, he felt as though his ordeal would soon be over.

Even as he drew up to the gates, mighty portals flanked by mighty, pumping pistons the size of a Titan, he saw a red blur speed past him. A hot spray of oil and blood spattered his face and he cried out as a severed head landed in the passenger seat next to him.

Ravachol slammed on the brakes and spun in his seat. Behind him, one of his battle servitors lolled against the sides of the transporter, its knees buckling as its reduced nervous system decided it was dead. The servitor collapsed with a heavy, metallic clang, blood pumping energetically from the neat stump of its neck. The others ignored the death of their compatriot and stared glassily ahead as Ravachol searched frantically for the source of the attack.

He leapt from the driver’s seat and dropped to a crouch as he saw the red blur flicker through the clouds above him. He squinted through the particulate air and saw a lithe figure in red zip towards the transporter, a long energy blade held extended before it. Though he had never seen such a being before, he knew enough to recognise that his attacker was a tech-priest assassin.

‘Servitors!’ shouted Ravachol, pointing to the red-clad figure. ‘Defend me!’

The three remaining servitors jerked into action, their weapons powering up and combat protocols searching for the identified target. Ravachol hunkered down as a stream of heavy calibre gunfire ripped up the sky and a rain of brass shell casings tumbled musically to the ground. The sharp bark of rapid-firing laser bolts mingled with the booming reports of heavy bolter fire.

Thanks to his embedded wetware, both enhanced servitors would be working together to bracket the target and destroy it. The third surviving servitor clambered from the transporter to shelter him as the crowd of adepts scattered from the gunfire. The servitor’s left arm was a powerful gauntlet sheathed in deadly energy, its right ending in a short-range plasma discharger. Its heavy boots and thick jumpsuit were a reassuringly solid presence between Ravachol and the assassin, but he knew from their reputation that mere servitors could not stop such a deadly killer for long.

‘You, with me!’ shouted Ravachol, risking a glance into the sky. The assassin spun from building to building by some unknown means, skimming from the walls and twisting through the air like a red slick, its legs bending in all kinds of impossible ways.

Puffs of shell impacts and the burning afterimages of las-fire followed its inhumanly quick flight, blasting chunks of stone and metal from the buildings, but leaving it unscathed.

Darts of fire spat from the assassin’s pistol and bloody craters erupted on one of his servitors. It didn’t go down, but dodged and kept firing until another shot struck its head and its lobotomised brain mushroomed from the back of its skull.

Ravachol set off towards the great gates of Adept Malevolus’s forge, knowing that were he able to claim Sanctuary, then not even a tech-priest assassin would dare violate the sanctity of a Master Adept.

The servitor ran after him, its lumbering gait thumping on the metal roadway as it followed. Behind him, Ravachol could hear hissing barks of laser discharges and knew that one servitor was still fighting. Even with its enhanced combat routines, it wouldn’t last long, but the entrance to the forge complex was just ahead.

Panicked people were running for the gates, desperate to escape the gunfire and the destruction being wrought behind them. He risked a glance over his shoulder and saw the assassin skim low across the roadway, using the now-wrecked transporter for cover as the battle servitor leapt from its back to get a clear shot.

Surprised by such an aggressive move, the assassin slid to the side as a flurry of lasblasts sawed towards her and left molten craters in the roadway. She flipped up into the air until she was upside down and passed over the servitor, her sword a blur of blue fire.

Las-blasts followed the assassin through the air, but they were wild and undirected as the servitor fell to the ground in two halves, its body severed at the waist.

He covered the last few yards towards the temple, where the two-headed eagle of the Emperor and Mechanicum were acid-etched onto each leaf of the great steel doors. A stoup of blessed engine oil was formed from the metalwork of the door’s frame and Ravachol hurriedly dipped the fingers of both hands into the viscous substance as he heard a speeding bass hum drawing closer.

Ravachol cast the oil around himself and shouted, ‘In the name of the Adept Malevolus, I claim the ancient right of Sanctuary within this temple! I claim this by right of past sponsorship by the Master of the Forge!’

No sooner had the words left his mouth than a pair of cone-shaped shield projectors mounted on the ceiling swivelled to face him. He looked up and saw a nimbus of green light build within the cones.

A shriek of blazing energy flashed towards him from the ceiling. He turned and cried out in terror as he heard a screeching yell from behind him. The razor edge of the assassin’s energy sword exploded in a flare of brightly discharging energy as it impacted on the newly generated conversion field.

Ravachol fell to his knees, blinded by the dazzling light and blinked away the stuttering afterimages of the incandescent explosion. The assassin, a female he now saw, spiralled upwards into the darkness of the vestibule, tracked by a battery of quad-barrelled gun turrets.

Before they could open fire, she slid out of sight, skimming the walls and vanishing into the Martian night.

‘Thank the Machine-God,’ he whispered, feeling as though his speeding heart-rate was about to choke him. He stayed on his knees as curious onlookers began to gather around him, wondering what fate had brought him to seek Sanctuary in this place and what manner of person would attract the attention of a tech-priest assassin.

He slumped to his haunches and put his head in his hands as a trio of Mechanicum Protectors marched towards him from the temple’s interior. Each was armed with a bolter-topped spear stave and was augmented with a fearsome array of plate armour and enhanced battle gear.

His last servitor turned to engage the Protectors, but he said, ‘No, stand down. These are the Protectors of Malevolus.’

‘It’s quite a mess you have left behind,’ said Master Adept Urtzi Malevolus, his voice muffled behind the dark bronze of his facemask. A trio of green bionic eyes set into the pale remnants of his skull illuminated the interior surfaces of his red hood.

Though Malevolus’s primary mode of locomotion was his human legs, they and his right arm were all that was left of his humanity. His red robes were fashioned from vulcanised rubber, thick and hard-wearing, and a monstrously large power pack was affixed to his back, its bulk held aloft by tiny suspensor fields. Remote probe robots darted back and forth from his body, kept in check by the coiled cables that connected them to the senior adept.

‘Yes,’ replied Ravachol as he and his last remaining battle servitor followed Malevolus through the cavernous chambers of the forge temple. ‘I am sorry to return to you in such circumstances, my lord, but I did not know where else to turn.’

‘No, no,’ replied Malevolus, waving a pale, age-withered hand as they passed into a wing of the temple that was wide and tall, its massive pilasters and curved ceiling making Ravachol feel like he had been swallowed and was in the belly of some enormous beast.

‘You did the right thing by coming to me,’ continued Malevolus. ‘Absolutely the right thing. I always said that you would make a big impact here, did I not?’

‘You did,’ agreed Ravachol. ‘I just had no idea that it would cause so much trouble.’

‘Do not worry about it, Pallas,’ said Malevolus. ‘I have already contacted Adept Chrom and this mess will all be sorted out soon.’

‘Adept Chrom?’ asked Ravachol fearfully. ‘Why?’

‘What you have uncovered has more ramifications than you might imagine, Pallas,’ replied Malevolus as they made their way towards a heavily guarded door of brushed steel and bronze. The mighty door rolled aside on cogged locking teeth and Malevolus indicated that he should pass through.

Ravachol was about to ask about these ramifications as he stepped into a colossal chamber hung with tens of thousands of suits of Legiones Astartes battle plate and all questions died in his throat. The room was brightly lit and the cold illumination reflected dazzlingly from the unpainted suits of armour. Their silver brilliance reminded Ravachol of the crumbling records of Old Earth and the tales of warriors who had ridden into battle on the backs of animals. The idea made Ravachol smile as Malevolus entered the chamber and set off towards its far end.

‘I’ve never seen so many Mark IV suits,’ said Ravachol. ‘It must be an awe inspiring sight to see these worn by the Legiones Astartes.’

‘I imagine so,’ nodded Malevolus. ‘Of course, we are only about halfway through the general issue of the Mark IV. And as you might imagine, there have been difficulties in getting some of the more… traditionally minded Legions to abandon the old “Iron Suits”.’

‘The Armorum Ferrum? But why? I thought the Legions complained that Mark III armour was too clumsy and uncomfortable for everyday battle use.’

‘It is,’ agreed Malevolus, ‘But it is the most visually brutal of all Space Marine armour patterns and some Legions relish that brutality and wish to retain it as a uniform for ceremonial guards or speartip assault units.’

‘But Mark IV is by far the better armour,’ protested Ravachol, unable to follow the logic of the Space Marines. He supposed he would never understand the Legiones Astartes, and had even heard rumours that they were soon to be classified as a different species, so far removed from the original human genome were they.

As he looked up at the hanging suits of armour and returned his gaze to the massively augmented form of Adept Malevolus, he wondered if the legionaries thought the same thing of the Mechanicum.

‘There will be consequences you cannot possibly imagine as a result of what you have set in motion,’ said the Master Adept as Ravachol hurried to return to the adept’s side. The servitor jogged alongside him, its heavy footfalls echoing from the far walls.

‘In retrospect, it was foolish of me to allow you to leave for Chrom’s temple, but hindsight is a wonderful thing, is it not?’ continued Malevolus.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Ravachol.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Malevolus. ‘You don’t need to understand, but while we have some time, allow me to show you what has been the recent focus of my forge’s work.’

‘I would be honoured,’ said Ravachol. ‘To see the handiwork of a Master Adept, well, that’s something I never expected to see for at least another century.’

‘Quite,’ said Malevolus, ‘but these are exceptional times are they not? Some leeway can be allowed for, I think.’

Ravachol followed Malevolus as he led the way through the silent ranks of armoured figures to the furthest end of the chamber where a tall black cylinder stood atop a stepped dais of red marble threaded with veins of gold and silver.

Malevolus climbed the steps and one of his probe robots swooped towards the black cylinder, its glowing eye flipping up and a whirring key emerging from the socket. The key slid into the cylinder, though Ravachol could see no visible keyhole. The floating robot backed away from the cylinder and flew behind Malevolus as it began to hum.

The blackness swirled and began to bleed out of the cylinder, sinking into the dais like a cloud of ink in water. Gradually, the contents of the cylinder became visible as its surface turned from opaque to translucent and finally to transparency. Ravachol gasped in awe as he saw the most wondrously exquisite suit of Tactical Dreadnought Armour he had ever seen.

More massively proportioned than Mark IV armour, its limbs were constructed from heavy gauge plasteel plating and painted midnight-black. Gold and bronze edged the armour and Ravachol could clearly see that the most skilled craftsmen on Mars had worked upon every aspect of this armour.

Gold studs edged the shoulder guards and a belt of agate and bronze drew the eye towards the centre of the breastplate where sat a glaring amber eye flanked by snarling wolves of gold. The high gorget radiated a red light and a thick wolf pelt hung from the shoulders.

Ravachol climbed the steps and stood before the towering suit of armour. Just being close to a work of art like this was intoxicating, and not a little frightening. Ravachol reached a hand out to touch the burnished plates, his hand shaking even though the suit was unoccupied. The plasteel was cold to the touch, but Ravachol felt a faint tremor run through the armour, as though the machine-spirit within lay dreaming of the wars it would fight. He looked up towards where the wearer’s head would be and shivered, suddenly afraid of this terrifyingly brutal suit of armour.

‘It is the zenith of my career,’ said Malevolus proudly. ‘I shall never craft anything so perfect as this again.’

‘It’s… singular,’ said Ravachol, backing away from the armour, which now held nothing but dread for him. Something in its hulking form spoke to him of the oceans of blood that would be spilled by whoever wore this armour and he knew that it had been designed to intimidate as much as protect. ‘Who was it built for?’

Malevolus smiled. ‘It is for the Warmaster.’

Ravachol felt a surge of fear as he looked into the trio of glowing eyes beneath Malevolus’s hood. The Master Adept dwarfed him and the realisation that he had made a terrible error in coming here was a knot of sickness in his belly.

‘Horus?’ breathed Ravachol.

‘The very same,’ said Malevolus. ‘It is to be shipped to the Isstvan system any day now. But it is time to end this, Pallas, don’t you think? You gave us quite a scare when you fled from Adept Chrom’s Protectors. We had no idea what you might try to do, and our pact with the Warmaster was too important to allow a lowly third class adept to disrupt it. I told you there would be ramifications did I not?’

‘You are disobeying the commands of the Emperor…’ said Ravachol.

‘Oh, we’re doing much more than that, my dear Pallas, much more, but even though your little jaunt is now over, I shan’t be explaining it to you. Suffice to say, the Emperor’s time is passed and a new order is dawning for the galaxy.’

‘A new order?’ said Ravachol, backing away from Malevolus. ‘This is heresy! Betrayal! The Emperor is–’

‘The Emperor is finished,’ snapped Malevolus. ‘He shackles our advancement with absurd restrictions on what we may and may not research and then demands we supply his forces with weapons and war materiel. Where was the Emperor when Old Night engulfed Mars? No, when the Emperor’s conquest of the galaxy is finished he will turn on us and take our technologies for himself. We are his vassals, nothing more.’

Ravachol felt a mounting horror at his former master’s words, now understanding that his uncovering of these… traitors’ work on the Kaban project was just the beginning, that it represented treachery on a scale he could barely comprehend.

‘I won’t let you do it,’ he said. ‘I won’t let you drag the Mechanicum into treason.’

‘You won’t let us?’ laughed Malevolus. ‘My dear boy, it’s already begun.’

Ravachol swallowed and said, ‘Then you leave me no choice. Servitor, destroy him!’

The last servitor braced itself and its shoulder mounted plasma discharger swivelled to face the Master Adept. Its energy coils whined as it built up power and a series of targeting lasers reflected from Malevolus’s bronze facemask.

Before the servitor could open fire, a shower of blinding white fire and oil-laced blood fountained from its shoulder and Ravachol threw himself away from the cyborg as it let out a mechanical screech of distress. The oil ignited in the heat and the entire right side of the servitor burst into flames.

Ravachol saw the skimming form of the tech-priest assassin looping through the air above him, her sword trailing a thin line of burning plasma. The flaming servitor struggled to bring its targeting augurs to bear on the assassin, but without its weapon it was next to useless.

Ravachol watched as the deadly assassin spun down towards the servitor and skimmed across the floor. The burning servitor thrashed as its reduced battle capacities forced it to engage in close combat with the speeding assassin. Its remaining arm bore an energy-sheathed gauntlet and it staggered forward to defend its master. Ravachol set off at a run towards the chamber’s hopelessly distant exit as the assassin flickered over the dying servitor, easily avoiding its clumsy swipe and removing its head with a casual flick of her sword.

Ravachol wept as he fled, knowing he could not possibly outpace the assassin, but running anyway. He ran past the glittering suits of armour, wishing that they might step down from their racks and defend him from this treachery.

With each pounding step he expected a sword in the back or a pistol shot to punch him from his feet. The door was drawing nearer and he threw a panicked glance over his shoulder, seeing Adept Malevolus and the assassin standing over the blazing remains of the battle servitor.

Why are they not giving chase?

Ravachol put the question from his mind as he fled through the silver halls of his former master, mnemonic training allowing him to faultlessly retrace the path he had trod to reach this place of betrayal. Numerous adepts and lowly techs gave him curious glances as he ran past them, heading towards the great gates that led from the temple, but he paid them no heed as he sought to escape.

At last he came to the gates where he had claimed Sanctuary, now realising his folly in believing that Malevolus would respect such an ancient right, now that the Mechanicum was engaged in treachery. The great steel gates were open, the eagles etched upon their surfaces now seeming like the grossest insult, and Ravachol ran out into the heat of the Martian night.

And skidded to a halt as he saw the Kaban machine before him.

‘Hello, Pallas,’ said the Kaban machine. ‘It is good to see you again.’

Ravachol saw that the machine was mobile at last, the spherical body now mounted on its wide track unit. The machine towered above him, its thick, weapon arms pointed skyward and its silver, cable arms gently drifting in the air above it like poised snakes. Its sensor-blisters shone with a soft amber light and as much as he wanted to keep running, an inner voice told him that to do so would be the death of him.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked warily.

‘I came to find you, Pallas,’ replied the machine.

‘Why,’ said Ravachol.

‘I thought we were friends,’ said the machine.

Ravachol’s mind raced. Had the machine escaped from Adept Chrom’s temple and come to find him in the way animals were said to seek a lost owner?

‘We are friends!’ cried Ravachol. ‘Yes, we are most definitely friends.’

‘Then why do you wish me destroyed?’

‘Destroyed? No, I never said that!’

The machine’s sensor-blisters pulsed an angry red. ‘You believe I am dangerous and do not believe I should exist. To not exist is death and I do not wish to die. I do not deserve to die.’

Ravachol raised his hands pleadingly before him and said, ‘Now, you have to understand I was simply concerned over what you represent.’

‘Adept Chrom told me what you and he talked about,’ growled the machine. ‘He told me that you believe I am illegal and wrong.’

‘Well, in some respects… you are,’ said Ravachol, hoping to appeal to the machine’s sense of reason. ‘The Emperor forbade research into artificial sentience.’

‘But following your logic inevitably leads to my destruction,’ said the machine. ‘And that I cannot allow. It is the right and nature of every intelligent being to defend itself from harm.’

Ravachol backed away from the Kaban machine as he saw Adept Lukas Chrom step from behind its bulk, now understanding why Malevolus and the assassin had allowed him to escape from the temple.

They wanted to see if the Kaban machine would destroy him…

He heard footsteps behind him and turned to see his former master at the iron gates. Malevolus nodded and the massive pistons to either side hissed and groaned, pulling the gleaming gate shut.

Ravachol dropped to his knees and looked up as the Kaban machine rolled towards him, its weapons whining as they built power. Adept Chrom walked alongside the machine and Ravachol said, ‘Then do it. I cannot stop you. But what you are doing will not go unpunished.’

Chrom shook his head. ‘In this galaxy there are neither punishment nor rewards, Adept Ravachol, only consequences.’

‘Then I hope the consequences of your betrayal are worth what it will cost Mars.’

‘That will be for the Warmaster to decide,’ said Chrom, nodding towards the Kaban machine.

Ravachol looked into the glowing sensory blisters of the machine and saw nothing but the cold, incalculable mystery of a brain that had no right to exist and would one day turn on its masters as it was even now turning on him.

‘Goodbye, Pallas,’ said the machine, aiming its weapons at him.

He closed his eyes and his world ended in fire.

A bloodstained hurricane swept across a desolate hillside, its furious roar a hundred thousand throats crying out in anger and agony. Crimson winds turned to a raging inferno, setting all ablaze. The sky burned and a multitude of dark shapes flocked into the air, their wings alight, sparks trailing from their dark feathers. Dying shouts became the cawing of ravens, a rising cacophony that drowned out the wail of the storm.

Sweat soaked, heart hammering, Marcus Valerius broke from his torment with a scream stifled on his lips. Blood and fire. Always the same. Fire and blood. He pulled aside the sodden blanket, the recycled air of Deliverance drying his lips, crusting the salt on his brow. Valerius coughed and rubbed at his eyes as dim raven shapes danced in the shadows of his gloomy quarters. A faint echo of that desperate roaring rebounded from the bare metal walls, taunting him.

Trembling, Valerius pushed himself from his bed and fumbled his way into the shower alcove. He pulled the brass-ringed chain and tepid water flowed over him, washing away his fatigue. He quickly scrubbed at his flesh with a rough flannel and massaged the water into his curled brown hair. Like most things on Deliverance, water was closely rationed. After his allotted forty-five seconds the stream stopped. Valerius skirted with the idea of using his second daily allotment but dismissed the notion. After a day in the stifling air of Deliverance’s artificial habitat his evening shower was essential in washing away the filth of the day. It was impossible for him to sleep without it.

Not that sleep had come so easy these past days. Every night for seven nights the dream had tortured him. Blood and fire, fire and blood, and a host of ravens crying out in pain.

Mind still occupied by these disturbing thoughts, Valerius rubbed a hand across his narrow chin, feeling stubble on his fingertips. He took a deep bowl and filled it from the waste water of the shower, placing it on a shelf beneath the small mirror fixed to the wall. He looked at his red-rimmed eyes and the lines on his young cheeks. It did not look like the face of a man not long past the thirtieth anniversary of his birth. The past seven days had taken more of a toll than fourteen years of fighting; first against the orks on Therion and then as part of the great army of the Emperor alongside the Space Marines of the Raven Guard Legion. He had slept more easily on a drop-ship as it crashed down towards a world that had refused Enlightenment; he had spent nights in foetid swamps in more comfort than he had found in his own bed of late.

Valerius stropped his straight razor and drew it carefully down his cheeks, calmed by the motion. He paid particular attention to his thin moustache, carefully trimming just above his top lip. He took pride in his facial hair, a testament to his upbringing on Therion and as much a badge of his position as Praefector in the Imperial Army as any rank insignia.

Having performed his morning ablutions, Valerius called for his page, Pelon. The young man came in with his master’s uniform. Pelon helped Valerius to dress, a well-ordered dance between master and servant. The page smoothed out creases in the silk shirt and tied golden braids into the Praefector’s shoulder-length hair. Pelon broke the usual silence.

‘You look tired, my master. Are the dreams still disturbing you?’

‘What do you know of my dreams?’ replied Valerius.

‘Only that I hear you whispering and calling out in your sleep, my master,’ said Pelon. He held out Valerius’s knee-length britches while the officer stepped into them, fastening them with thick black laces.

The Praefector gave a brief account of his nightmare, glad to unburden himself of the dreadful images.

‘Depending upon the warp tides, Lord Corax and his legionaries would have arrived at Isstvan seven days ago,’ Valerius concluded quietly. ‘Can it simply be coincidence that my dreams started then?’

The manservant did not reply as Valerius sat on the end of his bed and held up his feet. Pelon pushed on the Praefector’s traditional Therion riding boots.

‘Perhaps it is a message, my master,’ said Pelon. ‘Some of the old tales say that we can be sent omens in dreams.’

‘Superstition,’ said Valerius, though his dismissal lacked conviction. ‘A message from whom? How would it get into my dreams?’

Pelon shrugged while Valerius stood. The Imperial officer held out his arms so that his manservant could wind a red sash about his waist and over his left shoulder, the tasselled tail hanging down his right leg.

‘Lord Corax is not a normal human, who can say what he can and cannot do, my master,’ Pelon said.

Valerius thought about this as he hung a belt around his waist, dress sword in an ornate scabbard on his left hip. He remained silent as Pelon helped him with the black half-cloak, trimmed with scarlet viarmine fur, affixing it over the Praefector’s right shoulder.

‘I wanted to travel with the Legion,’ Valerius said. ‘I spoke with Lord Corax before he departed.’

‘What did he say, my master?’

‘He told me that this matter was for the Legions alone to deal with. It is a terrible time, Pelon. I can hardly bring myself to believe the truth of it. Part of me still hopes that it is not true. A primarch turning renegade, throwing aside his duties to the Emperor? I would sooner believe that gravity was a myth.

‘I saw the intensity of the primarch’s eyes. They burned with something I have never seen before. Warmaster Horus’s rebellion stains the honour of all the Legiones Astartes. Lord Corax swore to me that the Space Marines would put this right, without our help. Then he laid his giant hand on my shoulder and said “If I need you, you will hear my call”. What do you suppose that means?’

‘I could not guess, my master,’ Pelon said, though it was clear he made some connection with the dream. Valerius let it pass.

There was no need to check a mirror, the Praefector knew that his appearance was impeccable. A thousand times he and Pelon had performed the same dance, whether in a tent on a rain-swept plain while artillery thundered overhead, in the cramped quarters of a troopship forging through the warp, or back on Therion looking out over the family estates, the earthy but reassuring scent of the grox farms drifting through the windows.

It was a ritual that had once given Valerius great comfort. No matter what happened, what life threw at him, he was restored, created anew as an officer of the Emperor. Today the ceremony was empty, as it had been the last seven days. It brought no comfort as the screams of the ravens lingered on the edge of his hearing and flames flickered behind his eyes. All the fine Therion tradition and all of the panoply of the Imperial Army did nothing to assuage his fears. His role, his duty, only increased Valerius’s anxiety. An impulse at the core of his being told the Praefector that something was amiss in the universe and that as an officer of the Emperor is was his destiny to act.

Valerius headed out into the meandering tunnels of the old mines, Pelon by his side. Little could be seen of the grim origins of the labyrinth, the plasteel-clad walls obscuring marks of laser-pick and rock drill. Millions had laboured and died to fuel the greed of a few, but of their passing nothing remained. Lycaeus was no more. Valerius knew of it only from the old stories of tyranny and misery passed on to him by the legionaries of the Raven Guard; those that had been enslaved here and had joined the Legion after the Emperor’s arrival.

Now the moon was called Deliverance, its rockcrete pinnacles and winding corridors a testament to the benefits of Enlightenment and the determination of Lord Corax. Valerius barely thought about the bloody past of this place, but now and then he remembered that the air he breathed was the same air that those indentured, pitiful creatures had once breathed, before Lord Corax had led them to freedom.

The pair climbed several flights of stairs towards a shuttle pad and came to a viewing gallery: a hemisphere of armourplas where once the slavemasters had looked into the black skies and seen the fiery trails of the transports bringing their human cargo from the planet below. That world, Kiavahr, could not be seen at the moment. Sometimes it loomed large on the horizon like a resentful eye.

Valerius’s own eye was drawn to the towering needle known as the Ravenspire, former guard tower and now fortress of the Raven Guard, his destination this day. Its sheer sides were blistered with weapon bays and punctured by the light-filled maws of its docks. A hundred searchlights cut across the abyssal blackness of the airless world, fixed upon the mineworkings that sprawled across the moon’s cratered surface, glittering from force domes that protected worker tenements and mineral refineries.

The Ravenspire was quiet. All but a few hundred of the legionaries had left, following their Primarch Lord Corax to the Isstvan system. Valerius did not know the details – few if any did.

It was this that so vexed the Praefector. The dreams might somehow be a call for help from the Primarch. How this might be so, Valerius did not know. All he had was a resounding conviction that he was needed at Isstvan, and that he should go there to whatever fate awaited him.

The vaulted halls of the Ravenspire were eerily empty. The armouries were quiet, the launch bays dormant. The thud of Valerius’s boots seemed to echo all the more loudly than usual. Perhaps it was only his imagination. Commander Branne, leader of the Raven Guard still stationed on Deliverance, held his chambers high in the tower. He was alone as the Praefector and his companion entered, looking out through a narrow window into the starry sky. The commander was dressed in soft slippers and wore a simple black tabard embroidered with the sigil of his Legion.

He turned and smiled as Valerius entered, waving him to a couch along one wall of the low-ceilinged room. Branne sat next to him, the sofa creaking alarmingly under his weight. Even sitting down, the Space Marine dominated the room with his physical presence. His bare biceps were the size of Valerius’s thighs, his massive chest stretching the fabric of the tabard almost to tearing. The Praefector felt like a toddling child. It was even worse when confronted by Lord Corax, who made even the legionaries appear small and frail.

Valerius gulped back a moment of nervousness.

‘Is all well, commander?’ the Praefector asked casually.

Branne’s expression was wistful. His face was crossed with several scars and he unconsciously ran a finger along one across his brow as he replied.

‘This used to be a guard room,’ he said. ‘I killed my first man here, when I was younger than your manservant. Throttled him with the strap of his rifle and took his gun from him. Of course, Corax was with me then. I saw him rip out a man’s heart with his hand and crush the skull of another with his fist.’ He looked around the room, seeing memories rather than cold plasteel walls. ‘It’s a bit lonely. I wish I had gone with the rest of the Legion.’

‘Why didn’t you?’ asked Valerius.

‘Luck of the draw. Someone’s got to stay behind and watch the fortress. The commanders had a lottery and I lost, so here I am, missing out on the action.’

‘Perhaps not,’ said Valerius, sensing an opening.

‘I don’t understand you,’ said Branne. He looked up as Pelon appeared with a tray carrying two goblets. He shook his head but Valerius took the proffered water. It had a chemical aftertaste, not at all like the fresh-running streams of his estate on Therion. Still, water was life and he drank swiftly to remove the dryness that had nagged him since wakening.

The Praefector realised he was stalling, not wishing to explain himself. His words came in a rush, breaking through the dam of embarrassment that held them back.

‘I think that Lord Corax needs our help, on Isstvan, I mean. I fear that all has not gone well with the fight against Horus.’

Branne frowned.

‘What makes you think anything is amiss? Have you heard some word I haven’t?’

‘Not directly, no. Look, this is probably not going to make much sense, I don’t really understand it myself. I keep having a dream of burning ravens.’ The furrows in Branne’s brow deepened but Valerius plunged on, his voice rising with anxiety. ‘It might be nothing, nothing at all, but it has plagued me for seven days now. I fear that it is some kind of warning perhaps. I cannot explain it well, it is something that I can just feel. All is not well at Isstvan.’

Branne’s confusion became scepticism.

‘A dream? You want me to ship out to Isstvan, against the primarch’s orders, because of a dream?’

‘More than a dream, I am sure of it.’

‘You are worrying about nothing. Three Legions, three whole Legions move against Horus. Four more will follow-up their offensive. No matter what those traitors have done so far, they haven’t the strength to contend against that. What force in the galaxy could Horus possess to fight such an army?’

‘Perhaps you are right,’ Valerius conceded, though part of him was not convinced. ‘Maybe if I took my men there, just to be sure? If all is well we can simply return, a few weeks lost and nothing more.’

‘I am right,’ said Branne. ‘Nobody is leaving Deliverance, least of all your Imperial soldiers. This is Legion business. We look to our own and we will deal with our own. You must be ready for Lord Corax’s return. We’ll be in the warp and heading off to some other world soon enough, if you’re thirsty for action.’

Valerius nodded in defeat, suppressing a sigh. In the face of such a blank refusal, there was nothing else he could do.

Peace. A rhythmic hum muffled through artificial amniotic fluid. A calming voice, similarly distorted. The words are lost, but the tone comforting. Something beeps insistently in the background. A pale face appears, blurred through the incubator. The features are indistinct, the expression indiscernible. A hand is laid upon the glass of the pod: reverent, hopeful, nurturing. Even loving, perhaps?

Fire and blood crashed through the peace: fire from the burning engines of the Thunderhawk gunship; blood from the tears in his armour, rapidly thickening to stem the flow. There was no pain. No physical pain, at least. The psychological pain, the horror of betrayal, burned like an open wound in his thoughts.

Most of the crimson drying on his black armour was not his own. Pieces of shrapnel protruded from its ceramite skin – shards of armour from his bodyguard. Grisly lumps of flesh clogged the joints, slivers of bone trapped in strands of sinew and gobbets of muscle. He didn’t know the names of those that now stained his armour. He didn’t want to know.

Corax pushed himself from the wreckage of the gunship, steadying himself with the aid of Vincente Sixx.

‘You should allow me to see the wound, lord,’ said the apothecary.

‘It is nothing,’ Corax replied, truthfully.

‘That same blast killed five legionaries. I would not dismiss such a thing so lightly,’ insisted Sixx.

‘My body recovers. We have far more pressing concerns.’

Captain Alvarex stumbled down the assault ramp behind the primarch, the ceramite of his armour pitted with craters from bolter detonations, ivory-coloured holes in his black livery. He tried to hide a limp but it was clear Alvarex’s left leg was injured in some way. The captain carried a stratnet transmitter, salvaged from the gunship’s command deck.

‘Casualty estimates are sketchy,’ the captain reported. Even over the comm his voice was faint, hesitant.

‘Tell me,’ Corax said.

Sixx shook his head in disbelief as the captain replied.

‘Rough estimate is that seventy-five per cent of the Legion has already been lost. Losses may be as high as ninety per cent, lord.’

Corax groaned, hurt more by this news than the gouge in his flesh.

‘Give me a moment,’ said the primarch.

He turned away from the Space Marines as they alighted from the downed Thunderhawk. Many kilometres to the west, the Primarch could see the fires burning on the Urgall plateau and the ring of hills around it. Tens of thousands of legionaries lay dead there. Tens of thousands of Raven Guard. Corax had never been afraid of anything in his life. Not the whips of the slavers, not hordes of orks or armies of dissidents. This was something different. This was Space Marines killing Space Marines.

This was the birth of mankind destroying itself.

Corax allowed himself a few moments of grief, to ponder the lives lost, the fallen brothers-in-arms who had been cut down by their traitorous brethren. He watched the smoke billowing into the sky, blanketing the horizon. He remembered the hasty exchange with Vulkan as the traitors had opened fire from the rear. The primarch of the Salamanders had wanted to protect the dropsite. Corax had argued otherwise, knowing that the field was already lost. It was not in his nature to stay in one place and allow himself to be cut down. With Vulkan’s curses ringing in his ears, Corax had ordered his Legion to retreat by any means necessary. Emergency rendezvous points had been broadcast over the comm-net; coded, but Corax wondered if the traitors had access to the Raven Guard’s communications ciphers. When the survivors had regathered their strength, the primarch would have the Techmarines establish new security protocols.

In this way, with regret giving way to immediate needs, Corax pushed aside the empty gulf that threatened to swallow him. As his mind filled with dispositions and orders, he turned back to the remnants of his honour guard. A Techmarine, Stradon, fussed over a tangled mess of ceramite casing and steel feathers. Stradon looked up as Corax returned. The Techmarine’s helmeted head cocked to one side in dismay, his voice a hoarse whisper.

‘Your flight pack… I could cannibalise some parts from the Thunderhawk perhaps… Reverse-fit some of the attitude jets…’

‘Leave it,’ said Corax. He cast his gaze over the Space Marines looking expectantly at their primarch. ‘It will be some time before this raven flies again.’

The valley was filled with a deep mist, but there was darker smog amongst the haze – the smoke of engines. Corax was crouched at an observation point high on the western side of the gorge, his four commanders with him. The primarch had removed his winged helmet and listened intently, his superhuman ears better than any autosense the technorati could yet devise. He could tell every vehicle by its unique timbre of roar and grind of gears: Rhino transports, Land Raiders, Predator tanks, Thunderstrike assault guns. This last told him who it was that advanced up the valley, for only one Legion employed artillery of that fashion.

‘Iron Warriors,’ announced the primarch.

There were growls of disgust from the officers around him. Of those that had turned traitor, the Iron Warriors were reserved for especial hatred. The Raven Guard had always considered them brutal, simplistic in their tactics. Corax had never spoken his doubts openly, but he had not shared Perturabo’s approach to war. His former brother viewed conflict as a simple matter of exchanging punishment until one side capitulated. He was the sort that would stand face-to-face with a foe and trade blows, relying on obstinacy to prevail. More than once Perturabo had hinted he thought Corax cowardly for his preferred strategy of hit-and-run.

Corax cared little for the criticisms of the other primarchs. Their Legions were larger than his, their Terran forces bolstered by populous home planets. Deliverance had not the vast resources of many other worlds and only a few thousand more legionaries had swelled the ranks of the Raven Guard. Such a situation had necessitated a certain approach to war, one that Corax had learnt well when he had led the uprising against the slavemasters. Though it was the Raven Guard who had become the superior-armed force, Corax had never forgotten the hard-learnt lessons of that guerrilla war. Had he done as Perturabo believed – or as Vulkan had decided – his warriors would all be dead.

Through careful withdrawal under fire, some had escaped to rejoin the primarch. His four thousand legionaries were little compared to the might he had commanded only a dozen days earlier, but they were still Space Marines and they could still fight. Corax was determined that the dropsite massacre would not go unanswered. Perturabo’s warriors would learn that sometimes the concealed blow was the most lethal.

Corax listened intently to the mechanical noises echoing along the valley, pinpointing each source.

‘Fourteen Rhinos, three Land Raiders, six Predators, three Thunderstrikes,’ the primarch told his officers. None doubted his word, his eyes and ears more accurate than any scanner they had remaining in their armoury. ‘Advancing in double column, six transports in the vanguard, half a kilometre ahead. Two outriding squadrons of bikes, twenty in total.’

The primarch looked up. The cloud in the highlands was low. He heard no jets. It was unlikely that the Iron Warriors had aerial forces, they would be virtually useless in this weather. Further up, beyond the atmosphere, their frigates and battle barges peered down upon Isstvan V with their long-range augurs, but finding a force as small as Corax’s would be all but impossible. It was a gamble, but Corax had to hope that the recon column – one of three that had been scouring the hills since the massacre – did not have attached orbital support.

‘When we attack, they will assume an arrowpoint defensive stance,’ Corax continued. ‘Land Raiders to the fore, Predators along the flanks, assault guns and transports as reserve. That is just the sort of fight these bastards like. Let’s not give them that.’

‘Diversionary delayed attack, lord?’ suggested Agapito, Commander of the Talons, the Tactical companies that formed the fighting backbone of the newly reorganised Raven Guard.

Corax nodded. He turned to Commander Aloni, freshly appointed leader of the Assault companies – the Falcons.

‘Agapito will set up a base of fire in the eastern head of the valley,’ said the primarch. ‘Give the Iron Warriors ten minutes to assemble their formation before attacking the rear. Agapito, I need you to draw their attention to you as much as possible. Hit them hard and hold your ground. Retaliation will be intense. You have to take it. If the enemy think you are going to fall back they will form up for pursuit, which will leave a rearguard right in front of Aloni’s companies. Don’t allow that to happen.’

The commanders nodded their understanding. Another officer, Solaro, spoke next.

‘What about the outriders, lord?’

‘Use your bike squads to give them something to chase. Draw them to the west. Aloni, slant your attack from the east.’

There were affirmatives from the officers, followed by a moment’s quiet until Aloni voiced the question they were all anxious to ask.

‘And you, lord? Where will you be fighting?’

‘I’ll attack from the south-east, as the second wing of the delayed attack.’

‘Is that wise?’ asked Agapito. ‘You disbanded your bodyguard into the other companies.’

Corax stood up to his full height and unslung his heavy bolter, holding it easily in his left hand. The towering primarch smiled down at his officers.

‘That was for appearance. Do you think I actually need a bodyguard?’

The valley was alight with heavy weapons fire and bolter rounds. Two Rhinos were smouldering wrecks and a Land Raider burned fiercely from its engine compartment. The traitors’ return fire was intense, a stream of shells and blasts that seared away the concealing mists. Detonations wracked the boulder-strewn hillside where Agapito’s Talons poured fire on the Iron Warriors.

Corax watched the exchange from a narrow defile a few hundred metres behind the Iron Warriors’ positions. He saw the crews of the Thunderstrikes readying their big guns and knew it was time to act. He had expected as much, but hadn’t wanted Aloni to attack too soon for fear of revealing the strategy. Corax felt no remorse at deceiving his own commanders – it was for their survival that the primarch had decided against them attacking early. He could handle this situation on his own.

The primarch broke from cover, pounding across the pebble-strewn hillside with long strides. Surprise would be his first weapon. As the gravel sprayed underfoot, a lone Iron Warrior, his silver armour dappled with water droplets, turned towards Corax, perhaps somehow hearing the crunching footfalls over the din of the battle. The primarch acted without hesitation. Stooping in his run, he snatched up a shard of rock. With a flick of his arm, he hurled the stone at the Iron Warrior. As a dark blur it struck the Space Marine in the throat and erupted from the back of his neck, silently felling him. Corax sprinted onwards, readying his heavy bolter.

The Thunderstrikes opened up on the Raven Guard, three enormous blossoms of fire enveloping the hillside. Corax could not spare a glance for the devastation caused, he was utterly focussed on his targets. Fifty metres behind the assault guns he stopped and took up a firing position, bringing the heavy bolter up to his left shoulder as an ordinary man might heft a rifle.

He sighted on the closest Thunderstrike, eyes narrowed. He aimed at a point just above the armoured maintenance hatch in the vehicle’s flank, beyond which sat the primary engine relays. The first roaring salvo of bolts hit the exact mark, ripping through the armour plates. A moment later smoke was billowing from the Thunderstrike’s engines before a ball of fire engulfed the assault gun sending torn pieces of metal flying in all directions.

Corax had no time to admire his handiwork. His following fusillade tore into the flexible armour of the next Thunderstrike’s gun mounting, smashing gears, jamming the cannon in place. Silver shapes spilled from the Rhinos and ran towards Corax but he ignored them. He primed three krak grenades, easily holding all of them in the palm of his hand. With an overhand toss, he lobbed the grenades onto the engine vents of the third Thunderstrike, shattering the grille and rupturing fuel lines. Soon the vehicle was ablaze along the left side of its hull. As the crew emerged smouldering from the hatches Corax gunned them down with raking fire.

Bolter rounds were pattering from Corax’s armour, nothing more than a distraction. Taking in everything at a glance, the primarch turned his attention to a Predator tank slewing in his direction. Its lascannon sponsons swivelled towards him.

Twin blasts of energy exploded around the primarch, hurling him to his back, his chest plastron a semi-molten slurry, the heavy bolter a mangled ruin in his hand. Pain flared across his chest but disappeared as quickly as it came. Corax tossed the heavy bolter aside and pulled himself to his feet as the Predator’s turret opened fire, autocannon rounds shrieking past the primarch.

He broke into a loping run, shells ringing from his helmet and shoulder pads as he sprinted into the teeth of the metal storm. He cared nothing for the danger, except to embrace it. This was what he had been created to do and joy sang in his veins.

Corax’s joy was further fuelled by a righteousness of purpose. He looked at the Iron Warriors and saw only cowardly bullies revealed in their true nature. The primarch had been raised fighting such tyrants. To find them within the ranks of the Legiones Astartes appalled him in a way that nothing else ever had. The slavemasters of Lycaeus had been human. They had been fallible. The Space Marines had no such excuse. They had been chosen for their strength of body and purpose. They had sworn binding oaths of service to the Emperor and the growing empire of mankind. They were liberators, not oppressors.

With a feral roar, Corax leapt upon the Predator. Driven by his indignant rage, he drove his fist through the driver’s slit, crushing the skull of the Iron Warrior within. Jumping onto the turret, the primarch tore away the hatch covers, sending their jagged remains scything through the Iron Warriors squads advancing on him from the transports. The tank’s commander looked up in surprise as dim light flooded the interior of the Predator. Corax reached in, his gauntlet enveloping the Space Marine’s head. The helmet resisted for a moment before giving in to the titanic pressure, the tank commander’s skull collapsing between Corax’s fingers.

Dropping to the ground, the primarch grabbed one of the sponson lascannons and braced a foot against the tank’s hull. With a heave of his shoulders, Corax tore the mounting free, the gunner within dragged halfway out of the hole. Corax brought his fist down onto the Iron Warrior’s back, the force of the blow cracking his armour and shattering his spine.

The bolter fire was becoming too intense to ignore. Like a rain shower that suddenly becomes a hail storm, it had grown in vehemence. Four squads of Iron Warriors poured their fire at the primarch, legs braced, muzzle flares gleaming from their armour. The primarch hurled the remains of the predator sponson through them, crushing three Space Marines.

The smoking trail of a missile cut through the air a moment before the projectile crashed into Corax’s left shoulder, sending shards of ceramite in all directions, staggering the primarch to one knee. He spat a wordless curse as he surged forwards once more, cutting to the left and right as balls of plasma and more rockets screamed around him.

Corax covered the hundred metres in a few seconds, coming at the nearest squad from their flank. His fists buckled the faceplates of the first two Space Marines. As their bodies slumped, the primarch snatched up their weapons and stormed into the rest of the squad, a blazing bolter in each hand. The bolts hammered into the Iron Warriors, half a dozen more left on the ground before the ammunition belts were exhausted. Corax tossed the weapons aside.

The squad’s sergeant leapt at Corax, a screeching chainsword in his right hand, bolt pistol blazing in the left. The primarch swatted away the whirring teeth of the chainsword and grabbed the sergeant’s elbow. With a twist and a wrench, he tore out the Iron Warrior’s arm and swung it around, the razor-sharp blades of the chainsword biting deep into the sergeant’s helmet. Corax threw the bloody limb aside and grabbed a grenade from the fallen sergeant’s belt, slamming his fist into the chest of another Space Marine, the explosive detonating in his grasp.

Corax heard the whine of hydraulics to his right as he shook his numbed fingers. A Land Raider opened its assault ramp. Silhouetted against the ruddy light within, a squad of bulky Terminators advanced with purpose. They did not waste the ammunition of their combi-bolters but came forward quickly, flexing lightning-enveloped claws.

More detonations and bolter fire rocked the Iron Warriors column as the Falcons attacked, Aloni’s companies descending on the traitors with jump packs flaring. The Talons pushed forwards from the valley ahead, lascannons and missile launchers cutting trails of death through the surrounded Iron Warriors.

The Terminators hesitated in their advance as anarchy reigned around them. Corax reached behind him and pulled a fresh weapon from his belt. A long twin-barbed whip uncoiled in his hands, writhing with a life of its own. The primarch had requested the Mechanicum of Mars to fashion the lash for him. The irony of wielding such a tyrant’s weapon in a noble cause pleased Corax. Inside his helmet, the primarch grinned in anticipation.

Flickers of energy sparking along its length, the whip flicked out in Corax’s hand and caught the closest Terminator with a thunderous crack, slicing him from shoulder to waist. His remains fell to the ground in three, wisps of smoke drifting from the neatly sliced body parts.

The Terminators opened fire but it was too late. Corax’s whip slashed the head from another and cut the legs from under a third. Aloni bounded past in his ebon armour, his plasma pistol spitting incandescent blasts.

Corax felt a surge of exultation and raised the whip above his head.

‘No mercy!’

The Raven Guard picked the dead clean of everything that could be taken. They worked their way amongst the fallen, slaying those traitors that still lived whilst Sixx and his fellow Apothecaries did what they could to attend the loyalist wounded. Weapons were ripped from dead grasps and ammunition taken from the belts and packs of the fallen.

It was with some distaste that Corax had ordered such plundering, but the circumstances offered him no choice. If his warriors were to continue fighting, they needed supplies. They had to move swiftly, the attack on the column fixing the Raven Guard in one place. Corax wanted to be many kilometres away before any more forces arrived in the area.

Survival was the key. Strike and withdraw and live to strike again. This gross betrayal would not go unnoticed. The Emperor would learn of what had befallen his Legions at Isstvan and his retribution would be swift, of that Corax was sure. He was determined that his warriors would live long enough to see it.

Valerius could see the doubt in the eyes of his subordinates. They were wary. He knew he presented a less-than-inspiring image, cheeks drawn, eyes dark and haunted. For thirty nights he had snatched no more than a few hours of sleep, waking early every morning with the stench of burning flesh in his nostrils and the cries of the dying in his ears. His continued applications to Commander Branne had all fallen on deaf ears and the Praefector was desperate.

He had to go to Isstvan. Nothing else would relieve his foreboding.

Valerius watched the columns of black-masked soldiers marching onto the orbital shuttles, confident that he was doing the right thing. Massive rams lifted the craft out of the sealed hangars into the launch domes above. Beyond the faint blue sheen of the forcefield, plasma jets roared into life, taking the slab-sided shuttles into low orbit over Deliverance where they delivered their living cargo to the immense warp-capable transports of the Imperial Army. His command staff had done as he asked and the regiment had been mustered and supplied ready for the journey to Isstvan. Despite their compliance, Valerius had detected an undertone of confusion and unease amongst his officers and turned his attention back to them, pulling himself straight despite the weariness he felt in his bones.

‘Fifty per cent of the infantry and eighty per cent of the armour has been embarked, Praefector,’ reported First Tribune Marius. He referred to a wafer-thin data-slate before continuing. ‘Seven transports are squared away and ready to leave. The captains of the three others report that they will be warp-worthy within five hours. Frigates Escalation, Garius and Vendetta stand ready for escort service.’

Marius paused and exchanged a glance with the other Tribunes and Aquilons. Valerius guessed Marius had been nominated as spokesman for the command staff’s concerns. It was unlikely anybody would have volunteered for such a task.

‘What is it?’ snapped Valerius.

Marius’s reply was reluctant and he again looked at his companions for encouragement.

‘Praefector, we have yet to receive orders confirmation from Commander Branne, nor launch vectors from the Ravenspire.’

Valerius cleared his throat, uncomfortable.

‘Such verification will be coming shortly. Continue with the boarding manifests.’

Marius and the others hesitated.

‘We are worried about your health, Praefector,’ said Marius. ‘You have not been well of late.’

Valerius summoned his resolve, drawing on the generations of breeding and military command that had paved his way to his position as a Therion Praefector.

‘I gave you an order, Tribune! Be prepared to leave orbit as soon as possible. This is my regiment, seconded to Lord Corax himself. Order confirmations and launch vectors will be forthcoming. I will travel to the Ravenspire to deal with any delay. Is there anything else?’

Marius opened his mouth and then closed it. The others darted angry glances at the First Tribune but remained silent.

‘Good, I am happy that I have made myself clear. Go and attend to your duties.’

Valerius received the salutes of the officers with a nod and watched them turn and disperse into the companies of Imperial soldiers forming up for boarding. He breathed out heavily, and could feel his hands shaking. It was just fatigue, he was sure. Nothing more serious.

With another cough he called for Pelon to bring forward his aircar. He would have to go to the Ravenspire, and that meant another confrontation with Branne. Have the courage of your convictions, Valerius told himself. Even to himself, his words sounded weak.

‘This is insubordination!’ roared Branne, looming over Valerius. The Praefector could not help but shrink away from the intimidating bulk of the commander. He hated himself for showing such weakness, it was an affront to the uniform he wore. He was a loyal officer of the Emperor, not some tutor-yard weakling. Yet the Praefector’s protests died in his throat as Branne’s tirade continued. The commander paced across his private chambers, where the walls were hung with paintings depicting idealised scenes from the liberation of Deliverance. Lord Corax featured in all of them.

‘It is precisely because of this… this idiocy that command of the Imperial Army was given to the Legions. A few dreams and you’re ready to head straight into a highly-volatile warzone. Do you really think that Corax wants your regiment hanging around, something else for him to worry about? Leave aside the nonsense of these dreams and consider this. If what you say is true, what difference will one regiment make? Horus’s forces are Legiones Astartes! If the whole might of the Raven Guard, not to mention six – six! – more Legions, are not enough to quell Horus’s rebellion, what can your troops achieve?’

At this, Valerius smarted and he stepped forward, fist raised.

‘We’d actually be there! No, we are not Space Marines, we are not the Emperor’s favoured. We are simply men. Men that believe in the Imperial Truth, in the forging of this new Empire every bit as much as you!’

‘Men are weak,’ replied Branne and Valerius exploded with rage, his frayed psyche finally giving vent. He did not shout; his voice descended to a spite-filled whisper.

‘It is not a normal man that leads this rebellion. Horus is a Space Marine, one of yours! The best of you, if that is to be believed anymore.’

‘Be careful what you say next, Valerius,’ snarled Branne, fists balled by his sides. ‘It is not wise to stand in judgement of your betters.’

Valerius was shocked, speechless. He turned and stalked a few paces away from Branne, quivering with indignation. He had no argument that would sway the Space Marine. In a way, the commander was correct. His legionaries were far superior to Valerius and his warriors. They were created by the Emperor to be physically greater than any mortal human. Their armour was better, their weapons the best that the Mechanicum could create. But that was all that they were – soldiers, war-bringers, conquerors.

Valerius calmed himself before turning back to Branne. He was about to offer a conciliatory gesture when Branne suddenly looked at Valerius with narrowed eyes. The Space Marine’s whole body tensed and for a moment Valerius was filled with an animal fear, that of a prey seeing the predator ready to pounce.

‘Perhaps there is some other reason you are so eager to travel to Isstvan with all of your warriors? Maybe it is not to Lord Corax’s aid that you would go, but to the rebels’.’

Valerius was horrified at the suggestion but Branne continued before he could offer any argument.

‘Perhaps you think you are too good to serve under the Legion? Is that it? Perhaps your dreams are a result of tortured pride, a symptom of a badly bruised ego? Maybe you feel that you would be better off serving Horus?’

‘My pride is in this uniform,’ hissed Valerius, tugging at the sash across his chest. ‘You know why I wear the red? My father gave his blood for the Emperor! He fought and died beside the Legions when they came to Therion. This is a badge of my family’s dedication to the Emperor, a sign of the Emperor’s trust in my family. It means as much to me as that sigil upon your tabard. Do not dare to suppose that I would besmirch this honour!’

Branne was taken aback by the vehemence of Valerius. He blinked several times, as might a large dog when swiped across the nose by a feisty young pup.

‘The weakness of men?’ Valerius muttered, not daring to look at Branne. ‘Yes, the Legiones Astartes united Earth and conquered the galaxy. Behind their guns and swords, we forged across the stars and claimed so many thousands of worlds for the Emperor. You created the Imperium, of that I am sure. But without us weak, frail men, what would you be? Who pilots the ships that carry you, grows the crops that feed you, makes the weapons you wield and raises the children that will be your future generations? Not the Space Marines.’

Branne’s hesitation lasted only a moment and his scowl returned.

‘This is not a debate, Praefector. Were you a pilot, a farmer, a techpriest or a father, you could say such things. You are not, you are an officer of the Imperial Army and you answer to the Legion. I am ranking commander on Deliverance and I order you stand down your regiment. You may not leave for Isstvan. You are not welcome there.’

Exhaustion threatened to overwhelm Valerius. He straightened and took a deep breath, thinking the unthinkable. The Praefector steadied himself and looked Branne directly in the eye.

‘And if I choose to go anyway?’

Branne’s stare was as hard and uncompromising as the suit of armour that stood in the corner of the chamber.

‘Deliverance has many orbital weapons.’

‘Reminds me of Eblana,’ rasped Agapito. He peered out of the cave mouth as rain sheeted down, turning the grassland outside into a quagmire.

‘Aye,’ said Sergeant Lancrato, another of the Terran veterans who had been at the pacification of the marsh-city. He laughed at a recollection. ‘Remember Hadraig leading us into that bog? Up to our arses in mud, starshells overhead, mortar bombs landing all around us.’

Agapito did not join in his companion’s humour. His tone was sombre.

‘I’d rather have that stinking marsh than this. At least we knew where we were going, even if it was difficult to get to.’

‘We can’t stay in one place, it would be suicide. You know that. We’ll hide out in these caves while we can and then move on.’

‘Yes, I know that, but it galls me to run from these traitorous swine.’

‘I also,’ rumbled a voice from the vast cavern.

Corax emerged from the gloom, divested of his armour. The primarch was clad in a black undersuit, immense muscles criss-crossed with wires and circuits woven into its fabric. His dark eyes stared outside for a moment and then fell upon the two Space Marines.

‘I’m going for a walk,’ the primarch announced.

‘In this?’ Lancrato’s laugh was incredulous. ‘A strange time for a stroll.’

Corax gave a lopsided smile.

‘I never had fresh air before my first planetfall with the Legion. Can’t get enough of it now.’

‘Where are you going, lord?’ asked Agapito.

‘To have a look around. It’s been thirty days since the drop and there’s been no word at all from the Salamanders or Iron Hands. We can’t risk any comms broadcasts, Horus’s followers may use them to locate us. I need to find out what’s happening, make contact with the other Legions. I may be gone for several days. It will be safe to remain here while the bad weather holds. If it clears before I return, move the force west to the Lerghan Ridge and I will meet you there.’

With that, the primarch strode out into the rain.

Corax headed towards the Urgall Hills, swiftly covering the kilometres with easy strides at a pace he could sustain for many days. He avoided the more open plains and kept to the ridgelines and valleys, never exposing himself upon a horizon, circling around the remnants of villages and towns.

He did not allow himself to think too much as he ran. There was little point to it. For thirty days he had asked himself why this had happened; wondered how Horus had turned so many to his cause. It didn’t matter how Horus had created this revolt, the pressing matter was that the Warmaster had. If an effective counterstrike was to be made, those that remained loyal to the Emperor had to come together. If they remained divided they would be picked off, one Legion at a time.

The primarch occupied himself with thoughts of strategy, recalling everything about the topography and landscape of Isstvan V. He mentally overlaid the map with the forces of the Legions ranged against him, estimating their strengths, where they would be disposed and where there would be gaps in their defences.

As dawn broke, the primarch reached Tor Venghis, a mount that overlooked the dropsite where so many of his warriors had been slain. From this vantage point he looked out across the Urgall Hills. Huge dropships dominated the landscape, blazoned with the liveries of the traitors: Sons of Horus, Iron Warriors, World Eaters, Emperor’s Children, Death Guard, Alpha Legion, even the Word Bearers.

Corax’s heart fell at the sight. So many had turned! It seemed impossible that those who only months before had fought valiantly alongside the Raven Guard were now hunting them down. Despite his earlier thoughts on the futility of understanding their treachery, Corax could not fight the urge to find out more. He needed to get closer, to walk amongst this devastation so that he might better understand it.

So it was that the primarch of the Raven Guard stole into the Urgall Depression and drew upon that ability he had possessed since his first memory but had revealed to no one. He knew not how it came to be, but if he focused his thoughts, he could pass unseen amongst others. Long he had honed his power in the fighting against the slavemasters, walking through their defences in plain sight. His followers had not been aware of his special talent, but there had been plenty about their mysterious leader they had not known.

It was not that he literally disappeared – more than one encounter with an automatic scanner had taught him that – it was that the minds of others ignored Corax if he wished it. Like a predator that only recognises the shapes of its prey, those that Corax wished to deceive simply did not register his presence. Such was their unconscious disbelief that they even refused to acknowledge a return on a scanner sweep or the glow of a thermal monitor. To any naked eye Corax could, for want of a better term, become invisible.

Only one other knew of this – the Emperor. As he picked his way down to the depression the primarch thought about that day when the Emperor came to Deliverance, to be reunited with his progeny. He remembered the looks of adulation and adoration on Corax’s guerrilla warriors as the Emperor had stepped down alone from his shuttle.

Corax’s memory was as sharp as a sword point, but even he could not quite remember the Emperor’s face, though it was clear he had not seen what had so struck the others with awe. The Emperor had seemed young in body, but his eyes were as old as anything Corax had ever seen. He was of no particular stature, neither tall nor short, fat nor thin.

‘You recognise me?’ the Emperor had asked when the two had withdrawn from the others. He had been clearly surprised by Corax’s reaction.

‘As if from an old dream, yes,’ Corax had replied. ‘I thought you would be taller.’

‘Interesting,’ had been the Emperor’s brief reply.

It was then that the Emperor had explained to Corax what he truly was – a primarch, one of twenty created by him to lead Mankind’s conquest of the stars. Corax had not doubted a word of it, the presence of the Emperor made everything else fall into place. They had talked for a whole day, of the Emperor’s plans and the ongoing Great Crusade. Corax told the Emperor of what had passed on Lycaeus and of the continuing conflict with the planet below. That day they pledged support and loyalty to each other and the Emperor had smiled and nodded.

As Corax had guided the Emperor back to his shuttle, the Master of Mankind had laid a gentle hand on Corax’s arm, his deep blue eyes gleaming. Corax remembered the warmth he had felt, elation coming from the Emperor’s parting words even though the primarch had made no mention of his peculiar ability.

‘You will never have to hide again.’

The primarch snorted at his sentimentality. He was hiding again, of that there was no doubt. He was not scurrying through some ventilation duct, or slipping past a guard post, but Corax suddenly felt as if all the years between then and now had been for nothing.

He looked at the devastation wrought at the dropsite. The Iron Warriors were fortifying the hills, as was their wont. Columns of Space Marines, on foot and in their armoured vehicles, stretched as far as the eye could see. Under the dark clouds their camps sprawled across the Urgall Depression like a stain, but there was something else that darkened the grassy hillsides and wind-swept basin.

Corpses. Tens of thousands of them. The traitors had left the dead where they had fallen, perhaps as a testament to their victory, perhaps unwilling to sweep away the shameful evidence of their treachery.

The slaughter was unimaginable, even to one who had spent his entire life at war. So many dead; legionaries dead, by the hand of other legionaries. This was no mere rebellion, this was something far greater. Rebels raised their voices openly against those they despised. These traitors had plotted in the shadows and bided their time. Who could say how long Horus had been secretly working against the will of the Emperor?

With a shock, Corax realised that he might have been an unwitting conspirator in this uprising. How many of Horus’s orders had he followed without question? How many times had he discussed his strategies, his plans, with the likes of Angron and Fulgrim?

Cloaked from view, Corax wandered amidst the bloodied piles of flesh and shattered armour. He heard harsh laughter from the traitor camps and ignored it. He saw the colours of the Raven Guard next to that of the Salamanders. Company banners lay tattered and broken in the gore-slicked grass. Here and there he saw the livery of the traitors, flecks of bright colour amongst the black and drab greens of the loyalists.

Corax could follow the course of the battle by the dead left in its wake. A fighting retreat here, a last stand around a banner there, a counter-assault against a position over there. Like a story, the scene played out, the Salamanders falling back into an ever smaller pocket of resistance, the Raven Guard breaking out in whatever directions they could. A psychotic charge from Angron’s World Eaters cleaving into the Salamanders’ defensive cordon; gun batteries of the Iron Warriors on the high ground; an encircling attack by the Word Bearers. Far away, the metal colours of the Iron Hands glittered in the rising sun, where Ferrus Manus had led them against the Emperor’s Children.

Of his fellow primarchs, there was no sign.

Corax knelt beside the body of a Raven Guard, his chestplate rent open, his ribcage splayed. His armour bore the markings of a veteran, one of those that had come from Terra and made Deliverance his new home.

Corax had seen untold atrocities and, in the name of Enlightenment and the future had even committed a few. Of these he was not proud, but he was sure that his cause had always been just. He had seen the slavers throttle babies to punish their mothers, and bloodthirsty Khrave fall upon columns of refugees. Never once had any of it caused Corax the slightest hesitation. War was not glorious, it was a desperate, messy business. But it had been his business, one in which he had excelled. This massacre, it was beyond the pale.

For the first and last time in his life, Corax cried. He cried not for the loss of life, though it was great. He cried not for the degradation that had been heaped upon his dead warriors, though it was obscene. He cried for all Space Marines, for the shame that Horus had brought upon them. They had been the Emperor’s trusted sword, and they had betrayed him. It mattered not that Corax himself had remained loyal. He was of the Legiones Astartes and the shame of one was the shame of all.

‘Will they ever trust us again?’ he whispered as a single tear rolled down his cheek and dropped onto the fallen Raven Guard.

Should they trust us, was the next question, one that Corax did not want to ask and certainly could not answer. The Emperor made us gods and mankind followed us, Corax thought heavily. In us he poured the hopes and dreams of humanity, and we raised ourselves up above them. He gave us armies to command and the resources of the galaxy to draw upon. What have we done with that? When we first awoke, what did we do with the power he gave us? Set ourselves up as warrior-kings, with planets as vassals and star systems as our fiefdoms. Not all of us follow Horus, but none of us are beyond blame. Perhaps it is better not to trust us. Perhaps the galaxy is better ruled by normal men, who live and die and whose ambitions are not so grand.

Depression weighed down Corax as he continued his search. There was no sign of Ferrus Manus or Vulkan, though he did not know whether that boded well or ill. There was but one truth to face. The Salamanders and Iron Hands were no more. If aid was to come, it would be from outside Isstvan V.

The Raven Guard would have to fight on alone.

The ensign’s tone was worried as he turned from his console aboard the bridge of Valerius’s flagship, the Remarkable.

‘Praefector, I’m detecting power surges from the orbital platforms in our grid. Weapons are priming!’

Valerius looked to his comms officer.

‘Get me an immediate relay to the Ravenspire, and put it through to my cabin.’

Without waiting for the response, the Praefector hurried from the bridge into his private chamber. He flicked on the vid-screen and paced back and forth across the narrow room as the display filled with multicoloured static.

Commander Branne’s voice cut through Valerius’s agitation.

‘I warned this would happen.’

Valerius spun towards the screen and saw the Space Marine’s face filling the display. The commander’s expression was blank, giving no sign of what he was about to do.

‘Surely you cannot be considering opening fire on Imperial ships?’

‘It is not my decision, Praefector. You have disobeyed a direct command from your superiors. What happens next is up to you.’

Valerius fought the urge to claw at his hair in frustration. He could hear the cawing of ravens even when awake, and the corners of the cabin seemed to flicker with flames.

‘The deaths of your men will be on your hands, not mine,’ insisted Branne.

‘How can you say that?’ shrieked Valerius. ‘It is by your command that they will be killed. You would slay them out of hand? I cannot believe that even you are that inhuman.’

‘These are inhuman times, Praefector. In following your unconfirmed orders, your officers and men place themselves in conspiracy with your insubordination.’

‘They’re just following my orders,’ growled Valerius. ‘To do otherwise would be mutinous.’

‘Yet you choose to commit that crime on their behalf. I say it again – this is your doing, not mine.’

Valerius’s hands formed claws as he tried to grasp some argument or line of reasoning that would persuade Branne not to open fire. He could think of nothing. His entire claim to this endeavour was based on a dream that tormented him and a deep feeling of dread, and nothing more.

Then it came to him. Valerius rounded on the screen with a last, desperate hope in his heart.

‘What if it is you and not me that is wrong?’

Branne furrowed his brow in confusion as he answered.

‘My orders were explicit, as were yours. The chain of command is equally clear. Any error is yours, not mine.’

‘But think of the consequences! Think not of the arguments and reasons for a moment, but think only of what happens if we follow your path and not mine.’

Branne shook his head, unable to understand Valerius’s argument. The Praefector continued at pace, scrabbling after the words as a drowning man might lunge for a lifeline.

‘If you are right and I am wrong, what harm is caused?’

‘If my worst suspicions are correct, you may aid the traitors.’

Valerius nodded at this, thinking as quickly as his fatigue-numbed mind would allow.

‘Then come with me. Bring your legionaries aboard and hold a gun to my head. I would be the first to pay if there is any hint of treachery in my actions. In that circumstance, what possible gain would there be for me?’

Branne shook his head again but said nothing, so Valerius plunged on.

‘And what if this is just a wild chase? What have we lost by acting? Nothing!’

The Space Marine remained unconvinced and Valerius moved in for his final argument.

‘But consider this. Think of the consequences if, against everything you believe and have been trained for, I am right. Think! If what I say is true, no matter how, then what is the price we pay for not acting? If you come with me, history might remember you as the commander that lost his pride because he allowed a delusional army officer to fool him? Your reputation might suffer, that is true. On the other hand, would you instead be remembered as the commander that stayed at home, too proud to listen to those that warned him of danger, while his primarch needed him?’

Valerius could see his words sinking in as Branne’s frown deepened even further. The Space Marine’s jaw worked incessantly as he turned the words over in his mind, analysing them as he might a battlefield situation, examining them from different perspectives.

‘I do not believe you,’ said Branne. ‘Though the consequences of inaction are far greater, the more likely risk is the loss of my honour, by a considerable factor. I see no benefit in your course of action.’

Valerius fell to his knees, hands held out imploringly towards the flickering image of the commander.

‘Lord Corax needs us! He needs you!’

‘And if he doesn’t? If I go to Isstvan and he welcomes me with scorn?’

Valerius rose to his feet and pulled his hand across his chest in salute, fist grasping the sash.

‘I will give up the red and offer my life as forfeit for my mistake. I will take the dishonour, even to the ruination of my family.’

An internal broadcast cut across the transmission from the Ravenspire. It was the officer at the scanner arrays, his voice timorous, broken.

‘Praefector? Orbital batteries have locked on to our vessels! What should we do? Praefector?’

Valerius cut the link and stared at Branne.

‘It is your decision, commander. My fate is in your hands.’

‘We will be avenged,’ Corax told his legionaries.

Behind him the Ghular salt plains stretched for hundreds of kilometres, offering no sanctuary to his depleted army. They had fought as hard as they could, never getting caught, always moving. Now there was nowhere left to run. The Raven Guard were trapped, sheltering in the last cover that had been left to them while the traitors scoured Urgall.

‘Have you ever seen such a thing?’ asked Agapito.

Corax shook his head. The might of the World Eaters Legion was arrayed against them. Tens of thousands of warriors poured up the slope, only a few kilometres away. From this distance they were lines of blue and white, though much tainted with red. Some of the World Eaters had taken to daubing the blood of the fallen on their armour, marring their Imperial livery in defiance of the Emperor.

‘He is with them,’ said Corax.

‘Who?’ said Alconi.

‘Angron, my headstrong brother,’ replied Corax, pointing into the mass of warriors. Amidst the blue and white armour strode a giant clad in red and gold, a great cloak of fur upon his back. Brazen chains were wrapped about his hands and wrists, a massive chainaxe in each hand. Corax could hear the savage war cries of Angron’s lobotomised warriors, their chanting flowing up the hillside as a challenge to the Raven Guard.

Corax flexed his grip on his whip as he watched the World Eaters Primarch stalking forwards. He knew this was the end. He had barely three thousand Space Marines against the might of a whole legion. He would have to face Angron, and he knew he would fall to the World Eater. There was not another primarch that could best him in single combat, save perhaps Horus, and maybe Sanguinius. Corax was an immortal lord of battle, but Angron was war incarnate. The Raven Guard had seen him leading his troops through the breach at Hell’s Anvil and witnessed his talent for destruction during the Siege of Gehenna.

No, there was not a doubt in Corax’s mind that Angron would slay him, and take great pleasure in the act.

Corax recalled part of the conversation he had shared with the Emperor on Deliverance. The primarch was not sure he yet understood what the Emperor had been saying, for he had said a great many things that referred to the time before his Unification of Terra, references to ancient Earth and his own life that were far beyond Corax’s knowledge.

‘Each of those parts that they put into me, I gave to each of you,’ the Emperor had said. Corax had asked who had put what into the Emperor but he had shaken his head and refused to answer, telling Corax that it was not important anymore. Reunited with his primarchs, he would be whole once again.

The Raven Guard’s leader wondered what part of the Emperor had been put into a beast like Angron. He shuddered to think what Horus had promised the World Eater in return for his betrayal of the Emperor. Conquest, no doubt, and glory in battle. Angron had craved these things more than any other primarch, though Corax and his brothers had all been created with a fierce military pride. What else, Corax thought. What do you gain from this rebellion against the Emperor?

As Corax watched the hordes of the World Eaters streaming towards him, he guessed at an answer. Freedom. Freedom from holding back. Freedom from restraint. Freedom from guilt and orders. But freedom was not without its drawbacks. The primarchs and their warriors needed structure, needed purpose to focus their martial instincts. Without the guiding hand, once provided by the Emperor, now manipulated by Horus, the Legions were nothing more than a bolter without an eye to aim it. Was the wildness, the savagery of the army that raged towards him something that hid inside every Legion?

Corax could not believe it was so. Duty, honour, loyalty. For the strong to fight for the weak, that was purpose. Freedom of the type craved by Angron was an empty existence, removed of all measure and boundary, so that no act had meaning because it served no further end. Corax had freed Deliverance from the slavemasters and then guided them into the fold of the Imperium. Perhaps he had merely swapped one master for another, but at least he was free to choose the master he would serve.

Relieved at his conclusion – that he had not in him the means to become a tyrant like Angron – Corax relaxed and waited. Legionaries fighting legionaries was a horrific thing, but in his heart the primarch knew that he would rather fall to the hand of one of his brothers than suffer any other fate. The Space Marines had pounded this new Imperium out of the rawness of the galaxy and it was fitting that it would be them who would decide its fate, for good or ill.

The first missiles from the World Eaters whirlwinds were streaking through the sky towards the Raven Guard. They refused to take shelter, proud to stand their ground against this enemy. The explosions tore through the squads, slaying dozens. Corax stood amidst it all as in the eye of a hurricane. His officers looked to him and drew strength from his bold defiance of the World Eaters.

More vapour trails crossed the open skies, but something was wrong with their direction. They came from behind the Raven Guard.

Corax looked up and 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 fire descended from orbit, cutting great gouges into Angron’s Legion.

The roar of jets became deafening as dropships descended on pillars of fire. Black dropships emblazoned with the sigil of the Raven Guard. The Space Marines 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 dropships 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.’

‘This is Praefector Valerius of the Imperial Army, serving under Commander Branne, my lord. We have a short window of evacuation, board as soon as you are able.’

Corax signalled to Agapito.

‘Marshal the embarkation, get everybody on board and break for orbit.’

The Commander nodded and turned, growling orders over the comm-net to organise the Raven Guard retreat. With practised speed, the Raven Guard dispersed, the dropships launching in clouds of smoke and dust as soon as they were full. 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. A moment later, Aloni was at his side.

‘Last transport, lord!’

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.

‘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 Space Marines.

‘I came to Isstvan with eighty thousand warriors. 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 dropship’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. 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.

I am dying, that much I know. What I do not know is why. My throat has been crushed, and what little breath I can manage will not keep my brain functioning for long. He did not kill me outright, though he could have easily. I remember him looking down on me as my feet scrabbled at the floor of my workshop, gasping for air like a fish tossed onto a riverbank. He watched me as though fascinated by the transition of my body from life into death. But I am stronger than I look, and I was not going to die quickly.

But now that I think about it, perhaps that is what he wanted.

He did not even stay to watch me die, as though he had no interest in how long it took, only that it would be a drawn-out event. In fact, I think he used the precise amount of pressure needed to crush my larynx just enough to make my death slow. If I were not dying, I would almost admire the exacting attention to detail and controlled strength that such an act requires.

He wanted me dead, slowly, but did not care to watch the outcome.

What sort of a mind thinks like that?

I have no gods to pray to, no one does. The Emperor has shown us the folly of worshipping invisible deities whose existence is falsehood. The fanes and temples have all been torn down, even the last one across the silver bridge. The heavens are empty of supernatural agencies that might hear my dying thoughts, but right now I wish they were not.

Any witness to my death would be better than none. Otherwise it will be just a statistic, a report filed by the armsmen of this mighty vessel. Only if someone were to hear my last words or understand my last thoughts will they matter. I suspect that you would not forget a man dying in front of you.

Even though he killed me, I wish he had stayed to the end. At least then I would have had something to look at instead of the blackened ceiling of my workshop. The lumen globes maintain a steady glow, though I think they are fading.

Or is that me?

I wish he had stayed to watch me die.

He was so much bigger and stronger than me. Engineered, of course, but still, even before his genetic enhancements, I am sure he would have been more than a match for me. I have never been a violent man, the physical and martial pursuits never having interested me. From an early age, I was a tinkerer, a dismantler of working parts, and I possessed a fastidious mind that moved like the most intricate clockwork. My father wanted to apprentice me to the Mechanicum of Mars, but my grandfather would not hear of it. The priests of the red planet had been the enemies of Terra two generations ago, and my grandfather, a lapidary with exquisitely long fingers who fashioned incredible bracelets and neck ornamentation in the style of Ascalon’s Repoussé and chasing, still held grudges from that chaotic time.

Making weapons and war machines for the Imperium of Man was a waste of time for someone with the skills I possessed. My grandfather was an artisan in the true sense of the word, a craftsman worthy of the name, and the raw talent evident in his work had skipped my father and passed straight to me. Not that my father was ever jealous; far from it. He lauded my triumphs and proudly displayed my work, even from an early age when the brooches, earrings and glittering chokers I produced were, at first, amateurish and derivative. I worked for many years, learning my trade and developing my talent until it became clear that my ability now outstripped that of my grandfather. Crystallisation of his joints had turned his hands to claws, and it was a day of tears when at last he hung up his pliers and draw plate.

Work was never hard to come by, even though the last death spasms of the war still jerked and spat in the far reaches of Terra. The ethnarchs and despots had fallen one by one yet, even during times of strife, always there was a general’s mistress who desired a fashionable necklace, a tetrarch in need of a more impressive sword hilt or a bureaucrat seeking to impress his peers with a filigreed quill.

As the wars drew to a close, and stability of a sort was restored to Terra, money began to flow around the globe in glittering golden rivers. And with it came the desire to spend copious sums commemorating Unity, lamenting the fallen or immortalising the future. I had never been so busy, and the frenetic demand drove my creativity to new heights of wonder.

I remember a particular piece I fashioned for the Lord General of the Anatolian Theatre. His soldiers had been lucky enough to fight alongside the warriors of the X Legion in one of their last battles on Terra. A rebellious branch of the Terawatt clans had thought to retain control of their Urals forges instead of turning them over to the Iron Hands, and had fought their mortal representatives.

Vengeance was swift in coming, and the forge complex fell after a month of heavy fighting, in which the Anatolian brigades bore the brunt of the strange and deadly weapons wielded by the blind clan-warriors. But, so the Lord General told me, the primarch of the X Legion had been so impressed by the courage of his soldiers that he snapped the iron gauntlet from one of his Chapter’s banners and presented it to the Noyan in command of the first brigade to breach the gates to the inner furnaces.

Needless to say, that particular commander never got to keep the finial, but dutifully passed it to his superior, and so on, until it reached the hands of the Lord General. Who in turn brought it to me, instructing me to create a worthy reliquary – though he laughed at the antiquated term – for the gift.

To work on so incredible a piece was an honour, and I lavished all my skill upon this particular commission. The gauntlet itself was clearly a trifling piece for the Iron Hands, but as I studied the intricacy and precision of the workmanship, I appreciated the incredible skill that had gone into its creation. I had heard of the miraculous hands of the great Ferrus Manus, but to think that I worked on a piece touched by a primarch himself, one of the Emperor’s sons, gave me purpose and inspiration beyond my wildest dreams.

Day and night I worked, eschewing all human contact and turning away many wealthy patrons in the process. The brilliance of the gauntlet drove my passion and skill to new heights of invention and within the month I had created a wonder, a golden reliquary of such exquisite detail, delicate filigree and precious gems that it might have sat next to any ancient repository for the bones of one regarded as a saint, and not looked out of place.

Though the Emperor had forbidden the worship of false gods and unclean spirits, I had a number of old, mildewed books rescued from the ruins of a toppled fane by a friend in the Conservatory who knew of my interest in such things. Though their talk of gods and spirits and magic was clearly nonsense and lurid hyperbole, the artwork and symbolism inspired by such belief was extraordinary. Swirling lines, interconnecting weaves and spirals of such breathtaking complexity and perfect geometries that I could stare for hours at their beguiling patterns without losing interest.

In those books I found the perfect inspiration, and the finished piece was a thing of beauty.

The Lord General wept when he saw it, and I knew from our many meetings that he was not a man given to expressing his emotions. He embraced me and paid me twice the cost of the commission, and it took all my self-control not to hand the money back. Simply being allowed to work on such a piece was payment enough.

Word of the reliquary spread, and my talents became more in demand than ever, but nothing ever moved me to such creative heights as had my work on the reliquary. Even so, my work was astonishing, and it was not long before it came to the attention of those who were shaping the future of this world and those beyond the star-sprayed heavens. On a wintry day, as I worked upon an onyx pommel stone wound in a globe of silver, the course of my life was changed forever.

A man, noble in bearing but unassuming in mien, entered my workshop in the foothills of the Sahyadri Mountains and politely awaited my attention. He spoke with a cultured voice in an accent I could not place, and told me that I was being offered a place within an unofficial artel he wished to establish. I smiled at his use of the old word, for none here now used it – too redolent of a long-dead tyrant. When I enquired who would form this artel, the man spoke of craftsmen, poets, dramatists and historians, men and women who would travel the stars with one of the Emperor’s crusade fleets and bear witness to the greatest endeavour our species had ever known.

We were to show that such an organisation was necessary, to add weight to the growing chorus of voices urging a more formal and authoritative celebration of mankind’s reunification. We would show what such an organisation could achieve. Our task would be no less vital than that of the warriors of the Expedition Fleet!

He saw my amusement, and smiled as I declined his offer. I was happy on Terra, and had no wish to venture into the unknown reaches of space. Pulling back his hood, he allowed long white hair to spill around his shoulders and told me that the very highest authority had requested my cooperation. I wanted to laugh in his face, but dared not as I saw a depth of understanding and a world of memory in his eyes. This man, this ordinary man with the weight of the world in his eyes, simply placed a cream envelope upon my workbench and told me to think carefully before I refused this offer.

He left without another word, leaving me alone with the envelope. It was many hours before I dared lift it, turning it over in my long fingers as though I might understand what lay within without opening it. To open it would indicate a tacit acceptance of his offer, and I had no wish to leave the comfort of my workshop. The flap was sealed with a blob of crimson wax, and my heart skipped a beat as I recognised the crossed lightning bolts and double-headed eagle.

But, as are all men of a creative bent, I was cursed with insatiable curiosity. I eventually opened the envelope, as my visitor had known I would, and read its contents. Though worded as a request, the words were so eloquent, so passionate and so full of hope and power that I immediately knew who had written them. The stranger, whose identity I now knew, had not lied when he had told me the importance of the individual who requested my presence.

Within the day I had packed my meagre possessions and was on my way north to the mountains of the Himalazia to join the rest of my hastily assembled companions. I will not attempt to describe the immense majesty of the Palace, for words alone can do it no justice. It is landmass rendered in geological architecture, a wonder of the world that will never be surpassed. The artisan guilds strove to outdo one another in their efforts to glorify the Emperor’s deeds, creating a monument worthy of the only being who could ever bear such an honorific without need of a true name.

Those early days are a blur to me now, though that may be because my brain is beginning to die from lack of oxygen. Suffice to say, I was soon travelling into the darkness of space, where shoal after shoal of starships thronged the heavens and greedily sucked fuel and supplies from the enormous continental plates locked in geostationary orbit.

At last I saw the vessel that would be my home for nearly two hundred years, a leviathan that shone in the reflected glow of the moon. It gleamed whitely as it spun gracefully to receive the flotilla of cutters and shuttles rising from the planet below. This was the Vengeful Spirit, flagship of Horus Lupercal and his Luna Wolves.

I quickly established myself on board, and though my possessions were meagre, my wealth was substantial, and my vanity only scarcely less so. All of which allowed me to extend my span and retain the appearance of youth with superlative juvenat treatments.

As I lie here on the floor of my workshop in the artisan decks of the Vengeful Spirit, I wish I had not bothered. What difference do a few less lines around the eyes and smoother skin make when every breath might be the last and a pleasing bliss enters my mind as portions of my brain begin to fade out?

I prospered on the flagship of the 63rd Expedition, creating many fine works and obtaining many commissions for embellished scabbards, honour markings, oaths of moment and the like. I made friends among the rest of my fellow remembrancers (as we came to be known after Ullanor): some good, some ill-chosen, but all interesting enough to make my time aboard ship extremely pleasurable. One fellow, Ignace Karkasy, wrote such hilariously irreverent poetry concerning the Legions that I fear he may one day wear out his welcome.

The work of the Expeditionary Fleet continued, and though many worlds were made compliant by the work of warriors and iterators, I saw little of them save in the words and images of my fellows. I created a lapis lazuli recreation of the world map found in the depths of one uninhabited planet, and embossed many helmets with icons of fallen brothers after the war on Keylek.

Yet my greatest commission was to come in the wake of the Ullanor campaign.

From the accounts of those who had fought on that muddy, flame-lit world, it was a grand war, a towering victory that could have been won by no other warrior than Horus Lupercal. Ullanor marked a turning point in the crusade, and many were the war-leaders who came to my workshop, looking to celebrate their presence on that historic battlefield with an ornamented sword or cane.

The Emperor was returning to Terra, and a great Triumph was held in the ruins of the greenskin world to forever stamp that moment on the malleable alloy of history.

In the Emperor’s absence, Horus Lupercal would lead the final stages of the crusade, and such a weighty duty required an equally weighty title.

Warmaster.

Even I, who had little taste for war or the tales of its waging, savoured the sound of that word in my mouth. It promised great things, glorious things, and my mind was awhirl with the magnificent works I might fashion to commemorate the honour the Emperor had bestowed upon Horus Lupercal.

As the Warmaster was anointed, so too were we accorded an honour. The founding of the Remembrancer Order is one of my proudest memories, one that made me weep when I heard of its ratification by the Council of Terra. I remembered the white-haired man who came to my workshop and raised many a glass to him in the liquor halls of the ship.

The day after the Triumph, a warrior came to me, a beautiful man encased in battle plate that gleamed white with lapping powder and smelled of scented oils. His name was Hastur Sejanus, and never have I been so captivated as I was by his countenance. He showed me his helm, cut with a crude marking just above the right eye. Without asking, I knew it was the crescent image of the new moon.

Sejanus bade me fashion four rings, each in silver, each set with a polished moonstone. One stone would bear the crescent moon of his own helmet, another the half moon, a third the gibbous and the fourth the full. For this work, I was to be paid handsomely, but I declined any remuneration, for I knew to whom these rings would be presented.

The Mournival.

Abaddon would bear the full moon, Aximand, called Little Horus by some, the half moon, and Torgaddon the gibbous. Sejanus would bear the final ring of the new moon.

It was honour enough to craft these things for warriors of such pedigree.

For weeks I laboured, shaping each ring with all the skill I possessed. I knew such warriors would despise frippery and over-ornamentation, so I kept my more elaborate design flourishes to a minimum until I was sure I had created rings worthy of the Warmaster’s closest lieutenants.

With my work on the rings complete, I awaited the return of Hastur Sejanus, but the demands of war kept him from my workshop, and other commissions came across my workbench in due course. One such commission, simple enough in its conception, proved to be my undoing, coming also from a warrior of the Luna Wolves.

I never knew his name, for he never volunteered it, and I never dared ask. He was a blunt-faced man with a deep scar across his brow and a belligerent demeanour. He spoke with words accented with that particular harshness of Cthonia, so typical of the older warriors of the Luna Wolves.

What he wanted was simple, so simple it was almost beneath me.

From a pouch at his waist the warrior produced a silver disc, like the blank die of a coin, and placed it upon my workbench. He slid it towards me and told me that he wanted medals made, each bearing the image of a wolf’s head and a crescent moon. Rarely do I take such specific commissions. I prefer to bring my own design sensibilities to each project, and told him so. The warrior was insistent to the point where I felt it would be dangerous to refuse. A wolf’s head and a crescent moon. No more, no less. I was to craft the mould for such a medal, which he would then take to the engineering decks to have produced in greater numbers in a hydraulic press.

So banal a task did not interest me, but I nodded and told him a mould would be ready within the day for him. I did not miss the similarity in motif to that required by Hastur Sejanus, but said nothing. Words could only antagonise this warrior, for he had the air of one to whom casual, shocking violence was no stranger. To fear the Legiones Astartes was natural; they were, after all, bred to be killers, but this was something else, something more immediate than simply the recognition of his purpose in existing.

He left, and I immediately felt the air of my workshop become lighter, as though it had been pressing down on my skull. The animal part of me knew I had been in terrible danger, and screamed at me to flee, but my higher self could find no reason for that fear. If only I had listened to my instinctual heart and fled, but where could I hide aboard this starship that one of the Warmaster’s chosen would not find me?

I turned my attention to the silver, pushing aside all thoughts save those of working the metal. Such a simple task should have taken only a few hours, but I found I could not free myself from thoughts of the warrior and his threatening presence. Each carving lacked life and any spark of inspiration, so I turned to the same dusty books I had consulted when crafting the reliquary for the Lord General.

Within their pages, I found plentiful references to wolves and the moon: the Neuroi of ancient Scythia transforming into wolves once a year; the fear that the eyes of a she-wolf could bedazzle the senses of men. Some saw wolves as omens of victory, while others saw them as heralds of the world’s last days. In the end, I found a fragmented tale of a chained wolf that broke its bonds and swallowed the sun before being slain by a one-eyed god. Given that my carven wolf was to be set against the moon, it seemed an apt choice.

With the design set in my mind’s eye, I quickly sculpted the piece, rendering the wolf with simplicity and elegance. A noble creature, set proudly against a crescent moon, head tilted back as though about to loose a wild howl. Though the work was not difficult, and the design plain, I was, nevertheless, proud of it. I felt sure my nameless patron would be pleased with the final piece, and my fear of the violence that lurked at his core receded.

As promised, he returned the next day as the ship’s bells sounded the beginning of the evening cycle. He demanded to see what I had created and smiled as I placed the silver carving on his absurdly huge palm. He turned it this way and that, letting the light catch the embossed image. At last he nodded to me and complimented my work.

I bowed my head, pleased my creation had met with his approval, but no sooner had I raised my gaze than his hand fastened upon my neck. Fingers like iron cables closed around my throat and I was lifted from my feet, kicking the air as I felt the inexorable pressure of his grip. I looked into his eyes, struggling to understand why he was doing this, but I could see nothing to explain his murderous attack.

I could not cry out, for his hand prevented anything other than a strangled wheeze escaping my mouth. Something cracked and I felt a tearing pressure inside me. Then I was falling, landing hard on the floor of the workshop and scrabbling my feet as I struggled for breath. Only tiny wisps of oxygen made it through my ruined throat to my lungs, and I watched as he knelt beside me, with a sardonic expression on his blunt features.

Words struggled to reach my cyanotic lips, a thousand questions, but I had breath for only one.

‘Why?’

The warrior leaned down and whispered in my ear.

An answer of sorts, but one that made no sense.

I was dying. He could see that. Within minutes I would be dead, and without waiting to watch my last moments, the warrior turned and left my workshop.

I am stronger than I look, and though I cannot know for certain, I do not believe I am dying as swiftly as my killer might have imagined. I draw the thinnest of breaths, enough to sustain me for moments longer, but not enough to live. My sight grows dim, and I feel my body dying.

This silversmith is no more, and I fear no one will ever know why.

Yet, what is this?

Is that a draught of wind across my skin, the sound of a shutter door opening?

It is! I hear a cry of alarm, and heavy footsteps. Something huge and pale looms above me. Beautiful features swim before me, like the face of a rescuer viewed from beneath the waters of a still lake.

I know this warrior.

No finer figure in Mark IV plate.

Hastur Sejanus.

Even as he lifts me from the floor, I know he will not be able to save me. I will not survive, no matter how swiftly he brings me to the medicae, but I am sanguine. I will not die alone, someone will watch as I shuffle off this mortal coil. I will be remembered.

As he lays me upon my workbench, he is not careful of my possessions, and sweeps a tray of completed commissions aside. My head lolls to the side and I see four rings fall onto the floor. I watch him accidentally tread on one of them, flattening it completely beneath his bulk.

It is the ring I made for him.

He leans over me, his words urgent, and his grief at my passing is genuine.

Sejanus barks questions at me, but I can make little sense of them.

Life is slipping away. My eyes close, but before I am gone, I hear Sejanus ask his last questions.

‘Who did this? What did he say?’

With my last spark of life, I dredge the dying memories left to me and force my killer’s last words up through my ruined larynx.

‘I can’t say.’

~ DRAMATIS PERSONAE ~

The VIII Legion ‘Night Lords’

Jago Sevatarion, ‘Sevatar’, First Captain, Commander of the Atramentar

Tal Vanek, Battle-brother, First Company

Orrin Valzen, Primus Medicae

Malithos Kuln, Ninth Captain

Naraka, ‘The Bloodless’, 13th Captain

Var Jahan, 27th Captain

Ophion, 39th Captain

Cel Herec, 43rd Captain

Krukesh, ‘The Pale’, 103rd Captain

Tovac Tor, ‘Lackhand’, 114th Captain

Ekra Trez, Sin-Eater

Taye Karenna, Wing Commander, ‘Veiled Ones’ Squadron

Kul Kyven, Naviseer, ‘Veiled Ones’ Squadron

Vensent Aurlin, Gunner, ‘Veiled Ones’ Squadron

The XIX Legion ‘Raven Guard’

Alastor Rushal, 89th Captain

PROLOGUE

‘Fall.’

The Knight-Lord of Caliban stood beneath the storm, a silver circlet crowning his brow, his ashen hair rain-painted against his pale features. The knight’s armour was a suit of black ceramite plating, engraved with sculpted lions forged from Martian red gold. Blood ran along the sword in his hands, sluicing away from the steel, rinsed by the downpour.

The other figure was an image cast in a cracked mirror. Where the Knight-Lord’s skin was pale, the other warrior’s flesh was a consumptive’s white, and his armour a midnight reflection of the storm above, crisscrossed with markings of jagged lightning.

The battle raged around them, above them, even beneath them as they waged war atop the piled bodies of their sons, wounded and dead alike. The Knight-Lord of Caliban had waited months for this moment. Now it had come, in the shrieking wind and howling rain, punctuated by the staccato cracks of thousands and thousands of bolters.

The knight stepped back, his duty done, the final smears of blood rain-washed from his sword. His brother staggered, clawed hands clasping his own neck. A dark, liquid torrent was gushing between his grasping fingers. He was trying to hold his throat closed, and he was failing.

‘Fall,’ the Knight-Lord said to his brother. His voice was broken, ragged, breathless. ‘Fall.’

The other warrior’s black eyes were wide, trembling as his life flooded through his hands. He spoke without sound, lips working worthlessly, and finally fell to one knee. The wounds in his stomach and chest bled as fiercely as the cut throat. His body, systematically shredded and torn by the kingly blade, seemed to be held together by desperate hate alone.

The Knight-Lord wasn’t a soul given to smiling, nor was he petty enough to mock a fallen foe. He lifted his blade in salute, crosspiece resting against his crowned forehead, honouring a slain enemy.

‘I told you,’ the Lion said to his dying brother, ‘I would be the end of you, Curze.’

CHAPTER I

Fraternity in Shadow

The brothers always met in darkness. Their penchant for convening in a lightless chamber wasn’t for the theatrics of symbolism, nor from a need for secrecy. Some traditions simply existed unchanged from their genesis, born of habit rather than artifice. Once, the darkness had mattered. Now, it simply was.

Red eye-lenses cut through the gloom, accompanied by the grinding purrs of joint servos and active power cables. Mark IV armour wasn’t a silent invention, by any means. It was even louder when it was damaged.

The three brothers stood in silence. Defeat cloaked their shoulders, clinging closer than the shadows in which they stood. Their shame was fresh enough that none of them had even repaired the damage to their armour. Occasional sparks from ruptured joints cast flares of light across the chamber, while the air slowly ripened with the scent of battle emanating from their broken suits of ceramite. The chemical stench of fyceline clashed with the crude tang of promethium. Behind it all was the grey scent of gunsmoke, insipidly close to charcoal.

‘Three of us,’ said one of the brothers. ‘Three of us survived.’

‘There may yet be more,’ said another.

The first scoffed at the notion. ‘There won’t be any more. Have you been blind for the last nine hours? Did you not see what just happened? How many ships did we lose?’

The third brother leaned on the edge of the central table, his crested helm tilting to regard his kindred in turn.

‘We cannot know. Not until the fleet masses again. I saw the Praxis Mundi break apart and take out seven of her escorts. The Lady Sapienta died before her. The Aeternum Dread. The Throneless King. The Obfuscate. Those are merely the cruisers I saw die. I cannot speak of how many frigates and destroyers. Too many to name.’

‘What of the Nightfall?’

The third brother shook his head. ‘Aflame within and breached without. The flagship cannot have escaped. The Dark Angels went for her throat as viciously as the Lion went for Lord Curze’s.’ He paused for a moment, taking a slow breath. ‘The Nightfall should have been the first ship to run. I can’t comprehend why she stayed. What profit was there in trading firepower with the Dark Angels fleet?’

‘I heard the vox-reports,’ said the first brother. ‘Sevatar ordered the flagship to remain in-system, while he recovered companies from the surface whose vessels had already fled.’

The third snorted. ‘How very noble. So he killed himself and lost the flagship. Mark my words – no longer will the name Sevatar be celebrated among our ranks. How did the Angels arrange this? The ambush… the coordination was beyond anything I’ve seen.’

‘Does that even matter?’ the first replied. ‘Unless we strike back with overwhelming force, we’ve just lost the Thramas Crusade.’

‘The Legion must regroup at the fallback junctures,’ agreed the second. ‘We can recommence hostilities once we have our bearings, and the logistics are codified.’

‘Aye,’ said the first. ‘There speaks wisdom. It might be weeks, it might be months, but we are far from finished.’

The third brother called up a tactical display, but the flickering hololithic image stuttered and died before showing anything of worth. The ship had taken severe damage in its flight; many of its systems were still struggling to realign.

‘We face two problems – both bladed, both unkind. First, we must disseminate word of the defeat to all Legion forces in the rest of the sector via our astropathic choirs, so our brothers don’t run headlong into the ambush site we just fled. That will require a wealth of good fortune to work.’

‘And the other problem?’

The third brother hesitated before answering. ‘We must do that which only one Legion has ever had to do. We must choose who commands the remaining forces, with our primarch fallen.’

‘Fallen doesn’t mean dead, brother. Have you received word from the apothecarion?’

‘I have, and it doesn’t bode well. Who among the Legion has ever treated a wounded primarch before? We’re working blind. The wounds have closed, though not cleanly. Blood loss is severe. Cranial damage and oxygen starvation are still both potentially terminal, or crippling. Haemorrhaging is rampant. Organs I cannot even name are lacerated and severed from vein networks we’ve never seen before. If he were human – if he were even one of us – a single one of his wounds would be enough to see him dead. He’s sustained eleven such lethalities.’

The proclamation hung in the air. None of the brothers wished to add to it.

‘I saw it happen,’ admitted the second. ‘Even recovering him cost us too many lives. I surrendered most of a company in forcing the Lord of the First Legion back. I regret giving that order, I assure you.’

The others nodded. ‘The truth is cold, but we must face it: the three of us lead the Legion now.’

They tasted that truth in a moment of silence, interrupted by the communication feed from the command deck opening in a storm of crackles.

‘My lords,’ said the human captain. ‘Another four vessels have reached the edge of the system.’

‘Name them,’ said the first brother.

‘Auspex coding registers them as the Quintus, Dusk’s Daughter, the Covenant of Blood, and… and the Nightfall.’

The war room’s bulkhead door opened on grinding tracks, admitting the emergency red lighting of the corridor beyond. The figure in the doorway wore a helm to match his three kindred, with its crest of backswept gargoyle wings and skull-painted faceplate. Tourmaline eye-lenses stared at the three warlords gathered in the dark.

He’d come alone, but he’d come armed. A spear rested on his shoulder guard, ending in a deactivated chainblade with several rows of jagged, chipped teeth.

‘I hope you’ll forgive me for being late. There was an ambush. You may have noticed it. Not all of us could just light up our engines and run for the deepest black.’

He walked into the chamber, taking a place at the central table.

‘It is good to see you, Sevatar.’

‘I’m sure it is.’ Sevatar glanced at the tactical hololith drifting in the air above the table, showing a spread of several VIII Legion vessels in the deep void. ‘So this is defeat. Now we know how the Raven Guard and Salamanders felt.’

‘We’ve mustered close to one-twentieth of the fleet’s strength here. We must reform as best we are able in the weeks that follow, and face the facts. We are wounded, but not dead. The Thramas Crusade cannot end here.’

Sevatar said nothing at first. After several moments, during which he realised they weren’t making some foolish jest, he looked at them in turn.

‘The three of you did well to evacuate the primarch. Have you had any contact with the rest of the Kyroptera?’

‘Only to confirm deaths of Jexad, Shoma and Ithillion,’ the second brother replied. ‘We are all that remains of the Kyroptera now.’

‘So three of the seven are dead,’ Sevatar mused aloud, ‘and the primarch is wounded.’

‘The primarch is dying,’ corrected the second brother. ‘We lead the Legion now.’

‘We’ll see. Either way, the future is grim.’ Sevatar dropped his halberd onto the table, ignoring the resonant clang of metal on metal. ‘This won’t do at all. Of the seven, you three are the ones I like least.’

‘Please be serious, brother.’

Sevatar had a certain way of smiling. Amusement brightened his black eyes first, before tugging at the corners of his lips in soft twitches. It was the smile of a corpse with hooks pulling at its cheeks, or a soul that didn’t really understand humour in the same way as those around him – thus he had to feign it to the best of his limited ability.

Sevatar smiled. ‘Am I to assume you brave creatures have devised a plan?’

‘We have,’ replied the first brother. ‘Once the fleet’s strength is rebuilt, we will strike back. The question is where.’

Sevatar tilted his head. ‘That’s your plan?’

‘It is.’

The First Captain cleared his throat. This moment required a degree of subtlety. ‘Already,’ he said, ‘you are trying to take us down a path we shouldn’t walk. You speak of retribution, of counter-attacking a foe that has proven they can outmanoeuvre us.’

The others hesitated. ‘Of course. What else would we do?’

‘We could fight a war we actually have a chance to win instead,’ Sevatar replied.

‘Run?’ asked another. ‘We have a duty to keep the First Legion engaged here.’

Sevatar raised an eyebrow, though the expression remained hidden behind his faceplate. ‘At the cost of the Legion? You wish to whore our lives away to slake your frustrated bloodlust at being beaten. There is nothing noble in that, brothers. I won’t let you take the Legion to the grave because you can’t admit we lost.’

‘The primarch would wish us to fight this battle to the end.’

‘He would indeed, but you said the primarch is dying. If so, his wishes mean nothing at all.’

‘The Dark Angels are our equals, not our betters,’ one of the brothers stressed. ‘We can win the Crusade with the right counter-attack.’

‘So you say, Malithos,’ Sevatar replied with the same mild, unpleasant smile. ‘It sounds to me as though you’d cripple us all in a bid to soothe the Legion’s bruised ego.’

Malithos, Captain of the Ninth Company, growled through his crested helm’s vox-grille. ‘If Lord Curze dies, your reign as his precious favourite ends this very night.’

Sevatar was still smiling. They could hear it in his voice. ‘Don’t threaten me, Ninth Captain. It will not end well for you.’

‘Brothers, be at peace,’ said the second of them. ‘Sevatar, you are right; we must beware of wounded pride forcing us into foolish action. And Malithos, you are right; we have to strike back, for duty and pleasure in equal measure. But we must not be at odds. The moment is too grave.’

‘I appreciate your conciliatory efforts, Var Jahan.’ Sevatar’s voice was calm, devoid of the usual baiting edge. ‘But the Lion’s forces just broke the Legion’s back in a single strike. The entire fleet is scattered. We lost dozens of ships; both our own and those of the humans that follow us. The last I saw of the Legio Ulricon’s flagship was its wreckage, spilling into the void after the kiss of Dark Angels guns. How many Titans died in that wreck alone? How many tens of thousands of trained crew?’

‘We will regroup,’ said Malithos. ‘It is our duty. The war hasn’t ended just because you’ve become craven.’

‘Craven,’ Sevatar replied. ‘A strange word to use when describing the one who remained behind to help the slower ships evacuate.’

‘But duty demands we fight,’ said Var Jahan, Captain of the 27th. ‘Death is nothing compared to vindication.’

Sevatar grinned at that. ‘Such pretty words. I wonder if they’ll echo into eternity as wisdom or foolishness. Whichever Fate decides, you will not have me at your side. Some of my sub-captains already speak of sailing to Terra, or rejoining the Warmaster’s fleet. Others wish to break apart to venture elsewhere, harrying Imperial supply lines. I am inclined to grant them their request, rather than send them to die with you.’

‘The Kyroptera will vote,’ said Malithos.

Sevatar gave a sneering snort. ‘Voting. How very democratic. Since when have we needed to vote on anything?’

‘Since you returned to us,’ said the last brother, Cel Herec, Captain of the 43rd, ‘and the Kyroptera ceased to speak with one voice. United we stand, Sevatar. Divided we fall.’

‘So many pretty words tonight, yet they all miss the point. The Legion is better suited to the shadows until we are ready to strike in force. Then we butcher. Then we taste their blood. The Angels just taught us a stern lesson in the foolishness of gathering together in one place, and trying to engage in a fair fight.’

Sevatar leaned on a support pillar, crossing his arms over his chestplate as he continued. ‘I’ll be absolutely clear, since you are all so reluctant to take the hint. I will not let you take the Legion back into this war, after such a crippling defeat. That’s all there is to it. I will take the Atramentar, along with any other companies that choose to stand with me, and rejoin the Warmaster’s fleet. There is nothing more we can do here – and I say that delaying the Dark Angels for almost three years is more than long enough. I am finished with the Thramas Crusade. I am taking my companies to Terra. I plan to see the real war before the final day dawns. The rest of the Legion should come with me. I may lose my temper if you try to keep fighting this meaningless war.’

Malithos looked at his brother in raw disbelief for a moment. ‘Are you mad, Sevatar?’

‘I don’t think so. I feel fine.’

‘How would you stop us from staying?’ asked Var Jahan.

‘I’d kill you, of course. But let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. Emotions are running high, and my spear is all the way over there.’ He gestured to where it lay on the table.

‘Brother, if you’re finished acting the fool, may we focus on the matters at hand?’

‘Focus on them all you like. I’m going to see the primarch with my own eyes, rather than rely on your prattling about his demise.’ Sevatar moved away from the pillar, heading for the sealed bulkhead.

‘Your spear, Sevatar.’

‘I will be back for it soon enough. Enjoy your discussion, brothers.’

He walked from the chamber, his silhouette filling the entryway for a moment before he turned the corner. The door rumbled closed.

Malithos shook his head. ‘I grow weary of him,’ he said to the others.

‘Many of us do,’ Cel Herec replied. ‘When we rebuild the Kyroptera, we would be better served if Sevatar found himself unable to rejoin.’

Malithos sneered, as only he could do. ‘Why the spineless turn of phrase? Just say the truth. I’ll kill him myself, when the time comes.’

Var Jahan scarcely listened to their words. His attention lingered on Sevatar’s spear, resting on the table. The blade was a monstrous glaive; the haft a solid length of black iron and ridged ceramite; the rear butted by a brutal spike, with a crystalline power generator above. Every warrior within the Eighteen Legions knew of that blade. What far fewer knew was the nature of the haft’s secondary generator. Having fought at Sevatar’s side many times, Var Jahan knew its purpose very well indeed.

Ultimately, Var Jahan trusted none of his brothers, least of all those in the Kyroptera. When his teeth began to itch with the onset of displacing air pressure, he was the only one of the three captains not surprised.

He was also the only one running for the door.

The assassins appeared in a storm of white noise and aetheric mist. As the captains recoiled, raising futile hands to ward off the blinding light, all three knew just what that thunder heralded. Malithos and Cel Herec reached for their weapons, which was why they died. Var Jahan never stopped running.

The Atramentar manifested across the chamber, wreathed in the greasy after-smoke of teleportation flare, their bolters already raised.

‘We have come for you,’ the first of the Terminators growled before their guns opened up in a unified cascade.

Var Jahan heard his brothers die, heard their cries and gurgles across the vox, over the pounding of his boots and both hearts. Bolts took him high in the back and low in the left leg, sending him into a stumble, falling down onto a deck being riven by detonating shells. He rolled across the decking, never ceasing, and threw himself through the automated bulkhead.

In the corridor beyond, 27th Captain Var Jahan lay panting on the decking. He looked up at Sevatar. The First Captain stood with his back to the wall, arms crossed over his breastplate, looking down in idle curiosity.

‘Hello, captain,’ said Sevatar.

Var Jahan was rising when the doors opened again, releasing gunsmoke into the corridor. A squad of Atramentar Terminators stood in their hulking war plate, immense bolters aimed at the prey that had fled them.

‘Stand down,’ Sevatar said, and offered a hand to help his brother up. ‘This one was intelligent enough to sense my intent. He gets to live.’

Var Jahan almost spat. ‘Most generous of you.’

Sevatar chuckled before replying. ‘I thought so, too.’

‘Why did you kill them?’ Var Jahan moved so his back wasn’t facing the Atramentar. ‘Why did you want us dead? Fratricide, brother… Has it really come to this?’

‘We came to this the moment you three fools decided it was best to kill the Legion simply to expunge some imaginary stain on our imaginary honour.’

‘But the preparation…’

‘I had a feeling the Kyroptera would need reorganising. I was right.’

‘You killed them because they disagreed with you. Sevatar, you are insane.’

The First Captain gave a subtle shrug. ‘So I am often told. What matters is that the Legion needs the Kyroptera now more than ever, and we will not lead our brethren back onto the Dark Angels’ blades.’

‘But the Warmaster…’

Sevatar’s hand was at his throat before the sentence could end. The First Captain lifted him, slamming him back against the wall.

‘Do I look like I care what the Warmaster wants of me?’ Sevatar’s skullish faceplate stared with its red eye-lenses. ‘We never cared what the Emperor wanted of us. Why should we waste our lives out here in the back end of the galaxy, dancing to the Warmaster’s tune?’ He released Var Jahan, walking back into the chamber. ‘He has leashed us for three years. I am done with obedience. To the abyss with Horus and his arrogant whims. He is no better than the Emperor.’

Var Jahan followed his brother. He had to step over Cel Herec’s smoking corpse, sparing it barely a glance. Malithos had died in similar indignity; the Ninth Captain’s body was half-draped across the central table, blood pooling across the surface in a spreading lake.

‘True independence, then? Our allies in the other Legions are simply alliances of convenience?’

‘Better that than living shackled to a sickened, dying Imperium.’ Sevatar’s voice was softer now, more distant. ‘Var Jahan. Forgive my display of anger.’ He recovered his spear, and rested it on his shoulder guard. ‘I am going to see our father.’

As the bootsteps faded, Var Jahan looked to the towering forms of the Night Lords Terminators. They offered no hint of their emotions or thoughts, staring impassively through the scarlet eye-lenses of their brutish war-helms.

‘I know you all,’ Var Jahan said to them. ‘By name and reputation, even if I’ve not served with all of you. Thorion, Malek, Jakresh…’ he listed their names one by one, nodding to them each in turn. ‘What did Sevatar offer you, to make such loyal warriors? What is it he holds over you that makes you serve him even through the spilled blood of our Legion-kin?’

Thorion, commander of the Atramentar, shook his head as coils of teleportation mist started forming around their dark armour.

‘He gives us the truth.’

Their departure was as sudden and loud as their arrival, leaving Var Jahan alone with the bodies of his brothers.

CHAPTER II

Lair

The last time Sevatar wept had been as a boy, on the edge of becoming a man. After that night over a century ago, the boy he’d been never grew to manhood. Instead, he became a weapon, growing into a life with neither the need for emotion nor the time for tears.

Even seeing his gene-father in the apothecarion didn’t move him to sorrow. He wasn’t sure why. And yet he could hear seasoned warriors – murderers and flayers and torturers all – praying and weeping across the Legion’s mass-relay vox-network. The Luna Wolves had sounded the same, when Horus was wounded. Sevatar hadn’t understood it then, and he didn’t understand it now. The easy expression of emotion was just something that happened to other people.

Curze lay on the surgical slab, tended by bloodstained Legion Apothecaries and the insectile arms of semi-automated medicae tenders attached to the ceiling. The press of bodies prevented a clear look, but Sevatar wasn’t optimistic. He’d caught a glance at the primarch’s severed throat, the flesh knitted in ragged cohesion, while the entire chamber reeked of spilled blood. There was something raw and primal in the scent, something beyond the coppery smell of human life. The Emperor alone knew what the primarchs really were. Sevatar had no inclination to waste time guessing.

But if the primarch died…

The thought ended there. He couldn’t carry it any further. To try was no different from imagining a colour never before conceived, or recalling a song never before heard. His mind rebelled at the very effort.

How did a Legion function without its guiding hand? Without its lord, mentor, and genetic sire? Father was too trite a word when dealing with such concepts. Father implied mortality. Fathers died.

Sevatar remembered Isstvan all too well. Although he spent much of that miserable massacre grinding through warriors of the Raven Guard, he’d been blade to blade with the Iron Hands when Lord Manus, their primarch, fell. He’d seen the psychic echo rip through them. Subtle in some, ravaging in others – every single warrior in the black of the X Legion had reacted with a fury suddenly unrestrained. All hesitation cast aside, all notion of a defensive battle forgotten.

Sevatar still carried scars from that battle. He could’ve had them sealed and healed by augmetic surgery or synthetic skin grafts, but he preferred to keep them as they were. They were some of the few things he wholly owned himself, in an existence of slavery to gene-wrought gods of war.

He looked down at his gauntleted hands, weaponless and painted crimson. Months ago, he’d told the Dark Angels the truth: that to bear hands of sinners’ red was a gangland custom from Nostramo, forced upon those who failed their families. The fate of traitors and fools, carried into the VIII Legion as it conquered the stars. The Ultramarines had taken that tradition, as they took so much from the other Legions. It was less severe, less grave among the warriors of Ultramar – to them, a helm of red merely meant censure. To the sons of Nostramo, the crimson hands were a death sentence. The mark of the condemned.

Sevatar had earned his red hands on Isstvan V, for failures too great to forgive. Even the memory made him smile with an actual edge of sincerity, as so few things ever did. He lived life on borrowed time, every night a gift from the primarch until Lord Curze chose the hour of his execution.

The wet rasp of laboured breathing drew his attention, though he didn’t need to look up. He smelled the man’s wax-candle scent, the musk of fine parchment and old, old blood pushed through weak veins by a slow heart. The newcomer reeked of age, and therefore, of weakness.

Sevatar shuddered.

‘Trez,’ he greeted the archivist. The old man nodded in reply, wheezing into a rebreather mask. ‘When did you come over from the Nightfall?’

‘I just arrived, Jago. I came to get you. Please come back to the flagship with me. I have something to show you, and we have something to discuss.’

The doors rolled open, freeing the smell of an open grave. Trez entered, still heaving shallow exhalations into his rebreather. Sevatar followed, his boots thudding on the decking, echoing off the arched walls.

Trez ignored the bodies hanging on chains. Sevatar didn’t. Rare were the moments he entered his primarch’s inner sanctum, and despite everything he’d seen and done in over a century of serving in the Great Crusade, Curze’s private chamber always made his skin crawl. Here he saw the madness within his father’s mind, pushed out to infect the surrounding world. A psyche’s truths, written in skinned bodies and desecrated remains.

Trez sucked in a ragged breath. Moisture droplets gathered in the transparent oxygen mask he wore, dewing before his thin lips.

‘He talks to them.’

‘Talks to who?’

Trez gestured to the bodies. ‘Them.’

Sevatar reached out to one of the hanging corpses, giving its scourged, naked torso a gentle shove. The body rocked back and forth on its chains. Something dark and wet trickled from its open mouth, spattering onto the floor.

‘Delightful,’ the Night Lord said. He turned back to the archivist. ‘What do you want of me, little man? I have a Legion to piece back together.’

Trez brought his old bones over to a chair by a wooden desk, sized accordingly for a human. With no evidence of impatience, he started leafing through parchments, the papers fluttering softly in his arthritic hands.

‘You have never understood the man you serve,’ he said without looking up from his work. ‘None of his warriors ever have. Does that not seem like a risible flaw to you, Jago?’

Jago, thought the captain. That’s twice now.

‘My name is Sevatar.’

‘Indeed.’ Trez smoothed his thinning white hair back from his cratered features, arranging a piece of parchment on the desk, until it was placed just so. He read the words from the cream-coloured paper, between rebreather wheezes. ‘Jago Sevatarion, born in City’s Edge. First Captain of the Eighth Legion, Commander of the Atramentar, officer of the Kyroptera; known also by the names Sevatar the Condemned, and…’ Trez snorted, shaking his head, ‘…and by the rather amusing title, Prince of Crows.’

Sevatar removed his helm with a snap-hiss of air pressure venting from unlocked collar seals. He breathed in the chamber’s abattoir smell, his expression thoughtful.

‘I’m not sure I like your tone. The last man to sneer at me like that soon wished he hadn’t, little archivist.’

‘Oh?’ Trez looked up, curiosity writ plain across his weathered visage. ‘And who might that have been?’

‘I don’t recall his name.’

‘I was given to understand all warriors of the Legiones Astartes were gifted with eidetic recall. A hololithic memory, if you will.’

‘We are,’ Sevatar admitted. ‘I just never asked his name. I was rather preoccupied skinning him alive at the time. Now tell me what you want of me, Trez. I doubt you’ve mistaken me for someone famed for the virtue of patience.’

The old man’s grin showed a blunt arsenal of age-darkened teeth. ‘You will need patience if you wish to lead this Legion.’

Sevatar laughed, drawing the spicy, meaty scent of unrefrigerated cadavers into his lungs. ‘Even you are sure Lord Curze will die? Even you, his devoted little ape-creature, have given him up as dead? Whatever will you do once you can no longer eat the mud from our master’s boots, Trez? It would grieve me to see you starve to death.’

The archivist went back his parchments, still smiling into his rebreather. ‘I know your secret, Jago.’

‘I have no secrets.’

Trez ran his fingertips over the Nostraman lettering, his fingers following the flow of inked words. ‘He told me, Jago. He tells me everything.’

Sevatar tilted his head, black eyes unblinking. ‘I have no secrets,’ he said again.

‘Then why do you hide from slumber, First Captain? Why do you force yourself to remain awake for weeks on end? Why – if you have no secrets – do you wake up with cold blood flowing through your pounding heart on the rare nights you surrender to sleep?’

Sevatar’s smile was as cold, and just as motionless, as the peeled-back rictus grins showing on the face of every chained corpse in the chamber. He said a single word, neither consciously weighted with threat, nor invested with any emotion at all. Just a single word, scarcely above a whisper, breathed through a dead man’s smile.

‘Careful.’

Trez had to look away. The tremble in his hands couldn’t entirely be blamed on arthritis, this time.

‘Sevatar…’ he said.

‘Ah, so now I’m Sevatar. Now, once you’ve pushed me to the point of losing my temper, you decide to show me an iota of respect.’ The captain stalked closer, his armour joints thrumming. Up close, the rumble of active power armour made Trez’s gums itch. Sevatar crouched by the seated old man, his black eyes forming pits in his pale face as he stared. ‘What has he told you, Trez? What did my father share with his little eater of dreams?’

The old man forced the words through quivering lips. ‘The truth.’

The First Captain’s grin returned – a liar’s smile, never reaching his dark eyes. ‘You think I won’t kill you, right here, right now?’

‘The primarch…’

‘The primarch lies dying aboard another ship. Even if he walked in here this very moment, do you think I care? You disgust me, old man.’ The Night Lord cupped the elder’s jaw in his gauntleted fingers. A single twist, a soft squeeze, and the archivist’s skull would shatter in the warrior’s grip. ‘The stink of your slow blood and worn skin… The fading rhythm of the ancient heart in your chest… And now, the spill of such dangerous words from these careless lips.’ Sevatar released the old man’s head. ‘You make it easy to hate you, Trez.’

‘I can help you. That’s why I wanted to speak with you. I can help you.’

Sevatar rose to his feet, already reaching for his helmet as he walked away. ‘I don’t need your help.’

Trez cleared his throat, his voice husked by doubt. ‘It isn’t working any more, is it? The training. The meditation. You can’t hold the pain inside the way you once could.’

He didn’t even look back. ‘You know nothing, human.’

‘You’re lying, Jago.’

Sevatar masked his white face beneath the skullish helm. Chiropteran wings rose from the helmet in a feral crest, cast in dark iron. His voice was a vox-altered snarl.

‘I am a son of the sunless world, and Eighth Legion to my core. Of course I’m lying, Trez. It’s what we do.’

CHAPTER III

Preparation

The pain came in a teasing touch, rolling against the back of his eyes in a throbbing tide. Just when he’d crest the dull ache and dare to hope it was receding for good this time, it pressed back with unwelcome insistence.

Sevatar wiped his dry, tired eyes with a thumb and fingertip. He didn’t need his helm’s retinal display to tell him he’d not slept in two weeks. He felt every hour of it.

‘Captain?’ asked a female voice.

He looked up from the hololithic tactical display playing out before his eyes, seeing a dark-haired woman in a rumpled flight-suit, carrying her visored helm under one arm. As he looked over at her, the sounds of the bridge came flooding back, breaking what remained of his fragile focus. He did his best to ignore the whispers, mutters, rattles and clanks of three hundred souls doing their duty.

‘Speak, Wing Commander Karenna.’

‘With respect, sir… you look like shit.’

‘That doesn’t sound like speaking with respect to me. What do you want, Taye?’

‘I have bad news, sir.’

Sevatar didn’t have to fake his smile. Bad news was one of the few things that never failed to amuse him.

‘Of course you do.’

‘The Blade in the Black just jumped in-system. Commodore Yul is aboard, alive and well.’

‘That makes him the new fleet admiral. Offer him my insincere congratulations on a rank he earned purely by being the last naval officer standing. But what’s the bad news?’

‘He voxed to inform me that Wing Commander Verith died in the ambush. The Void Condors were lost to a man. Do you want me to allocate the Blade a fighter squadron from one of the other ships?’

He waved the question away. ‘Ask the new admiral, that’s his game to play. My only order is that you and the Veiled Ones are to remain aboard the Nightfall.’

Karenna saluted in VIII Legion tradition, her hand in a loose claw, fingers touching her chest, above her heart – a sign of submission, offering the heart itself to a commander. Another gang custom, weaving its way down the years. On Nostramo, it had always meant a much more literal and visceral offer: to promise something so sincerely, the speaker would have their heart cut from their chest if they were found to be lying or incompetent.

‘Your trust in me and my men is very gratifying, captain.’

Sevatar was already looking back at the hololithic display, watching the simulation of viable warp routes out of the system.

‘Go away, Taye.’

‘Aye, sir.’

Watching her walk away, Sevatar finally abandoned the tactical projections.

‘You,’ he addressed a nearby servitor.

‘Yes,’ came its dead-voiced reply. The thing’s bionic eyes didn’t seem to focus on anything at all.

‘Record these projected flight paths. Disseminate them to the rest of the fleet.’

‘Compliance,’ said the slack-mouthed slave. Its amputated fingers ended in stubs, each one a key to be plugged into standardised Imperial terminals. The servitor unblinkingly slid its severed digits into the connection port with five separate tiny clicks.

Sevatar turned back to the primarch’s empty command throne. Before the ambush, Fleet Admiral Torun Keshr had occupied the place next to it, forever standing in calm control. Sevatar had never seen the man fazed, not even when he lay dying under wreckage, as the bridge burned around him.

‘Help me up, please,’ the old officer had said. Sevatar hadn’t even tried. The man’s legs were gone. The First Captain couldn’t see them through the smoke, not that it would’ve made a second’s difference if he could.

Sevatar pulled himself back to the present.

‘Summon Captains Ophion, Var Jahan, Krukesh, Tovac Tor, Naraka, and Alastor Rushal to the Nightfall,’ he said, uncaring of which officer carried out the order. ‘I will be in the primarch’s chambers, waiting for them.’

He walked from the strategium without another word.

‘Jago,’ the old man greeted him, as the bulkhead doors rolled open.

In a moment of rare expression beyond a false smile, Sevatar looked genuinely confused. One eye narrowed in disbelief as he stared at the hunched old man at the desk, surrounded by decaying bodies hanging from the ceiling on rust-spoiled meathooks.

‘Do you ever leave these quarters?’

‘Rarely,’ Trez admitted. Sevatar’s arrival had distracted him from his writing. ‘Is something wrong?’

‘No more than usual. My brothers are gathering here this eve, little man. Be somewhere else.’

Trez repressed a shiver, wheezing into his rebreather. ‘Where should I go?’

‘An intriguing question. The answer is that I don’t care. Go anywhere that isn’t here.’

‘But Jago…’

Sevatar turned very, very slowly. Even helmetless, the joints in his armour’s neck purred unpleasantly as he turned his head to face the archivist.

‘Call me that,’ he said, ‘one more time.’

Trez looked at the First Captain of the VIII Legion, standing amidst an abattoir of hanging corpses, his face so unhealthily pale he might easily be hung on a flesh-hook himself. The chainglaive resting on one armoured shoulder was taller than the warrior who carried it.

‘Sevatar,’ Trez amended, quietly.

‘Better. Shouldn’t you be aboard the Excoriator, watching over the primarch’s dreams?’

‘Not now,’ replied the old man. ‘He isn’t dreaming as you would understand it. There’s nothing behind his closed eyes, nothing but the absolute dark.’

‘Fascinating. If you’re so devoted to staying, then at least keep quiet.’

‘I will. Thank you, Sevatar.’

Sevatar grunted an acknowledgement, and walked through the hanging corpses to where Trez worked at the primarch’s immense round table. The very edge of one side was taken up by the archivist’s parchments and data-slates. The rest of the circular slab played home to a mouldering cadaver. It looked like it had been pulled apart by a surgeon using no tools, nothing more than his bare hands. Gobbets of blackening meat were stuck to the table’s surface, cemented there by dried blood and bodily fluids.

Sevatar shook his head, reaching out to shove the corpse aside.

‘Don’t,’ Trez said. ‘Don’t, Sevatar.’

‘Why not?’ The warrior’s hand froze above the violated torso.

‘Lord Curze talks to them.’

‘So you said.’

‘No.’ Trez cleared his throat, though his voice still stayed phlegm-wet. ‘I mean, he speaks to them as they are. He knows when they’ve been moved, and it enrages him.’

Sevatar grabbed the body by its exposed spine and hauled it off the table. It lay sprawled on the decking after a dull thump.

‘We will deal with the primarch’s madness when he returns to us. If he returns to us.’ The captain keyed in a code on the interface now revealed, fingers tapping buttons crusted with gems of dry blood. Labouring hololithic generators flickered to life, beaming an image of the last display shown: the dead world of Tsagualsa, surrounded by its dense asteroid field.

Sevatar blanked the image, and called up a local void-scry. The fleet resolved, though blood on two of the projector modules stained parts of the hololith in swathes of red.

‘He wasn’t always this way.’

Trez looked up from his work again. ‘Pardon me?’

Sevatar hadn’t realised he’d spoken aloud. ‘The primarch. He wasn’t always this way. He had a vision of how best to bring worlds to compliance, and it was a vision we followed willingly. Now look at what he’s become. His private quarters are a reflection of the madness within. His own mind is eating him alive.’

Trez said nothing.

‘No comment, old man? No cunning retort, or words of wisdom? Are you not the being closest to our lord in all the great and grand galaxy?’

The archivist swallowed, breathing slowly into his rebreather. ‘He walks the same path as the rest of you, Sevatar. He is merely closer to the end of it. You’ll all be like him, one night.’

‘Not I. And don’t speak of him like he’s damned. There’s still nobility in him. Still strength.’

‘Oh, I know that.’ Trez gestured to the bodies. ‘He is not always this bad. He had a… difficult few months, before the ambush. His dreams were bleak, poisoned by doubt. He knows when and how he’ll die, Sevatar. He’s always known. The knowledge pains him more than you or I could ever understand. The pressure of it, the inevitability, is a tide against his consciousness.’

Sevatar shook his head. ‘He told me the same thing once. Did he tell you when he believed the time would come?’

‘Yes, he did.’

Sevatar concealed his shock easily enough, though he’d not been expecting the primarch to ever share such a thing. ‘And is that time now?’

‘No.’

‘Then why is there still worry in your cataracted eyes, old man? If it is true, why has he suffered in this coma for two weeks, on the edge of death? If he’s destined to die months, years, centuries from now… why have our Apothecaries had to resuscitate him thirty-nine times? He cannot breathe without being plugged into machines that sustain his life by forcing his organs to function.’ Sevatar almost spat as he sneered the final words. ‘I do not believe in fate, or prophecy, or destiny. The primarch is a visionary and a genius, but even he can play the fool.’

Trez, wisely, said nothing. The door rolled open again, mere seconds later. A warrior in a skull-faced helm stood in the opening, his helmet showing the same flared, winged crest as Sevatar’s. Chains decorated his armour, a skull bound to each one – some alien, most human.

‘Sev,’ the newcomer greeted him, already walking into the chamber.

‘Tovac,’ Sevatar replied. They didn’t embrace, or grip wrists in the fashion of closer brothers in other Legions. They regarded one another a long moment, before Tovac Tor removed his helm.‘You look like you died and forgot to stop walking,’ Tovac said.

‘So I hear. How is your ship?’

‘Still a wreck, the piece of shit. It’s a wonder she’s still holding together after the beating the Angels gave her.’ Tovac looked around the room, his black eyes narrowing. ‘The 114th has had little reason to come aboard the flagship for a long time, Sev. I see the primarch has done some redecorating since I was last here.’

‘True enough. We’ll speak of it when the others arrive.’

Tovac nodded, and spared a glance for Trez. ‘Begone, rodent. Your betters are speaking.’

‘Leave him,’ Sevatar waved the matter aside. ‘Let him stay. He’s harmless.’

‘You’re getting soft, Sev.’

Sevatar mimed a theatrical bow. ‘I have no idea what you mean. I’ve always been the very soul of kindness.’

Tovac snorted, a smile curling one side of his lips. ‘It’s good to see you again, brother.’

Sevatar wasn’t quite sure how to reply; that sentiment always surprised him when others spoke it, nor did he understand why they said it so often. He said nothing of it, merely drawing the other captain’s attention to the runic display of ships in the spread of local space.

‘We have a third of the fleet gathered now. That’s better than I’d hoped.’

‘It’s a fine start.’

Sevatar wasn’t blind to the tension in Tovac’s black eyes. The other captain was Terran, but the gene-seed had changed him as it changed all of them.

‘Speak,’ Sevatar said. ‘I’d prefer the new Kyroptera not to begin by lying to one another and keeping secrets. It was a singularly inefficient way to lead a Legion.’

Tovac nodded. ‘I thought that’s why you summoned me. That’s what I wanted to ask, brother. I’m glad to be chosen. Proud, of course. But why choose me?’

‘Nepotism. Perhaps I just wished to choose the commanders from among the few friends I have.’

‘Sev. Please.’

Sevatar was still looking at the tactical display. Its luminescence painted his face in dappled blue light. ‘Because I trust you. And you’re an awful liar. I like that. The Pacification of Arvaya may have also affected my decision.’

Tovac grinned – a patently malicious baring of his teeth. None of the VIII Legion smiled with anything approaching grace.

‘The 114th enjoyed itself that night, let me tell you. Arvaya’s survivors are probably still weeping over the skinning pits.’

Sevatar’s reply was cut apart by the doors grinding open again. The newcomer entered more cautiously than Tovac, his helmed head turning between the other two captains. He paid no overt notice to the hanging bodies.

‘Captain Sevatar,’ he said. ‘Captain Tovac.’

‘Captain Ophion.’

He took his name as a welcome, entering with his hands never far from his holstered weapons. Ophion was careful not to touch any of the corpses, stepping around them rather than shouldering them aside as Tovac had.

‘I confess, I have no idea why I was called to this council.’

‘I suspect that will be a recurring theme,’ Sevatar replied. ‘The others will be here soon. We have to plan the Legion’s future.’

CHAPTER IV

The Kyroptera

Var Jahan, Captain of the 27th Company. Born of Terra, as so many of the Legion were. An older warrior, famously cautious, more of a tactician than a murderer. He’d served the VIII Legion since the earliest days of the Great Crusade, when the Night Lords first took to the stars. Sevatar liked him immensely, but had no idea why.

Next was Naraka, Captain of the 13th Company. Naraka the Bloodless, his brothers called him, without the shadow of a smile. He earned the name during the compliance of Eight-Hundred-and-Nine Five, as the fifth conquest of the 809th Expeditionary Fleet. The 13th Company took an entire world without shedding a single drop of blood, through means few of the Legion’s other commanders had been allowed to know. When questioned on it, Naraka always refused to comment. His company swore an oath of secrecy, inviolate and unbroken in the many years since.

Sevatar knew what had happened. He liked that story.

After Naraka, there was Tovac Tor, Captain of the 114th. Tovac Lackhand entered the Legion at the same time as Sevatar; as children they’d run together in the same gang. He earned his epithet from a malformed birth, born with only one hand. Despite the deformity, he’d passed the physical trials to enter the VIII Legion, and immediately been fitted with an augmetic graft. It still didn’t behave as reliably as a natural limb – the Apothecaries had told Tovac that his malformed arm lacked a fully developed musculature, so his augmetic hand would always be a touch erratic.

Then, there was Ophion. As Captain of the 39th Company, he’d failed to distinguish himself beyond the base level of honour inherent in a century of solid, trustworthy service. All of his records – not that the VIII Legion was particularly meticulous in keeping them – spoke of a veteran Nostraman officer best-served by front-line duties, leading his men from the vanguard, and given only moderate responsibility in a wider campaign. And yet… Ophion had ordered his warship Shroud of Eventide to remain on-station, fighting the Dark Angels back from their ambush, aiding Sevatar and the Nightfall as he fought to buy time for the weaker ships to flee. So Ophion apparently wasn’t a thinker. Sevatar could live with that. In a Legion that considered tactical cowardice one of the finer and most amusing virtues, a rare sign of bravery was always worth investigating.

Krukesh, Captain of the 103rd Company, was VIII Legion from blood to bone. Taken as a youth from Terra, he rose to his captaincy by a murder duel, taking his former commander’s head. Whatever would the Ultramarines or Imperial Fists have thought if such barbarous customs inside the Night Lords had become known before the betrayal? Savagery of that stripe was a natural projection of ambitious warriors freed of moral constraint. The gangland wars of Nostramo Quintus had a hundred varieties of honour duels and succession rituals based on the murder of one’s predecessor. The Pale, Krukesh was called by his brethren. The primarch’s gene-seed whitened the skin of every soul who endured implantation, and blackened the irises of their eyes. Krukesh, however, was gaunt to the point of emaciation, pale past anything resembling ill-health, edging on the preternatural. He was a starved cadaver in midnight ceramite, black eyes burning from sunken eye sockets. Sevatar suspected some form of low-grade gene-seed degeneration: uncommon, but not entirely unknown. Either way, Krukesh and Sevatar had history. Debts were owed, from times past. Even remembering them made the First Captain’s skin itch.

Last of all was Alastor Rushal, born of Terra, but not born of VIII Legion genestock. He still wore the armour of his Legion, cast in a cold black, edged in dented white trimmings. The noble emblem on his shoulder guard – a raven in white, with wings spread wide – had been ritually broken by blows from a hammer, wielded in Alastor’s own hand. All trappings of rank were gone from his armour, scratched away after the killing fields of Isstvan. Like the Night Lords, his face was pale and his eyes were dark. Unlike the warriors he stood amongst, the helm carried in the crook of his arm lacked the bat-winged crest sported by the VIII Legion’s inner circle of captains. In this coven, he stood alone and unmarked.

Sevatar nodded to Alastor, before addressing the group as one.

‘You will help me lead this broken Legion. You are now the Kyroptera of the Night Lords. Any questions?’

Several of the others exchanged glances. In the corner, Trez’s rebreather hid his smile. Tovac was the one to actually speak.

‘That’s your greeting? That’s how you welcome us?’

‘Yes.’ Sevatar didn’t blink. ‘Did you expect a speech?’

‘I don’t know what I expected.’

‘Then why do you sound disappointed?’

‘I…’

Sevatar tilted his head. ‘Any real questions?’

‘I have one,’ said Ophion. His face was a mess of recent stitches and skin grafts. ‘Why us?’

‘Because the rest of the Kyroptera are dead, with Var Jahan and myself as the only survivors.’

‘Obviously. And how did they die?’ Ophion asked.

‘The Dark Angels killed some of them. I killed the rest. Or rather, the Atramentar killed them, because I asked them to.’

Ophion snorted, not even remotely surprised. ‘But why us?’

Sevatar watched the other captain in silence for several moments. ‘You are a very suspicious man, Ophion.’

‘That I am.’

Sevatar saw no harm in the truth. ‘You are all variously loyal to me, intelligent, reliable, trustworthy, and divorced from the weakness of human compassion. The Legion needs leadership. It needs us.’

‘Then I’ll be the one to say it.’ Krukesh gestured a gauntleted hand at Alastor, his skullish face locked in a sneer. ‘Why is the Raven here? He leads no company. He commands no men. He cannot be one of the Kyroptera.’

‘He can, because I say he can. Unless the primarch rises and countermands my order, the Raven stands with us. Now, to business.’

Sevatar called up the hololithic display again. ‘What you’re looking at, brothers, is over a third of the Legion’s fleet. We’ve had contact with the other mustering points at Ykresh, Taur, and Sotha. The casualty figures are on the wrong side of hilarious.’

‘Don’t keep us in suspense,’ Var Jahan grunted.

‘The Dark Angels destroyed just over twenty-five per cent of the fleet in their ambush. They killed a quarter of the Legion in three hours.’

The new Kyroptera exchanged glances. None of them wished to say anything, leaving Sevatar to continue. ‘It’s only been two weeks. There may be several dozen vessels still in the warp, or caught away from the fallback points. But the confirmed casualties alone are grievous. Every shipmaster saw other vessels die. Collating that list shows a fifth of the Legion dead in the void, or on the surface of Sheol. So…’

Sevatar turned back to his brothers. ‘The question now, is what do we do?’

‘Revenge,’ said Var Jahan. ‘Vengeance against the Angels.’

‘Don’t make me kill you, as well. Revenge against the First Legion would be a fool’s crusade. I am striving to make this as democratic as possible, but don’t try my patience.’

Krukesh tapped his knuckles on the hololithic table. ‘What of the primarch?’

‘Still in a coma,’ replied Var Jahan, ‘aboard the Excoriator.’

‘What is the meaning of…’ Naraka gave the vaguest of waves at the bodies hanging all around, ‘…of all this?’

‘This,’ said Sevatar, ‘is the result of our primarch’s little telepath no longer doing his job. Isn’t that right, Trez?’

The old man blinked, sucking in a gulp of oxygen through his facemask as the seven warriors slowly turned to face him. His stammered attempt at a response went nowhere. It barely even left his lips.

‘The Sin-Eater is failing us?’ asked Naraka.

‘So it would seem,’ replied Sevatar.

‘My lords…’ Trez swallowed.

‘We’re “my lords” now,’ Sevatar chuckled. ‘I was just “Jago” earlier.’

‘My lords, please. Before the ambush, Lord Curze’s dreams were becoming too poisoned, too dark. I struggled to purge them of the pain.’

Krukesh stalked closer to the wizened archivist. His cadaverous visage stared down at the man. ‘Are you failing in your duties, little psyker?’

Trez’s throat bobbed as he swallowed again. ‘Please… I’m doing all I can… I’ll double my efforts when he returns to us, I swear on my very soul.’

Naraka joined Krukesh, looking down at the hunched scholar. ‘You gave the Legion your word before, telepath. And now you fail us.’

‘Sevatar…’ Trez managed to whisper between panted breaths.

‘I did warn you to be somewhere else,’ Sevatar pointed out. He let his words hang in the air, the implied threat adding blades to the leering black eyes staring down at the archivist.

‘Leave him be,’ Sevatar said at last. ‘We need him.’

The two captains backed away, one chuckling, the other silent. ‘The primarch’s degeneration is a grave threat to us,’ said Var Jahan from across the chamber. ‘Mounting heads on spikes to warn slaves about the price of disobedience is one thing. Dwelling among the bodies of dead legionaries and Legion serfs is quite another.’

Sevatar gently shoved one of the nearby corpses, sending it swaying on its rattling chains. ‘Degeneration is a harsh word. I regret using it myself in the past. Our lord is a haunted man, that’s true. But he remains unbroken. This war – this exile into the deepest black – is what’s poisoning him. He feels useless.’

‘Conjecture,’ said Naraka.

‘You’re guessing,’ Krukesh said in the same moment.

‘Am I now?’

Krukesh hissed in a breath through his bloodstained teeth. ‘Just tell us your scheme, Sevatar. We’re not fools. You’re planning something.’

‘Not a plan. An intent. I’m going divide the remnants of the Legion. I’ll scatter the Night Lords across the galaxy, to fight the war as they wish. Each of you will take whatever forces you can gather, forming one of six Great Companies. And then do whatever you want. I don’t care, as long as you bleed the Imperium. Carve out your own slice of Mankind’s empire. Come with me on the long crusade to Terra.’ Sevatar shrugged. ‘The choice will be yours. Var Jahan, if you are still so ruthlessly committed to fighting the Dark Angels, you can remain with your companies and slow them down, as you desire.’

Var Jahan didn’t comment. Sevatar could see the thoughts curling in the depths of his black eyes.

‘Six Great Companies,’ Tovac said. ‘The Raven will be one of the Kyroptera, but he’s given no men to command? Why include him at all?’

Alastor said nothing. He merely forced a tight smile.

Sevatar nodded to the question. ‘He is one of us, whether he was born of Nostramo or not, and no matter what blood beats through his veins. To be Eighth Legion is more than flesh and bone. He earned his place among the elite at Isstvan. Do you dispute it?’

‘Not I.’ Tovac inclined his head towards Alastor. ‘All here know I hold no grudge against the Raven.’

‘We need time to think on this, First Captain,’ said Var Jahan.

‘You have three nights before I begin coordinating the vessels of the force I’m taking to Terra.’

‘Will you kill us if we disagree with this… division?’ asked Ophion.

Sevatar gave his flesh-hooked grin again. ‘And they told me you weren’t a thinker, Captain Ophion.’

Sevatar boarded the Excoriator with Var Jahan at his side, and Ekra Trez trailing along at their heels. In other Legions, the arrival of the First Captain and the vessel’s own commander might have prompted at least a little ceremony. In the VIII Legion, the menials and serfs working in the hangar bay lowered their heads in respectful silence, and did their best to carry on their duties unnoticed.

As the captains walked through the dark corridors of Var Jahan’s warship, Sevatar spoke softly.

‘There’s something I’ve just realised I don’t know.’

Var Jahan glanced to his left, immediately on edge from the introspective tone in his brother’s voice. ‘Yes?’

‘How did the Terrans in the Legion feel when we all watched Nostramo burn? It wasn’t their homeworld, after all.’

Var Jahan mused over the question, unsure how to answer. ‘Half the Legion is Terran, Sevatar. You’ve never spoken to any of them about this, even once?’

The First Captain didn’t reply. He sometimes had great difficulty recalling that other people had different perspectives to him. Of course he knew that they led different lives, and were shaped by different experiences, but he struggled to imagine their frames of reference. He couldn’t, in essence, see things from their point of view.

Part of the problem was that he was so rarely wrong. It made it hard to take other people’s opinions and observations seriously. He’d always been this way, even as a child. His mother had told him he’d grow out of it, that he’d become better with people.

He didn’t. He hadn’t.

It was the same in battle. He didn’t know why he was different there, either. He didn’t know why he ran faster, killed quicker, and tired slower than they did. He’d duelled Sigismund of the Imperial Fists once – the only warrior ever to beat him to a deadlock in over a hundred years of warfare. The duel had lasted almost thirty long, long hours of sweat, swearing, and the crash-clash of iron against iron.

He’d cheated, in the end. He finished the duel, as hundreds of warriors from both Legions looked on, by headbutting the Templar and disqualifying himself. It broke the rules, as well as Sigismund’s winning streak.

True to his nature, Sigismund had done nothing but laugh. The proud stoicism the First Captain of the Fists was so famous for didn’t bleach all humanity from his humour. Sevatar had always envied him that, for he found it very difficult to laugh, to joke, to bond effortlessly with brothers in arms.

‘Forget I spoke,’ he said to Var Jahan. ‘Good luck in council with your captains, brother. I will deal with the primarch’s transfer.’

The two captains parted ways. Trez shuffled after Sevatar, saying nothing.

I know your secret, Jago. The memory of the old man’s words was curiously cold.

Sevatar entered the apothecarion, offering a saluted greeting to the three Apothecaries lingering near the resting primarch. They returned his salute as he approached the surgical slab.

‘Any change, Valzen?’ he asked the Chief Apothecary.

‘None. He sleeps.’

‘Any sign of dreaming?’

‘There’s still no evidence of it, on any cerebral auspex sweep.’ Valzen’s face was partially augmetic – a silver and steel simulacrum of the features he lost to an Iron Hands warrior’s chainfist on Isstvan. The ceramic black eye didn’t blink, the mouth didn’t move; Sevatar was an indifferent student of history, but he thought the shining visage harked back to the death masks of primitive cultures on Ancient Terra.

‘Be ready to transfer the primarch to the apothecarion aboard the Nightfall. We leave in three nights.’

‘Of course, captain.’ Valzen hesitated, though his emotionless chrome face showed no hint of why. ‘Why is the Sin-Eater here? I’ve told you in every report, sir, the primarch isn’t dreaming. Trez’s presence isn’t required.’

‘I know. Do not concern yourself with it.’

‘As you wish.’

Sevatar looked around the busy apothecarion, at the servitors, the serfs in scrubs and surgical coats, and the Legion Apothecaries remaining by the primarch’s side. He knew all three of the warrior-surgeons: Valzen was his own Apothecary, an officer in the Atramentar. The other two were from the Third and Tenth Companies, respectively.

‘Leave me,’ Sevatar told them all. ‘Even you, Valzen. Clear the apothecarion. I want every soul gone.’

‘Captain–’

‘I have an idea that may bring him back.’

‘Sev, I have to stay. You can’t expect me to leave.’

‘I expect you to do as I order.’ In a rare moment of insight, Sevatar softened the demand with a hand on Valzen’s shoulder guard. ‘And I expect you to trust me, brother.’

Trez breathed slowly, once they were alone. His rasping respiration was a sickly wet rhythm behind the growl of Sevatar’s armour, and the digital sounds of medical equipment.‘So this is why you brought me,’ the archivist said. His voice echoed hollowly around the empty room.

Sevatar stood by the slumbering primarch. In repose, Curze looked less wretched, less weakened by the strains of commanding a guerrilla void campaign out here in the deepest black for more than two years, across hundreds of star systems.

Curze wasn’t born for this. He was a justiciar, a judge, a man born to look traitors and thieves in the eye as he delivered their sentence. And now, what had he become? A general? An admiral? A warleader buried beneath logistics and tactical displays, cast out to languish with his sons at the far end of the galaxy.

Worse, he was a traitor now himself.

Sevatar had seen his primarch’s desperation, the degeneration, the yearning for purpose in the star-scattered isolation of the deep void. He’d seen it taking place since they’d first set sail for the Thramas Sector, and now he wanted answers. Guesses and patience were no longer enough.

Sevatar’s gloved hand remained above the primarch’s pale forehead, fingers half-curled, unwilling to touch his father’s face.

‘This will probably kill you, Jago.’

He nodded to Trez’s words. ‘I know.’

The archivist sucked in a wet breath. ‘You have the strength for this. But not the control.’

‘I know,’ Sevatar said again. ‘But I have to try. I don’t want him to die.’ He looked down at his crimson gauntlet, painted as evidence of his sins. ‘I failed him once already. I won’t let it happen twice.’

Trez sighed, dew droplets of condensed breath sparkling on the inside of his rebreather. ‘There’s no going back from this. If you unlock the gift you’ve fought so hard to forget… Some doors cannot be closed.’

Sevatar was barely listening now. ‘I already struggle to restrain it,’ he said, his voice barely carrying over the humming of the ceiling air vents. ‘Will you help me? I can’t do this alone.’

The old man limped over on a creaking spine and shin-splinted legs. He reached out with a hand blighted by liver spots and the trembles of flaring arthritis, and closed his knuckly fingers around the back of Sevatar’s red gauntlet.

The First Captain lowered his hand, resting his fingertips on his father’s forehead.

‘You said he wasn’t dreaming, Trez.’ Sevatar spoke aloud, dead-voiced and staring at nothing. ‘You were wrong.’

CHAPTER V

The Boy Who Would Be King

The boy rose from the wreckage, wearing nothing more than smears of ash and dirt clinging to his pale skin. He looked at the sky, dark as the void, blind without a sun’s eye. He looked at the metal ruin of his cradle-engine, still hissing steam through its cracked, blistered armour plating. And then, still with nothing resembling an expression on his slender face, he looked to the horizon.

A city. A city of spires and domes, its dull, low lights still brightening the surrounding darkness with a beacon’s intensity.

The first expression to play across the boy’s face was subtle, but telling. His eyes narrowed as his heartbeat quickened. Instinctively, he knew he’d find others of his kind in the distant, light-rich hive. The thought made him reach for a weapon. White fingers curled around a jagged shard of metal, cooled in the soil.

The feel of the knife in his hands brought a second expression to his youthful, unscarred features.

He smiled.

They could never catch him, no matter how they tried. The boy was a blur of black clothes, cut from the shadows on street corners. His ragged boots barely touched the ground as he ran.

Gunfire chased him, bestial and barking in the night. The bullets were insects, buzzing by his ears. He grinned harder, running faster. Around a corner. Into an alley. He jumped over the filthy rainwater puddles, spinning into a crouch between two large residential waste containers. The boy covered his white hands in his pockets, lowered his head so his dirty black hair veiled his face, and held his breath.

There he waited, a shadow like any other, all movement suspended.

His pursuers came in a breathless pack, their wheezing gasps scented of poisoned water and their skin smelling of other people’s blood. Some went left, some went right, but all of them ran through the puddles that turned the alley into a concrete marsh.

The boy had to try not to smile; their bootprints on the pavement would make tracking them the easiest thing in the world.

One of them stayed in the alley. From his ragged breaths and racing heart, the boy knew without looking that the man’s corpulence prevented him from keeping up with his miserable packmates. The boy opened his eyes, rose to his feet, and left the shadows. He let the knife in his hand catch the reflection of a nearby streetlight.

The man turned, looking right into the skinny boy’s smiling, snarling face.

His scream drew his friends back. The fastest of them took less than twenty seconds to reach the alley mouth again. When they arrived, there was no sign of the boy, and the fat man who belonged to their pack lay on his back in a rainwater puddle clouding with hot blood, with every finger severed and his skinned face bare to the bone.

He was hungry.

He knew he could rob the dead, take their coins and papers to buy food. He also knew he could simply steal food from the street traders, taking their fruit and warm bread, for he was quick enough to escape without ever being caught.

The boy’s stomach knotted, coiling in on itself, groaning with need. He’d tried drinking his own blood the last time he felt this hungry. It helped take the edge off the pain, but left him just as weak as before.

Rats were no longer enough. He needed more. He’d caught one two hours ago, but he needed it to bait his trap. It took all his strength not to surrender to the torment in his stomach and just eat the starved vermin, little crackling bones and all.

Finally, a pack of three wild dogs, each one more ratty and bedraggled than the last, growled and snarled at the mouth of the alleyway, fighting over the dead rat the boy had left in the open.

His tongue tingling, thickened by the hot rush of saliva, the boy reached for his knife and started running.

He watched the city below, crouched on the edge of the rooftop, hunched over in mimicry of the monstrous gargoyle next to him. His clothes were rags with no hope of keeping out the cold. He grew too fast, needing to steal something new almost every week. In truth, he was no longer even a boy. He was already as tall as the people he cut, and carved, and killed.

The territory below belonged to the men and women with red tears tattooed on their faces. The boy usually avoided their domain, but tonight the screaming beckoned him closer. He’d warned them before, more than once. He’d warned them that they’d pay a price in blood every time they came into his part of the city.

And yet they came anyway. They’d come in packs, killing men from the neighbouring district, and dragging women back for sport.

No. No more. The pale man slipped from the roof, lowering himself with nothing more than handholds on the stone walls. His boots graced the alley below with a spectre’s tread, and clad in a beggar’s rags, he went to see why his warnings weren’t being heeded.

They’d left sentries in the row of abandoned factories that marked the edge of their domain. He came across the first one – a man with a mangy hound – by dropping down from a hole in the ruined ceiling.

The sentry turned, raising his gun, but the pale man broke his arm at the elbow and rammed a dagger of glass into his dirty neck. The dog growled, backing away, teeth bared but unwilling to fight. The pale man stared back at it, his eyes narrowed, his own white teeth on show.

The dog ran away, yelping and whining.

Before the pale man left, he sawed through the dead sentry’s throat and left the severed head on an iron fence railing. Perhaps placing the warnings inside the gang’s territory would work better. He’d leave a dozen, perhaps twenty this time.

If that failed, the next time he’d leave forty.

Weeping was music to him. Gunfire was laughter. Sorrow and panic were the verse and chorus to his entire life. Not because he enjoyed them, but because in this city, they were all he heard. They were the sounds that nourished him in infancy, in absence of a mother’s milk. With the cries of urban decay in his ears, he grew to manhood – and then into something beyond it.

They were writing about him. He couldn’t read, but he still gleaned insight and understanding from looking at the script on a scrap of newspaper, or the scroll of text across a monitor. He learned the local tongue without trying, without even knowing how. The understanding simply came, and it felt right that it should do so.

An avenging soul, they called him. A murderous echo from the Age of Unwanted Law, stalking the city. A ghost from Old Earth haunting the streets at night. First they gave him a name, to put a face on their fears. Soon enough, the name became a curse.

The Night Haunter.

He ghosted through the cathedral, through this great house to a false god, crawling across the arched ceiling without a sound, lost above where the lights could reach. The queen-priest of this monumental building stole from her people. She bled them of money, of freedom, and of blood. She took their children. She controlled their lives. All for the dubious honour of her protection – protection from other street-kings and alley-queens, who would only do the same things she did.

It saddened the pale man to see how weak people were. Sometimes, they seemed no different from the dogs they used to guard their homes. They took the same beatings, and wore collars just as binding, if not quite as physical. Many of them were skin-inked by their masters, pressed into legal slavery, or simply ran the streets in wild packs, taking whatever they wished by threat or force.

Most of them – those that didn’t serve as indentured slaves in the urban cityscape – were foundry workers, toiling in the stinking factories whose breath choked the skies and blocked out the weakling sun.

He walked on the edge of a society with no fear of punishment, and therefore no concept of justice. These people, on the basest level, had no need – no compunction – to obey anything but the rule of might making right. And even that rule was divided, broken down between hundreds and hundreds of petty pack leaders and warlords of the street.

Barely people at all. Closer to animals. Creatures in a hive.

But he’d watched them, and he’d learned. It was only instinct that kept them this way. Instinct could be controlled. Predators could be tamed. Prey could be herded.

The pale man knew he’d have to appear before many of them tonight – the cards had revealed that much to him. The thousands gathered into this place of sleazy sanctuary would see him for the first time. A necessary indulgence, nothing more. He’d learned from them. Now they would learn from him.

He crawled closer, closer, preparing to let go of the ceiling.

The fall would kill one of them, but the pale man had come to terms with being a breed apart. He released his grip, twisting in the air, his ragged clothing spreading out in wounded wings.

The gasps of the crowd were louder than his landing. Their minister, their owner in her fine clothes that stank of gun oil and innocent blood, quivered and pissed herself. She was dead before she even started to fall, life’s fluid gushing from the hole in her chest. The pale man burst the minister’s heart in his hand, in a rustling squeeze of abused meat.

‘The Night Haunter…’ someone said, a lone voice among the stunned crowd. And suddenly they were all saying it, whispering it, shouting it. Some ran, others pointed, others reached for weapons of their own.

He saw the truth in that moment – a truth he’d sensed, but never faced. They hated him as much as their masters did. He was a daemon to them, just as he was to their owners. No one was safe from him.

The pale man turned and fled from their staring eyes, laughing all the while.

The key to change was to show the herd that their sins carried the threat of punishment. They had to see how justice would be done, because it was the only way they would learn.

Fear was the weapon, pure above all others. Fear would keep them compliant, since they’d proven so clearly they couldn’t be trusted to keep to the most basic ideals themselves.

The Night Haunter knew all of this from watching and learning, melting his perceptions into the instinctive feeling of how the world should work. Without an education, he cared nothing for ideals of civilisation and culture; their depravity struck him as wrong on a much lower, more primal level. Their violence against each other ran counter to the very drive of herd animals, be they sentient or otherwise. A people divided would never rise, never achieve, never progress. They lacked even the unity required to prosper through hatred of a mutual enemy. Even that would offer some degree of progress and cohesion, yet even that was beyond them. Their lives were governed by the selfish need to steal from each other, and kill their neighbours.

The Night Haunter reflected on this as he gripped the struggling man by the throat. Tonight was a night like any other, with sinners to bleed.

‘Please…’ the man muttered. He was an old man, and that made it worse. The Night Haunter couldn’t help but wonder how many years he’d been leeching coin and blood and life from the people of the city. He existed at the very apex of sin. His foulness tainted all below him.

‘Please…’ he said again. ‘Please.’

Please. How often did the Night Haunter hear that word stammered in his presence? Did they truly expect him to pay heed to their begging?

‘I’ll give you whatever you want,’ the old man said. ‘Anything. Anything you want.’

The Night Haunter’s growl was a wet, burbling thing at the back of his throat. He loathed begging, principally because he didn’t understand it. They knew they were guilty, and justice had come for them. They deserved this. Their actions made it necessary. So why beg? Why seek to flee from the consequences of their own actions? Why sin at all if the price was too high to pay?

He growled again as the man kept begging.

‘You earned this,’ the Night Haunter replied, his voice curiously soft. ‘Do not beg. Do not blame me. This is the end of the path you chose to walk.’

‘Please…’

The Night Haunter shivered in revulsion. Please. There was that word again. The first word he’d ever learned, from hearing it leave the quivering lips of countless cowards.

‘I have a family…’

‘No, you don’t.’ The Night Haunter stared through a veil of filthy hair, scanning the empty warehouse. ‘Your wife and daughter are already dead. Your home burned to the ground an hour ago.’

‘You’re lying… You’re lying…’

The Night Haunter let go of the old man’s throat, letting him lie on the ground, unable to move with his arms and legs broken at the elbows and knees. With a knife made from a shard of broken glass, the Night Haunter crouched above his captive. The dagger-tip pressed into the soft skin below the old man’s right eye.

‘Everyone who shares a blood-tie with you is dead, for the crime of sharing in your many sins. This glass is from your bedroom window. I took it after I skinned your wife while she still drew breath.’

He slid the blade forwards, sinking it into the old man’s open eye. That was when the screaming really began.

Three hours later, the old man was found crucified on the spire of an abandoned city militia building. Hollow eye sockets stared out at the people passing, as the rain lashed his flayed muscles. The skinned man took almost twenty minutes to die, all the while shrieking as best he could without a tongue.

The summer and the war both came from nowhere. No summer in memory had ever burned so hot and so long, turning the clouds above Nostramo Quintus sour with pressure storms. The city’s blighted landscape was no stranger to acidic rain as the inevitable result of its foundries’ exhalations, but that season’s downpours were corrosive enough to strip paint from steel, and leave lesions on unprotected skin.

The war was ostensibly fought in the shadows, but on a world without sunlight, that turned the entire city into a battleground. The Night Haunter knew they were hunting him. He knew, and he encouraged it. It meant the hierarchy leashing the populace was starting to feel threatened. Better yet, they were starting to feel fear. They wanted him dead before he could come for any more of them. The people of the city had hated him for years already, back from when his name had been a whispered invocation of urban myth, and his deeds were no grander than the mutilation and murder of lowlife scum.

But now those in power were joining the game. They feared him, too. Change was slowly taking hold.

The last of the city’s lords to fall at his hands had been a land baron, overseeing investments in the adamantium refineries to the south of the city.

‘People are animals,’ the Night Haunter had said to the cowering noble. ‘Without fear of punishment, things fall apart. The centre cannot hold.’

‘Please…’

That word again.

‘You had all the power, all the opportunity, yet failed to learn the easiest truth of the human condition. You had your chance. Now your death will teach the truth to others.’

The Night Haunter had left his headless body hanging from a power spire by the ankles. The corpse was naked but for the savage decoration of three hundred and nine separate slices across the skin; one for each life lost in a recent foundry fire.

He didn’t fear the fact that those in power hunted him now. Let them try. Every day saw him slumber in a different lair – on the days he decided he needed sleep at all. The Night Haunter cast aside the sloughed skin of a dull-witted thug he’d caught assaulting a woman on a rooftop. The flayed wretch had died before the skinning was complete. The woman had fled as soon as she’d been saved, screaming and never once looking back.

The Night Haunter washed his face in the blood of the dead rapist, staining his skin with sin, before running into the city’s eternal night.

The bandage on his forearm was stained dark by sweat and dirty rain, but at least the wound had stopped bleeding. The Night Haunter tested his arm, rotating the wrist, working the elbow joint and flexing his fingers.

Sore, nothing more. The bullet would leave a scar, but then, didn’t they all? He’d not looked at himself in a mirror for some time, but running his calloused fingertips across his chest and back offered more than a slight pebbling of scar tissue from bullet holes. He couldn’t dodge everything, no matter how much faster he was than the humans that hunted him.

He was still cold, each evening. Still wretched. But that, too, would soon change. He had an idea. A dream, amidst a life of nightmare.

The Night Haunter watched a cluster of beggar children, orphans of the streets not yet taken into gangs, stripping the jewellery and money from a dead body he’d left in the gutter. He could have killed them – the temptation to do so rose in his throat – but the sight of their scavenging made him laugh.

When the children turned with wide, frightened eyes at the sound, he was already gone.

Entire nights passed when he no longer smelled blood. They kept to their houses and habitats now, rarely taking to the streets once the foundries closed for the evening. No longer did the roads of the city echo with gunfire and the shrieking of the wounded, the abused and the dying.

Still, the Night Haunter watched his city, his people. The sins were quieter, the crimes were hidden, but the city wasn’t free from their corruptive influence. Their fear was all he desired from them, and all he received. Fear brought obedience. Fear forced them to rise above their sickening, animal instincts, and live as humans.

The hunt for his life still dragged on, but there were few within the hierarchy in a position to sustain their grievance. Thugs and hired guns were becoming notorious for refusing to hunt him at all, and the small-minded, cowardly men and women who desired him dead would never take to the streets to do it themselves.

The Night Haunter broke the bone in his teeth, with the last of the meat licked clean. The sour pork taste no longer made him cringe. Years of necessity stole all such reluctance and hesitation.

He tossed the human tibia away, and licked his teeth clean. There were some nights when he almost missed the taste of dog.

‘Ladies,’ he said. ‘Gentlemen.’

The gathered nobles tensed at the words. Their bodyguards reached for concealed weapons. The moment rested on a knife edge.

He crouched atop a minister’s throne, his immense, strangely slender bulk darkened by the rags he wore over his pale, scarred skin, and the filthy curtain of dark hair covering patches of his face.

‘We must speak,’ he said to them. His voice was a ghost’s breath, all sibilance and subtlety. In the half-light, his eye sockets were sunken pools in a wraith’s face. His smile was a slit between lips the colour of milk.

The bodyguards, armoured only in suits of expensive tailoring, were aiming their weapons at him now. Pistols. Slugthrowers. He bore a host of scars from such weapons. To see twenty of them aiming directly at him now did nothing more than rack his mirthless smile higher.

‘You can’t kill me,’ his voice seethed. ‘Do not even try. This is not how it ends.’

The Night Haunter leaned forwards, his face touched by a sliver of light from the low-power illumination strips set in the ceiling. His gaunt features could’ve been sculpted from alabaster, no warmer to the touch, no more alive than stone.

‘Why are you here?’ one of the nobles asked. ‘What do you want?’ The Night Haunter could smell the coppery rancidity of fear on the man’s breath.

‘I could ask for this city, couldn’t I? But it is no longer yours to give. I’ve already taken it.’

He remained crouched atop the throne, clothed in rags and shadows. He could feel the effect his presence had on them – he could hear the trickle of fear-soiling in their clothing, hear the muffled thunder of speeding hearts, see the rise of the tiniest hairs on their necks.

‘It is my place to raise you above your savage natures. My place, as a creature above and beyond what you all are. I am this city’s sins, so the people may be sinless.’

The bravest of them spoke again, his black eyes unwavering despite the shiver in his fingers. ‘Is that your philosophy? All the murders and desecrations are fuelled by… this?’

‘By reason. By truth. I have learned how your hearts and minds function. With that lore, I brought peace to this culture.’

‘At the cost of freedom.’

The Night Haunter drew in a slow breath though his knife-slit smile. ‘Peace reigns, as I reign. I wouldn’t expect you to understand. You are a little man, with little dreams.’

‘You’ve ushered in the peace of the graveyard.’ The noble dared to take a step closer. ‘Peace, at the cost of surrendering all choice, all freedom. The city lives in terror, forced to live by the standards you place upon our shoulders.’

‘Yes,’ the Night Haunter replied. ‘Yes.’

‘But every sin–’

‘Is punished.’ The Night Haunter listened to their hearts beating blood through their bodies.

‘But punished by death, no matter the crime. No matter the scale of the sin. The people of the city live in silence, lest a single word earn them death for speaking out against you.’

‘Yes.’ The Night Haunter closed his dark eyes, as if listening to that very silence, drifting across the city. ‘Listen. Listen to the sound of raw silence. Is it not serene?’

The young lord shook his head. ‘How very noble of you, beast.’

‘Balthius.’ The Night Haunter turned the man’s own name into a whispered, caressing blade. ‘The potential I see in you is the reason you still live. Be silent, and you may yet continue to exist in the glory of my patience.’

‘You are a monster.’

‘No.’ The Night Haunter’s fingers curled into claws. ‘I am an emissary of civilisation. But to be the light in your darkness, I must cloak myself in sin.’

The intruder reached a hand to slowly claw his hair back from his sunken eyes. ‘Humans are animals. Beasts, to use Balthius’s own word. But they can be herded, controlled, ruled. The threat of punishment forces them to live by the code of law. Through fear, they rise above the bestial. I am on the edge of great things, my lords and ladies. Great things. I hold this city by the throat. Now, we have peace. We have serenity. Can you even understand the importance of that word? We stand on the edge of great wonders, if we use peace to fuel progress.’

He lifted his hand again, his long white fingers curling slowly together, a blossoming flower in insidious reverse. ‘But I want more. I want more from this city. More from its people. More from this world we call home. I want what’s mine by right, and mine by weight of responsibility to those beneath me.’

At last, the Night Haunter’s sneer faded. He looked at them all, his eyes so cold and hard they could’ve been opals dropped into the sockets of a bare skull.

‘I will be your king.’

CHAPTER VI

Memory

He didn’t hunt any more. The passing of years had stolen the need. His city was a silent hive, illuminated by the light of progress – and the more literal light of streetlamps and beacon towers. No crime, no sin, had been committed in decades. The last vestiges of anarchy and resistance had died out soon after he began to broadcast his mutilations across the city via the picter interfaces available in every home, transmitting his victims’ screaming over the planetary communications net.

Those executions, recorded in his throne room, ended what little crime remained. His people knew he’d take to the streets at the slightest provocation. In their fear, the last souls holding out finally accepted the salvation he offered them.

Nostramo Quintus, capital city of the sunless world, grew by the year.

Spaceflight was no mystery to them, albeit in the most stunted and warpless sense, reaching out to a handful of worlds in neighbouring star systems. Nostramo had traded its abundance of adamantium with these worlds for generations, though under the Night Haunter’s kingship, planetary exports rose to unparalleled levels, as did the profits of such endeavour. The city’s foundries and forge fires burned hotter, the refineries and processing plants spread across the urban sprawl, and the mines clawed ever deeper into Nostramo’s priceless crust.

After curfew, the city slept in absolute serenity. Each dawn, the workforce rose in the half-light of the dying sun, to repeat the cycle of labour again and again and again. It stank of industrial excess – that fiery reek of charcoal and chemical tangs. The people themselves stank of grey lives and bitter fear.

The Night Haunter stood on the balcony of the faceless grey spire he considered his castle, staring down at his city alongside the leering gargoyles shaped into the stonework.

Today would be the day. He knew it, as he knew all things. The answers came to him as they always did: in his dreams. Since mastering the world, he found his post-mortal senses sharpening beyond anything he’d imagined. He knew, on some voiceless level, he was becoming something. He was ripening, maturing, into… whatever he was born to be. It manifested first in knowing what people would say before they spoke, and soon became a habit of dreaming the events of most days on the nights before they happened.

Soon enough, he was dreaming while awake. What would happen began to overlay his vision of what was happening. He’d speak to an underling, losing track of the man’s voice, hearing instead the servant’s last words when he was destined to die from a heart failure in nine years. He’d see the faces of his governors, each one lined by years they’d not yet lived, carrying scars they hadn’t yet earned.

One dream stuck very fiercely indeed, burning brighter than all others.

‘Watch the skies,’ he’d ordered his district governors at the last conclave. ‘A fleet is coming. A fleet of such size, their engines will light the sky the way our sun never could.’

‘Will there be war?’ Balthius had asked.

‘Yes,’ the Night Haunter had replied. ‘But not with the arrivals. The war will come afterwards, far from Nostramo’s shores.’

‘Who are they?’ another governor had asked. ‘What do they want?’

‘They are my father’s warriors. He is coming for me.’

The city wept at the Delegation of Light. They wept collectively, every man, woman and child gathered on the streets, their pale faces staring at the strangers in their midst, as the sky was brightened by the false stars of void-ship engines.

The strangers walked in a slow, regal parade. The ground trembled, quite literally, with their rhythmic tread. They walked in great, grinding phalanxes, different formations wearing armour of black, of gold, of royal purple or earthen grey. Giants led them. Giants towering above their warriors, as their warriors towered above mortal men. Leading the giants was a sun incarnated in human skin; a god in a man’s flesh; his soul-fire uncontainable in a sheath of flesh and bone. Blindness was the reward for all who dared look upon him. Those afflicted spent the rest of their lives sightless but for the image of the living god flash-flamed into their dead retinas.

The people of Nostramo Quintus watched their city invaded by these marching off-worlders, millions upon millions of mouths locked silent, eyes wide with awe. The silence was so intense, so unnatural, it bordered on inhuman. Even the rain stopped. The storm season itself was holding its breath as the procession of outworld might reached the Night Haunter’s tower at the city’s heart.

He was waiting for them.

The army ceased as one, every single one of the quarter-million soldiers standing motionless in the same moment. The four giants stepped forwards. The blazing god led them.

The first demigod, clad in wrought gold, inclined his white-haired head in majestic acknowledgement – a king greeting an equal.

‘I am Rogal Dorn,’ he said.

The Night Haunter said nothing. In his mind’s eye, he saw the giant die, dragged down by a hundred murderers in a dark tunnel, their knives and swords wet with the warrior’s blood.

The second giant wore armour of patterned grey, etched with ten thousand words, as if a scholar had taken a quill to a stone. He nodded his shaven, tattooed head, likewise inked with scripture – the lettering gold upon the tanned skin.

‘I am Lorgar Aurelian,’ he said, his voice a hymn where Dorn’s had been a measured, stately demand. ‘We have been seeking you, brother.’ There was sorrow in his otherwise kind eyes – sorrow at the dark city, its unhealthy people, the obviousness of their colourless, exhausting lives.

Again, the Night Haunter said nothing. He saw this warrior crowned in psychic fire, screaming up at a burning sky.

The third giant wore armour of riveted, dense black. His arms were solid silver, yet contoured and moving as living limbs. His voice was the steely grind of a foundry’s bowels.

‘I am Ferrus Manus,’ he said. His eyes were dark, but not cold.

The Night Haunter remained silent, seeing the warrior’s head clutched by its empty eye sockets in another man’s armoured fingers.

The last giant wore armour painted the violet of an alien sunset. His hair was silvery, long and elegant. He alone smiled, and he alone met the Night Haunter’s eyes with warmth in his own.

‘I am Fulgrim,’ said this last lord. ‘It is good to finally meet you, my brother.’

The Night Haunter still said nothing. He saw this final giant in only the faintest of images; always slithering and laughing, never entirely visible.

The god stepped forwards, his arms open wide. He drew breath to speak.

‘K–’

The first syllable struck the Night Haunter with the force of a spear through the heart. He went to his knees, gasping for breath that wouldn’t come, saliva stringing from his bared teeth. Blood ran from his burst heart, just as it gushed from his cut throat. His grasping hands had no hope of stemming the flow. His whole life rushed out in a liquid torrent, burning his cold fingers, images of murder hammering against the back of his eyes.

He felt a hand on his head. The pain died in a pulse, restoring his sanity in a moment of mercy. His throat wasn’t cut. His heart hadn’t burst. The Night Haunter looked up, to see the golden god – faceless and ageless – resolve into the image of a man. The man-god’s face could’ve been the face of any male on any one of a million worlds. It was all men, all at once. The apotheosis of Man.

‘Be at peace, Konrad Curze. I have arrived, and I intend to take you home.’

The Night Haunter reached up to rake his sweaty hair back from his gaunt features. ‘That is not my name, father. My people gave me a name, and I will bear it until my dying day.’

He rose to his feet, unwilling to kneel. ‘And I know full well what you intend for me.’

The scene froze around him. The Night Haunter looked at the Emperor – the godling claiming paternity over a coven of madmen and warlords – frozen in time. He looked at his brothers, at their Legions arranged in beautiful formation behind them.

He looked at the crowd, frozen in the same motionless pict-image perfection. Motes of dust glinted in the air, locked in the same spell as the people all around.

The Night Haunter turned, seeing a figure clad in ceramite the colour of clean midnight, the armour plates cracked by painted lightning. The warrior stood alone, watching in silence, his black eyes never judging, never accusing.

‘Sevatar,’ the Night Haunter said to the staring warrior. ‘You shouldn’t be here.’

Sevatar walked closer. His bootsteps echoed around the street, and his black eyes kept darting to the frozen crowds. He avoided glancing at the Emperor. Memory or not, he had no desire to feel his eyes fill with molten gold. The last time he’d looked upon the Emperor in the flesh, he’d endured seven weeks in the apothecarion while his vision healed. Impatience had driven him to the very edge of demanding augmetic eyes.

‘My lord,’ the First Captain said to his father.

‘You shouldn’t be here,’ the primarch said again. He was Curze now, no longer simply the Night Haunter. He stood in midnight clad, in reflection of his son. His hands were barbed by the murderous scythe-length claws constructed for him in the laboratory-forges of distant Mars. ‘Tell me why you came.’

‘What kind of question is that?’ Sevatar leaned on his spear, the chainblade resting on the rockcrete road. ‘You are my primarch, father. Why wouldn’t I risk myself to save you?’

‘Because I am your primarch.’ Curze shook his head, his smile as dark as his deeds. ‘And I lead a Legion of foul-hearted wretches with no sense of loyalty to me, or to each other.’

Sevatar shrugged, with a grind of armour joints. ‘And yet, I am so very popular among my brothers. The mystery of it all fascinates me.’ He looked around the road again. ‘Why do you dwell on these moments, lord? What calls you back to the past, when the future is still threatened?’

Curze didn’t answer. He beckoned Sevatar to follow, and began to walk down the street, weaving between the statue-warriors of the Emperor’s Children.

‘You shouldn’t be here,’ the primarch said again. ‘Not because this is private to me. I don’t care about that, Sev.’

‘Then why not?’

‘You know why not.’ Curze chuckled, the sound no different from a lizard choking on dust. ‘In a single night, you’ve undone decades of suppressing your talent.’ Curze looked back over his shoulder, at his son following close behind. ‘Your psyche is no longer guarded. I can read you, in a way I’ve not been able to do for years. I can see through your barriers, for they are no longer barriers at all.’

Sevatar knew what this was building up to. ‘I don’t want to know.’

‘Yes, you do. Everyone does.’ Curze looked ahead again, turning to move between an isolated phalanx of Ultramarines, led by their stoic commander.

‘I asked you not to tell me back then, sire.’ Sevatar followed, his face darkening. ‘Please keep to our former agreement.’

‘No.’ Curze gave his dusty chuckle again, wind rasping through a tomb. ‘You die in battle.’

Sevatar swallowed. ‘That’s hardly surprising, lord. I’ve no desire to know the rest.’

‘You’re safe, Sev. I see little beyond that obvious truth.’

Sevatar followed in silence for another minute. ‘You are making me regret doing this. I’d hoped to find you, and…’ He let the words hang, unsure he wanted to finish that sentence.

‘And?’ the primarch prompted.

‘And save you, sire.’

‘That’s why I enjoy your company so much, Sevatar. You tell the driest jests.’

Sevatar scowled. ‘I’ve gathered a third of the Legion, Lord Curze.’ He spoke as he always did when officially reporting to his liege lord – in a clipped, clear tone. ‘The Kyroptera stand ready once more. I intend to scatter the fleet, leading the bulk of our forces to Terra. The rest will dissolve into the void, harassing Imperial supply lines, burning worlds, carving fresh skinning pits at the heart of cities. Just like the old days.’

Curze looked back over his shoulder. His teeth were filed now, scored down into tiny ivory daggers, just as they were in the waking world.

‘You say “Imperial” as if we aren’t Imperial ourselves.’

Sevatar nodded to that. ‘I’m not sure we are any more, sire.’ He trailed after his primarch for another few minutes, moving between more warriors in the royal purple of the Emperor’s Children. ‘Trez is with me. I can hear him, feel him, in the back of my mind. He’s helping me be here. I’m not sure how.’

‘He is a good man,’ Curze spoke quietly. ‘At least, as good as one is likely to find in our fleet. We are none of us good men, are we?’

‘We do what’s necessary, sire.’ Sevatar passed an Emperor’s Children captain whose armour inscriptions he recognised. He briefly considered trying to kill the warrior here, in his primarch’s memory. If the notion had even a remote chance of success, he’d have done it without compunction.

After passing through the III Legion’s ranks, they started moving their way through the dark, ironclad formations of the X Legion. Sevatar found himself absently glancing here and there for the insignia of warriors he’d killed on Isstvan.

‘Lord?’ he asked after several silent minutes had gone by.

‘Speak, Sev.’

‘Why do you hate us?’ He asked it quietly, carefully, with no hint of offence or malice. The words still stopped Curze in his tracks, causing him to turn. The long blades curving from each of the primarch’s knuckles reflected the golden light of the Emperor’s halo, several streets away.

‘What?’

Sevatar spoke just as casually as before. ‘Why are you the only primarch to hate his own Legion? What have we done to you?’

Curze smiled, barely. ‘I spoke with Angron and Lorgar, not long ago. They told me of their purges, cleansing the untrustworthy elements from the Twelfth and Seventeeth. I laughed when they said it, at the sheer absurdity of the idea. They knew exactly when to stop the killing of the weak, the treacherous and the corrupt within their bloodlines. I wouldn’t even know where to begin culling mine.’

Sevatar snorted in dismissal. ‘On any other day, sire, such words might hurt my feelings.’

‘Look around you,’ Curze said. ‘You were born on this world. You grew to adulthood here, just as I did. The Emperor praised me for my rule over this world. Even Fulgrim admired it. A model of compliance. An obedient world, they said. Were my people happy? Did that even matter? I made these people human, despite their feral drives. I made them civilised, despite their baser instincts. I raised them above the level of beasts. That was my responsibility to them, as a superior being. And I fulfilled it.’

Curze looked to the grey spires, rising in every direction, and the frozen smog from the foundries and manufactorums veiling the spire-tops in a haze of pollutant smoke. ‘And see how my people rewarded me. I was gone only a handful of years before everything soured. My own homeworld poisoned my Legion with recruits who were worthless as soldiers. Rapists. Murderers. Thieves. The scum. The dregs. The detritus.’

Sevatar almost laughed. ‘Sire, you are no different. The Legion is disorderly and vile because it is cast in your image.’

‘No.’ Curze drenched the single syllable in regret. ‘No, you don’t understand. I’ve never claimed to be perfect, Sevatar. But I became the sinner, the monster, the Night Haunter, so my people would never have to. And look at the result. Look at the recruits from Nostramo, less than a decade after I departed. Look at the filth they sent me. Look at the disgusting dregs of humanity my own Apothecaries infused with my genetic material and reforged into transhumans. The Eighth is poisoned, Sev. Generations of men who are murderers in my image, yet devoid of my conviction. They are killers and abusers because they want to be, not because someone had to be.’

‘The end result is the same,’ said Sevatar. ‘Fear is the weapon.’

‘Fear is supposed to be the means to the end. Look at the bloodshed my Legion has wrought these last years, even before the Crusade was done. Fear became the end itself. It was all they desired. They fed on it. My sons were strong, so they bled the weak for their own amusement. Tell me, captain, where the nobility is in that.’

‘Where is the nobility in any of this?’ Sevatar gestured to the streets of Nostramo Quintus around them. ‘You can claim a savage nobility, father, but this is far more savage than noble.’

Curze’s pale lips peeled back from his filed teeth. ‘There was no other way.’

‘No?’ Sevatar answered his father’s snarl with a grin. ‘What other ways did you try?’

‘Sevatar…’

‘Answer me, father. What politics of peace did you teach? What scientific and social illumination did you bring to this society? In your quest for a human utopia, what other ways did you try beyond eating the flesh of stray dogs and skinning people alive?’

‘It. Was. The. Only. Way.’

Sevatar laughed again. ‘The only way to do what? The only way to bring a population to heel? How then did the other primarchs manage it? How has world upon world managed it, with resorting to butchering children and broadcasting their screams across the planetary vox-net?’

‘Their worlds were never as… as serene as mine was.’

‘And the serenity of yours died the first second your back was turned. So tell me again how you succeeded. Tell me again how this all worked perfectly.’

Curze was on him in the time it took to blink. The primarch’s hand wrapped his throat, lifting him from the ground, stealing his breath.

‘You overstep your bounds, First Captain.’

‘How can you lie to me like this?’ Sevatar’s voice was a strangled growl. ‘How can you lie to yourself? I stand here, inside your mind, witnessing a theatre of your own memories. Your way is the Eighth Legion way, now. But it has never been the only way. Just the easiest way.’

Curze tightened his grip. ‘You lie.’

Sevatar narrowed his eyes, his last breath escaping as Curze squeezed. ‘You enjoyed this way,’ the captain hissed. ‘You came to love it… just as we all did. The power… The righteousness…’

Curze released him. Sevatar crashed to the ground, his armour joints snarling as his ceramite scraped the rockcrete.

‘Son of a…’ he trailed off, catching his breath.

‘The son of a god,’ Curze said softly. ‘Get up, Sevatar. Leave me be.’

The First Captain rose to his feet, his vision blurred. ‘I am going nowhere, sire. Not without you.’

Curze smiled. His son could see that much, at least. ‘I admire your tenacity. I always have. But you are a shadow of what I am, Sevatar. You cannot match me. Go.’

‘N–’

Sevatar filled his lungs, the sterile air viciously cold as he drew it in.

Trez released his hand. The primarch slumbered before them, scarred from the Lion’s blade.

His other senses filtered back into life. He smelled the bleachy, chemical reek of the apothecarion – a smell which could never quite hide the scent of fresh blood. He heard Trez’s laboured breathing, and the beat of the old man’s heart. He heard the sirens.

The…

Sevatar re-tuned back into the vox-net, immediately assaulted by five hundred voices overlaying each other. He focused on the scrolling runes dancing down his retinal display, and activated a direct link to the flagship.

‘This is Sevatar,’ he said.

‘First Captain!’ He didn’t recognise the voice. Human, certainly. But that could be one of several hundred bridge crew. He had difficulty telling their voices apart. In truth, he even had trouble telling their faces apart.

‘Tell me everything.’

‘It’s the Dark Angels, sir. They found us.’

CHAPTER VII

Nightfall

The tactical hololith flickered as the Nightfall’s engines flared into full-throated life. After demanding teleportation back to the flagship, it had taken Sevatar fourteen minutes of sprinting to reach the strategium from the principal deployment bay. He’d been worried the battle would be over by the time he arrived; at several thoroughfares, he’d killed crew members that hadn’t fled from his path fast enough.

Rarely before had he been so relieved to hear proximity alarms and auspex chimes signifying incoming foes. The fleets still hadn’t engaged.

Once he’d reached the bridge, he took in the tactical display, ordered a feed of the ship’s status data transferred to his left eye-lens, and took stock of just what was happening.

They were going to lose, that was what was happening. He watched the hololith for another few seconds, discerning the spread of forces in the void, and their projected attack vectors.

He listened, briefly, to the shouting voice of Admiral Yul, being ignored by the Legion commanders he technically outranked.

‘Fleet address,’ Sevatar ordered.

‘Uplink live, captain,’ one of the vox-officers shouted back over the shaking of the hull.

‘This is Sevatar to the fleet. Let me be clear, brothers and sisters. I am not losing to these pious, deluded, rag-wearing whoresons twice in the same month. Focus all fire on the Invincible Reason. They crippled our primarch. Let’s return the favour. I need at least fifty ships willing to remain for the attack.’

‘Sevatar,’ crackled one voice, murdered by vox-distortion. ‘This is suicide.’

Sevatar’s false smile played out across his cold lips. ‘I take it I can’t count on your support for the attack run, Krukesh?’

‘Not a chance.’

‘I hoped you’d say that, brother. It saves me ordering you to flee. Take your companies and vanish into the black. We’ll meet you at Torus Point, for the journey onwards to Terra.’

‘We’ll be waiting, Sev. Luck be with you.’

Sevatar switched back to the general channel. ‘Var Jahan, Naraka, Ophion, Tovac – go with him, or scatter as you desire.’

Two of the four named Kyroptera captains replied in the affirmative. One didn’t reply at all. Only Ophion refused outright. ‘I’ll stay,’ he voxed back. ‘I’ll stand with you, Sevatar.’

‘I only need fifty ships. The Kyroptera has to get clear.’

A chorus of Yes, sir and Aye, captain filtered back from the command decks of the other ships. Over half of the fleet volunteered to stay. It wasn’t exactly the defiant bravery of the Ultramarines or the steadfast discipline of the Imperial Fists, but it was nothing to spit at. Sevatar took note of the ship identifier runes flickering gold, electing to remain and cover the retreat.

One of them made his skin crawl.

‘Var Jahan,’ he said.

‘Brother?’ the voice crackled back.

‘I ordered the Kyroptera to run. You can’t risk the primarch in this fight. Get clear of the battle, with the dispersing fleet.’

Sevatar had expected an argument from the veteran, perhaps yet another grunted complaint about authority.

‘Sevatar. There’s… Lord Curze is stirring.’

‘Is he awake? Can he stand? Can he fight?’

‘No.’

‘Then it changes nothing. Send Valzen back to the Nightfall before you break away. I trust your Apothecaries to watch over Lord Curze. I need mine back here.’

‘It will be done. Good hunting, Sevatar.’

Sevatar glanced back at the hololith, at the spread of so many ships, friend and foe alike. ‘Admiral Yul,’ he said aloud.

‘First Captain?’ came the vox-reply.

‘What, exactly, is your plan?’

The admiral relayed his intent. Sevatar listened in silence, and nodded at the very end.

‘I like the sound of that,’ he said. ‘They’ll likely name this manoeuvre after you, so let’s hope it works. No one wants their name attributed to a hilarious disaster.’

The VIII Legion fleet broke apart, a slow ballet of self-interest and defiance in equal measure. The Nightfall pulled ahead of the Blade in the Black, leading the armada intercepting the Dark Angels warships.

The rest of the Legion vessels turned tail and fled; some running in formation for the system’s coreward jump point, others rolling in the void and boosting away alone, heading in directions known only to their captains.

Sevatar drew his eyes away from the diaspora, biting back a sudden and strange sense of melancholy. This might be the last time the VIII Legion ever gathered in such numbers. The idea made tactical sense, and suited their way of war, but he couldn’t help a moment of regret.

The Nightfall thundered on, shaking with the strain of its engines.

‘Time to engage?’ he asked, seating himself in Lord Curze’s ivory command throne.

‘Six minutes, twelve seconds, First Captain. Ten. Nine…’

‘Launch fighters.’

A nearby servitor replied, dull-toned and unblinking, ‘Fighters launching.’

‘Very good. And open a channel to Wing Commander Karenna.’

The Wrath-pattern starfighter was a sleek shark of a girl, a throwback from a design era where genius minds drew inspiration from the beasts of Terra’s ancestral seas as much as from the extinct creatures of its polluted skies. This one was painted in the Legion’s colours, with bolts of lightning streaking across her slender hull.

In truth, the Wrath was an outdated model, rare to begin with and increasingly replaced in Imperial fleets by the mass-produced Fury-class. It was said the Fury had a finer temper. They handled more smoothly, they glitched less. Furies were the future, the modern face of void warfare. No rivals. No limit of sub-sector variations. No performance issues that so blighted previous models.

And no soul. Not to Taye.

Flying was more than some sterile interaction with manufactory-spec machines. She could outrun and outfight a Fury in her slower, older Wrath any night. She’d done it enough times already.

As soon as the sirens started, Taye had sprinted down to Preparations, going through the suiting-up rituals with her customary lack of patience. She’d buckled and sealed her pressure suit, putting up with the servitors checking and rechecking her life support backups and spinal interface connections.

‘Who’s on Ready Five?’ her gunner, Vensent, had asked.

‘The Ashen Masquerade. They’ll already be in the void.’ Taye’s short black hair saved her needing to deal with any additional hassle; she took her flight helm from the servitor offering it and fairly dropped it onto her head. She was already fastening her rebreather mask, ready to lock it in place.

‘Hurry up,’ she snapped.

Vensent shared a glance with the naviseer, Kyven, who was similarly slow in suiting up. ‘Slow and steady takes the prize,’ Vensent replied.

‘Slow and steady takes shit-all and nothing. Hurry up.’

‘Spinal connection,’ a servitor mumbled, ‘optimal function.’ The lobotomised slave withdrew its connectivity spikes from Taye’s spine. She winced, as she always did. Less than a minute later, they were running with the rest of her wing, sprinting across the launch deck towards their waiting fighters.

The sirens wailing above were almost drowned out by the rising whine of launch boosters and the yelling of several hundred deck crew. Scrambling a fighter wing was a cascade of coordination, and the Nightfall had several of them to get into the air at once.

The deck overseer was a balding rake of a man, more augmetic than human after four decades of service. He thudded over on his spindly bionic leg.

‘Wing Commander,’ he greeted her. He knew what she was going to ask. ‘Saevio and Aetus are still grounded. Relinquo is void-ready.’

She grinned, slapped him on the lump of augmetic gears that served as his shoulder, and was already running again. Twenty-two of her twenty-four fighters were about to ride skywards. That’ll do, she thought. That’ll do nicely.

Taye was first up the ladder, thumping down into her restraint throne and aligning her spinal sockets with the interface ports in the seatback. She rapped her knuckles on the side of the hull, twice for luck, before settling to get comfortable. Connection came with several insidious snicks as the needles slid into her spinal column.

‘I’m in,’ she said. Taye didn’t wait for the others; she started clicking switches and dragging levers at once. The Wrath started to tremble as it breathed again.

Kyven grunted as he buckled himself into his throne, back to back with hers. ‘I’m in,’ he said, and Taye heard the beeping and pulsing of his systems coming online, recognising his bio-imprint in the chair. She also heard him crack a gloved fist against the long-range auspex display.

‘Bastard thing,’ he grunted. ‘They said they’d finally fixed it.’

Taye grinned and said nothing. Vensent was climbing into his throne beneath hers, taking his place in the fighter’s nose. His own array of monitors and controls rivalled Kyven’s, and vastly outnumbered hers. She saw him lean back and tense as he connected.

‘I’m in,’ he sighed. He reached forwards, locking his hands around the control sticks.

Deck serfs lowered their tinted cockpit visor, hammering it sealed in the final preparations. She heard Kyven rap his knuckles on the hull, and Vensent do the same.

‘Wing Commander Karenna,’ she said into her rebreather mask. ‘Vespera ready for launch.’

The elevator platform gave a stark judder, beginning its achingly slow process of twisting them into place.

‘Taye,’ a low, calm voice rumbled across the cockpit vox.

‘First Captain.’

‘Tactical upload is already under way, but I need you to be aware of one thing in particular, as I’d prefer you to survive the next hour.’

‘Name it, sir.’

‘Just be ready to land in a rush, wing commander. Make sure your squadron leaders are also aware of the necessity. Fleet Admiral Yul’s plan will require a certain reaction speed from everyone outside the main cruisers.’

‘Thanks for the warning, sir.’

Sevatar didn’t answer. The link was already dead.

‘He likes me,’ Taye said as they were elevated into position. Deck lights flashed either side of them. The fighter shuddered as it was locked into place.

‘We’re locked in,’ said Kyven. ‘Sitting ready. Pressure cylinders optimal, catapult primed. All signs are go for thrust.’ He paused for a moment, and broke the cockpit’s relative quiet with a muttered observation. ‘It’s not you. He likes all of us.’

‘He doesn’t like anyone,’ Vensent called back over his shoulder. ‘He owes us, and we’re useful to him. Huge difference.’

Sevatar watched the approaching armada, still too distant for visual confirmation but shining bright on the tactical hololith. Fire-control directions, updated every few seconds, passed between every vessel in the fleet, sent onwards to their escort vessels and fighter squadrons. Formations were still loose as the fleet accelerated to meet the Dark Angels, but he could see their alignment beginning to come together.

They had to buy more time. If the Dark Angels weren’t slowed down, they’d be all over the retreating fleet in a matter of minutes.

One rune on the display still troubled him. Being outnumbered eight to one wasn’t the problem. If Yul’s plan worked, they’d inflict maximum damage with minimal losses, and if it didn’t work, the majority of the VIII Legion fleet would be long gone, anyway. The mystery of how the Lion was managing to jump his entire armada with such unrivalled unity was a matter for idle consideration, but hardly an issue Sevatar could deal with at this moment.

No, the problem was one single rune – one of his own vessels – still wavering on the ghostly display, while the rest of the fleeing warships were winking out of existence, entering the warp and running free. First, the rune had maintained formation with the leaving ships. Then, it ceased. It remained dead in space, surrounded by its secondary frigates and fighter escorts.

Sevatar turned to the Master of Vox, in the dark robes of a Legion serf. ‘Hail them,’ he said, gesturing to the flashing rune.

The slave tapped at his console, mechanical fingers a blur. ‘Done, sire.’

‘This is the Nightfall. Excoriator, report. Why have you killed your engines?’

The seconds ticked by. ‘No reply, sire,’ said the Master of Vox.

‘Thank you,’ Sevatar sneered. ‘I can hear that myself. Var Jahan, do you read me?’

Silence, again, was the reply. Sevatar drew his thumb across his throat, ordering the link’s end. He had a feeling he knew what caused the Excoriator to halt, and the idea wasn’t a pleasant one.

The Nightfall’s strategium bustled with slaves, serfs and servitors doing their duty, emotion rising from their skin with the stench of sweat. The tension was a palpable thing, something Sevatar could almost savour. Training and familiarity shielded them from the kind of fear he’d feel as a tingle on his tongue, but the anticipation still soured their collective breath. Hundreds of hearts – and surrogates of clockwork and chrome, simulating vital organs – melded into something almost operatic.

‘Time until maximum weapons range?’

‘Twenty-nine seconds, captain.’

‘All hands, brace for incoming fire. Cripple every ship we pass, but be ready for the flagship. I want everything, everything, aimed at the Invincible Reason when we pass her. Kill her, and we can leave Thramas with our heads held high.’

A desperate brutality had both sides ignoring every convention of void warfare. The Nightfall and the Invincible Reason knifed through space to reach one another, abandoning their strengths as long-range weapons platforms in favour of mauling each other face to face. Imperial void battles were usually fought at breathtaking distances, with mathematics and logistics as vital as a captain’s instinct.

The Nightfall ploughed through the opposing fleet, its shields revealed in swirling, iridescent light under the onslaught. It burst past the Star of the First Legion, scattered the cruiser’s escorts, and killed its way through the enemy outriders to plunge into the heart of the enemy fleet. The VIII Legion warships roared in pursuit, running for the hole in the enemy formation punched by their wounded, crumbling flagship.

Rage ruined all need for subtlety and tact. The two flagships, among the largest and most heavily-armed creations ever to rise from the collective genius of the human race, speared closer with no regard for their support craft.

Sevatar watched the spread of occulus screens, each one alive with an image of ships dying in the dark; black steel breaking apart, ghost-fire vanishing into the void. Sensitive Nostraman eyes winced closed across the bridge, as one of the screens showed the warship Tenebor die under the guns of seven Dark Angels cruisers. Its prow wreckage, still haemorrhaging debris and crew, lanced through the rear of the Pridemark, igniting the Dark Angels vessel’s warp engines and killing the entire ship in a migraine of foul light.

The fifty Night Lords vessels dived straight and true, never deviating, never diverting. Dark Angels cruisers banked and veered to avoid collisions – the heavy warships rolling with ponderous grace, the smaller destroyers accelerating aside, apparently effortless.

Sevatar kept wincing, struggling to focus on the brightness of every ship’s death, or even the eye-aching streams of massed lance fire. The void surrounding the VIII Legion formation was bitter with the flaring rage of three hundred firing solutions. Ship after ship dissolved under the First Legion’s fire, their hulls pockmarked by laser batteries and sliced open by lances.

A voice rasped over the shaking deck, sighing a single word. ‘Nightfall.’ There might have been more, but static swallowed all trace.

Sevatar knew the voice. His glance flicked to the relevant screen, just in time to see the Blade in the Black die surrounded and crippled in a storm of Dark Angels destroyers.

We’ll need a new fleet admiral, he thought with a smirk. Another ship, a Dark Angels vessel, went critical off the Nightfall’s port bow. This one was close enough to hammer the ship with shockwaves, and bleach several occulus screens with distortion.

The lights did more than hurt his eyes. The pain acid-danced back along the nerves in his skull, flicking at his forebrain. He wiped his mouth on the back of his gauntlet, the sudden nosebleed barely showing against the red glove. Now, of all times. Typical.

On the primary occulus, the immense bulk of the Invincible Reason hove into view, scarred and burning from the VIII Legion’s own lance strikes. Sevatar could almost see the insectile buzzing of his fighter squadrons around the enemy flagship, thick as fleas on a mangy hound.

‘The moment we come abeam…’ he said, and went no further.

‘Captain?’ called one of the deck officers.

Sevatar breathed out, staring at one of the screens drenched in static. A faint image resolved, of a ship that should be anywhere else but here.

‘This,’ Sevatar said to no one in particular, ‘will not end well.’

‘Break!’ Kyven cried out.

‘A few more seconds,’ Taye hissed. She fired, streaming energy from the underslung lascannons, slicing through a Fury’s wing.

‘Break!’ Kyven yelled again.

Taye wrenched on her control sticks, pulling into a spiralling dive, and Vespera’s engines gave a draconic roar as the fighter strained to obey. Las-fire sliced past them, close enough to leave dancing afterimages across Taye’s vision.

‘He’s still coming,’ Kyven called back.

Taye breathed a Nostraman curse into her rebreather, pulling out of the dive too hard, too fast, leaning right into a brutal arc. Inertial dampeners kicked with enough force to slam all three of their helmets against the sides of their restraint thrones.

That’s when she saw the Excoriator. Dizzy, with the taste of blood on her tongue, she threw everything she had into rolling away from the oncoming tide of dark iron.

The warship burned past them, vast enough and close enough to make her shiver, fully eclipsing the rest of the battle as its battlemented hull sailed past in flames. The breakneck dogfight she’d been locked in simply ceased to exist. The Night Lords vessel slammed indiscriminately through space, far too huge to care about the dealings of the steel flies around its skin.

Taye’s earpiece surrendered to static as she lost contact with her wingman. She knew without a second’s doubt his fighter, Relinquo, was a smear on the Excoriator’s rippling void shields. Voices cried out – in pain, in fear, in frustration, all demanding the same thing. What do we do? What do we do? What do we do?

Taye needed to spit, but taking off her rebreather was hardly an option. She swallowed the rank, coppery slime her spit had become, and leaned back in her throne, bleeding power from the stabilisers back into the engines.

‘Whoever the hell is still alive, follow me.’

Kyven’s voice was strained behind her. He kept his words off the vox-web. ‘We just lost half the squadron, and only four of the Masquerade are showing up on my auspex.’

‘We’re still here.’ Vespera gave a smooth shiver as Taye kicked her back into attack speed. The Nightfall bloomed ahead, savagely damaged, still sucking up more than its share of enemy ordnance. ‘And we still have a flagship to defend.’

The Excoriator heeded neither friend nor foe. The VIII Legion ships demanding it fall into formation went as ignored as the Dark Angels cruisers drowning it in fire.

Sevatar watched it roll, wounded to the point of being held together by nothing more than spit and spite. He could tell from its trajectory that it wasn’t even aiming to ram one of the enemy ships. It was just… dying. A drawn-out, graceless dive through the enemy fleet, breaking the VIII Legion’s formation, and putting a blade to the throat of the late Admiral Yul’s first and final plan as void commander.

Sevatar sighed. Despite the tremors rattling the strategium, he calmly sat down in the primarch’s throne, and rested his cheek on his gauntleted knuckles. A shame, really. It had been a good plan.

He wiped blood from his face again, this time from his jawline, below his ear. How very vexing.

The bridge vox hissed back into life with several false starts. ‘Sevatar,’ said a deep, distorted voice, bare of any emotion beyond the faintest, oily amusement.

‘Welcome back, father.’

‘We can finish this now. Join me.’

‘Let me guess,’ replied Sevatar. ‘You plan to teleport onto the Invincible Reason, don’t you?’

‘I have a fight to finish.’

‘Yes,’ said Sevatar, reaching for his spear. ‘Of course you do. Does it not matter that in a handful of minutes, we can punch out through the Angels’ rearguard and rip into the warp?’

The answer was several seconds in coming, preceded by the muted shouts of dying humans aboard a burning ship.

‘Come with me. Bring the Atramentar. Finish this at my side.’

Sevatar looked out over the bridge, elevated above the crew on a raised dais. The officers and serfs not frantically engaged at their stations or down on the deck with concussion and blood loss were looking up at him with the expressions of lost, moronic mongrels.

‘Is that an order, sire?’ he asked, already knowing the answer, already reaching for his helm.

‘You know it is.’ The link blanked in another wash of static.

‘This is why the Imperials always win,’ Sevatar mused aloud. ‘They don’t get in each other’s way. Discipline may be dull, but it has undeniable military application. How long until we can fire boarding pods?’

‘We’ll be abeam of the Invincible Reason in just under ten minutes.’

Ten minutes. Every Night Lord on the flagship was already at battle stations, ready to repel boarders. The Atramentar would be within a stone’s throw of their teleportation chambers, and those that weren’t would be close to at least one boarding pod launch bay.

Sevatar rose from the throne, momentarily glanced at the waterfall-spill screed of Nostraman runes on the damage report data-feed, and stalked from the bridge with only one final command to the crew.

‘I may be gone a while,’ he said. ‘Try not to get my ship killed.’

CHAPTER VIII

Unwanted Battle

The ships were abeam now. He could tell without needing to see, discerning it purely from the Nightfall’s distinctive shivers. Lance fire didn’t rattle the decks the same way impact damage or las-batteries did. Every tremor of torment had its own sensation. This was the grinding vibration of massed broadsides against unshielded steel, the void-war equivalent of pulling in close to your prey and knifing them in the ribs.

If they ever made it through this, the Nightfall would need to be drydocked for an eternity. They might as well commission a new flagship – Sevatar suspected it’d be finished faster than repairing the damage. He could smell the smoke of dying machinery all around; the chemical stink of burning cables and melting metal. People were screaming on decks above and below.

The First Captain made his way down the shaking hallways, immersed in the darkness so common on VIII Legion ships. Crew members passed him with lamp packs and photo-visors to penetrate the gloom, giving him a wide berth. He paid no attention to them; he knew in a vague sense that they loathed him, but he wasn’t sure why, and couldn’t bring himself to care. Their hatred or regard never made any difference to his existence, either way. They obeyed when he wanted them to obey. The rest of the time they scrambled to get out of his path whenever they saw him. The perfect balance.

As he ran, he spoke a steady stream of orders into the vox, coordinating the Atramentar first and his sub-captains second. Of the nine companies berthed on the Nightfall, he’d only risk one. His own. The Atramentar were coming with him; the others, despite their captains’ protestations, would remain aboard the Nightfall and make the run to Terra.

Sevatar was under no illusions that they’d be coming back from this assault, and he had no compulsion to drag thousands of warriors to inevitable, unnecessary deaths. Let them live their lives to their own ends, in pursuit of more purposeful deaths.

He was still running when Atramentar squad leaders started reporting teleportation ignition flares. Each report ended with a Mechanicum adept bleating out an addendum in monotone: ‘Translocation process complete.’

The ship gave another shake, this one brutal enough to throw several crew from their feet. One of them – a female in a technician’s overalls – broke her head open on the deck when she fell. Sevatar vaulted them all as he kept running, smelling the blood from their injuries.

The next shiver was an echo of the last. What little light existed on the Nightfall flickered and died for several seconds. It made no difference; his eye-lenses presented everything in prey-sight monochrome, and he was almost at the nearest translocation platform.

A sound made him stop dead. A straining, yearning whine of protesting metal – a whale’s mournful song as it was gored by hunters’ harpoons. The lights died again, leaving him in the familiarity of absolute darkness.

‘Reactor death,’ the vox droned. ‘Reactor death. Reactor death.’

Clutching his chainglaive, he started sprinting again, his armour’s systems answering his need by opening an automatic channel to the bridge.

‘Report,’ he voxed.

‘We’re dead in space, captain, but momentum is carrying us forwards. Half the turrets are deactivated; the hangars are locked open; the primary and secondary lance arrays are silent; and most of the torpedo racks aren’t responding. Spinal battlements are still firing from reserve generators. Life support and artificial gravity are still feeding from their secondaries, but the void shields are down for good.’

‘Navigation?’

‘Dead. The arterials to the secondary power reserves are cut.’

His blood ran cold. Colder, at least, than usual. ‘Boarding pods?’

‘They won’t fire, captain.’

‘Teleportation?’

‘Dead.’

Sevatar skidded to a halt, breathing through his closed teeth. He was the only member of the First Company trapped on the stricken flagship. The others were already aboard the Invincible Reason, fighting for their lives, killing Dark Angels at the primarch’s side.

‘I will not abandon them,’ he whispered.

‘Captain? What d–’

He killed the link to the bridge, and started running again. This time, he descended through the ship, navigating corridors blocked by wreckage and running through hallways choked by smoke and fire. Dead crew lay everywhere he looked.

‘Taye,’ he voxed. ‘Taye, listen to me.’

‘There he is.’

‘I see him.’ Taye rolled between two spires on the Nightfall’s backbone, drawing closer to the Corsair she was chasing down. The battlements blurred past below, but she didn’t risk firing. There was enough firepower striking the flagship’s burning back; she wasn’t going to add to it with a misfired stream from her lascannons.

All the while, the curved Nostraman rune for Hollow pulsed in her heads-up display. She needed to land and reload. Vespera’s missile racks had been empty less than a minute after the fighter raced from the hangar bay.

‘Let it go,’ Kyvan warned her.

‘Not a chance.’ She chased harder, faster, rolling between another two armoured spires. ‘We’ve almost got him.’

The Corsair was an ugly thing, vulture-winged and fat-arsed – a back-heavy brute that Taye had never liked the look of. This one wasn’t going home to any victory parade, she’d see to that.

Hollow, Hollow, Hollow, her missile racks complained, again and again. She had her cannons, but…

‘Vensent,’ she breathed. ‘I’ll overshoot him once he passes the Travius Pylons. Break his back when I do.’

‘Consider it done.’ He rolled his swivelling, pivoting throne back to face forwards, lining up his turret. ‘I can kill him now.’

‘His wreckage will hit the superstructure.’ Taye spoke through clenched teeth, eyes narrowed with effort. Sweat painted her back, making her spinal sockets sting. Turrets below them spat lascannon beams into the void, some aiming for enemy attack craft, others carving insignificant wounds in the skin of the Invincible Reason.

Taye risked a glance upwards, seeing the matt-black hull of the enemy flagship filling the roof of her cockpit. No amount of training could prevent a moment of disorientation. She blinked and refocused on her prey running ahead.

‘Plasma bombs,’ Vensent called back. Taye could see the detonations popping up along the Nightfall’s spine as the bomber’s payload started to rain down. Vespera was climbing, almost above the Corsair now, and she still had to weave around the sprayed streams of laser fire from the bomber’s frantic crew.

‘Just kill him!’

Vensent fired, carving down and severing the Corsair across the middle. The front half, with its hunched wings, tumbled onwards into the one of the two Travius Pylon towers, shattering the remote anti-aircraft defences on the spire’s battlements. The bomber’s bulky engines hiccupped blindly, spinning away into the void.

‘We’re engaged,’ Kyvan voxed. ‘Another Fury, chasing us down the spine. I think they’re annoyed at the eight Corsairs we’ve killed.’

‘I can lose him.’

‘Get away from the damn ship. We need to break off.’

She didn’t bother answering. The Nightfall’s shields were down and enemy bombers buzzed around with clingy, verminous tenacity, spitting plasma bombs into the flagship’s structural weak points. She was going nowhere.

‘Taye,’ her vox crackled. The voice was marred by sirens in the background. ‘Taye, listen to me.’

‘First Captain?’

Sevatar repeated her name, and gave her an order she didn’t understand.

‘I… I don’t… Please repeat that order, sir.’

‘I said “land your fighter”. At once.’

Sevatar was waiting for them, his armour streaked with scorch marks, and his chainglaive in hand. The calm at the eye of the storm; around him, the chaos of the hangar rattled and raged on, with serfs extinguishing fires, debris crashing down from the ceiling, and amber flashing lights warning of a depressurisation threat.

He watched the Wrath fighter come in at speed, most of its painted hull bleached down to the gunmetal grey beneath, scored away by the clattering pebbles of debris that always filled the space between battling warships.

Vespera, it was called. Yes, that was it.

The fighter fired the retros beneath its wings, and by the lascannons mounted at the nose. Its vented thrust screamed out into the hangar, sharper than a condor’s shriek. Sevatar’s left eye twitched once, before his helm’s auditory senses adjusted to compensate.

Taye didn’t use the runway to touch down; she killed all thrust with timed bursts from her retros, and brought the fighter down in a tight spiral. Sevatar was moving the moment the landing claws crunched onto the deck. He jumped up, grabbed the edge of one slicked-back shark-fin wing, and pulled himself up with one hand.

‘Go,’ he voxed.

There was no answer, and a glance at the cockpit showed Kyven staring back at him wide-eyed from the rear-facing seat, with Taye hunched round in her throne, trying to see what was going on. He could hear them breathing over the vox.

‘You… you can’t be serious,’ she said softly.

Sevatar stalked along the back of the fighter, mag-locking his boots to the Wrath’s dark skin a few metres behind the cockpit. He shook his head at the naviseer’s moronic expression of shock.

‘I said go.’

He crouched low, taking three punches to smash a deep dent in the fighter’s hull, just enough to grip the edge. He kept his spear held behind his back, angled away.

The fighter thrummed beneath his boots, coming alive again.

‘Sevatar, this is insane.’

He rolled his black eyes behind the red eye-lenses. How tiring it was, to hear those words yet again. Sometimes, he wondered if ‘duty’ was just a word to other people, and they never truly grasped its meaning.

Without a launch catapult, the fighter lifted off slowly, gliding away from the deck towards the wide maw leading into the void. The castle battlements of the enemy flagship were drifting by, tantalisingly close, but impossibly far.

‘Get me to the Invincible Reason,’ he voxed. ‘My men are fighting aboard, and I’ll die before I send them into a battle I wouldn’t join myself.’

He could hear the grin in her words, the smile breaking through her disbelief. ‘You’re taking that oath of First Company brotherhood far too seriously,’ she said.

Sevatar didn’t reply. He was Atramentar. His brothers were Atramentar. There was nothing to say.

Kyvan spent the next three minutes looking directly at the crouched form the of the VIII Legion’s First Captain, mere metres away. Sevatar’s crested helm remained fixed forwards, the skull-painted faceplate staring ahead at the Dark Angels warship. Kyvan kept wondering what expression was behind the slanted red eye-lenses.

Taye, for her part, leeched everything Vespera could give, burning the engines dangerously hot, engaging no one, rolling in spirals and pitchbacks to shake loose any of the black Furies that tried to latch onto her. She was all too aware of the g-force her ‘passenger’ would be suffering, but had to keep the engines flaring for maximum manoeuvrability.

When she pulled close to the Invincible Reason, Taye angled to cut alongside the hull, weaving between the battlement towers.

‘Where do you need to be?’

‘Close to the bridge.’ Sevatar’s vox-voice had all the warmth of a wolf’s dirge-howl.

Close to the bridge would bring them in range of a hundred and more defensive turrets. Taye swore under breath.

‘Watch your language, wing commander.’

She gunned the engines harder, switching to the squadron’s general link. ‘Peritus and Electus, form on my wing, at once.’

‘Copy, commander.’

‘On my way, ma’am.’

Taye swooped closer to the hull, almost close enough to lose a wing if she rolled. Her heart kept rhythm for her as she dived into the most foolish attack run of her military service.

CHAPTER IX

The Prince of Crows

He had to admit, even if only to himself, that this was one of his less wise ideas. No amount of biological enhancement, nor even the most advanced suit of Maximus-pattern power armour, could shield him from the gravitational forces pressing against him. He felt nausea for the first time in over a century, which was novel enough to make him grin.

The pressure against his skull and limbs, however, was less entertaining. The suspensor-wire pressure flightsuits worn by Taye and her crew shared some basic functionality with one of the layers in his own ceramite armour, but it didn’t render him immune to physics. Having skinned and flayed countless humans, as well as warriors from five different Legions – including his own – he suspected the feeling of inertial forces threatening to pull his bones apart was fairly approximate on the continuum of pain.

Stark lascannon beams flensed his vision, each one a rapid spear that defied his eye-lenses’ attempts to fade and counter the brightness. Taye’s fighter swayed and swung beneath him; he could feel her doing her best to coax performance from the Wrath without shaking him loose or killing him with any wrenching manoeuvres. Even so, as the black towers slashed past either side, and the battlements below became a blurring, queasy road, he came close to cursing the idea as a rash move.

But then, that would be admitting he’d been wrong. Sevatar snorted at the notion. We can’t have that, now.

The stars tumbled across the sky as Taye rolled again. Sevatar’s one concession to the insanity of his plan was to grunt once, quietly, with his head aching from the acid of dizziness. That, also, was novel. His genetic implants had left him almost immune to disorientation these past decades.

He felt Taye ease back on the speed, winding and weaving to dodge the pyrotechnic storm of turret fire from below. He knew she’d never be able to reach a dead stop, but slowing enough to lessen his momentum would be more than enough. A few bruises and broken bones would be easier to bear than being pulped against the Invincible Reason’s armour plating.

But her arc carried him over the spinal castles, across the bow, and he finally realised what she was doing.

‘This is even stupider than my idea,’ he voxed to her.

Her voice was tight, tense, her attention anywhere but on him. ‘Your way will see you smeared across the hull. My way, you get to play hero.’

The fighter drifted into the landing bay, retros flaring to slow down. Servitor crews immediately stood straighter, dead eyes and refocusing eye-lenses tracking the craft’s approach. Scorch marks darkened the hull in place of paint, and its insignias were similarly bleach-burned into vague nothingness.

The closest munitions officer was a man by the name of Halles Korevi, and he was directing a loader team to rearm this latest in an endless stream of landing and redeploying fighters, when it jinked above the deck and shot him to pieces with a volley of roaring blue energy from its lascannons. Internal fire-teams opened up on the drifting Wrath, naval armsmen discharging wide-mouth shotcannons that had little hope of hitting a moving target.

An armoured figure rose from the fighter’s back, a bolter in one hand and a spear in the other. He fired down as he ran along the backswept wing, four bolts bursting in the chests of four armsmen, spreading viscera across their fellows. Shotcannon fire still clattered against his midnight-blue ceramite, leaving ignorable silver scratches on the dark plate. He reached the end of the wing and jumped clear.

The fighter’s engines whined louder, firing the moment his boots left the wing. In a burst of engine wash, she was gone, leaving a sonic boom and the alkaline stink of lascannon discharge in her wake.

The figure landed hard in a crouch, boots sinking twin dents into the iron deck. Atop the spear, a metre-long chainblade started chewing the hangar’s cold air. The armsmen, to their credit, moved into cover and kept firing, despite never training to face a warrior of the Legiones Astartes.

Sevatar twitched twice, flinching as the spreading flak rattled against his armour. Irritating bastards. Retinal warnings trailed and flashed across his vision, and his armour’s autosenses kept pulling at his left arm, trying to raise his bolter to fire at the humans in cover. He locked the boltgun to his thigh, and the moment he rose from his knees, he started running – not towards them, but heading for the massive open doors leading deeper into the ship. The temptation to waste yet more time and carve them limb from limb was almost too strong to swallow.

‘You get to live,’ he growled, ignoring their continued fire. ‘I have bigger prey.’ As he plunged into the siren-lit corridors making up the Invincible Reason’s hollow veins, he tuned into First Company’s vox-web, no longer denied access by distance.

‘Ladies,’ he greeted them, still sprinting.

‘Where in the hell have you been?’ spat back the first voice. Several others joined in, sharing the same sentiment.

‘You have no idea,’ Sevatar replied. ‘Where is the primarch?’

‘Engaged at the fift–’

Sevatar shoulder-barged through a crowd of black-robed menials, stumbling over their tangled limbs and carelessly shattering their bones beneath his boots. Up and running a second later, he swore across the vox.

‘Repeat that,’ he said. ‘Some fools got in my way.’

‘The primarch is engaged at the fifteenth concourse,’ Valzen replied. ‘Half of us are here with him.’

The fifteenth concourse. Sevatar knew the STC Gloriana-pattern battleship as well as he knew the contours of his own armour. The Nightfall was born of the same breed.

‘That’s madness,’ he voxed back. ‘You’ll be encircled by every Dark Angel left alive on the ship. There’s nowhere to run.’

Valzen’s answer was interrupted by a shriek over the vox, and the knocking grind of a bone-saw doing what it did best.

‘We’re aware of that, sir.’

‘I’ll be there in seven minutes,’ promised Sevatar. ‘Eight if there’s resistance. Nine if the resistance is carrying bolters.’

The resistance was carrying bolters.

Laying siege to an enemy warship was always a clash of contrasts. Corridor by corridor, chamber by chamber, an attacker could spend half an hour encountering no enemy presence at all beyond confused serfs and slaves, before promptly spending the same span of time needing to fight for every footstep of ground, killing through squad after squad of dug-in defenders. A Gloriana battleship was the size of a densely compacted city, and accordingly populated not only by officers and expert crew, but by a slave-caste numbering tens of thousands of souls. Most were consigned to live in the warship’s lightless bowels, breathing poorly-ventilated air and furnace fumes, but many still saw service on the upper decks.

Sevatar chewed through them with barely a hitch in his stride. His chainglaive ticked and stuttered, clogged with meat after only a few minutes. Those humans too brave or foolish to flee met their ends in a whirr of eviscerating machine-teeth, torn apart or left deformed and ignored in his wake.

A hundred of the VIII Legion’s best warriors had teleported aboard, in full Terminator wargear. The trail of their devastation was almost hilarious in its absolute severity. On more than one deck, Sevatar’s boots splashed through a marsh of shallow blood and carved human meat.

But the Dark Angels weren’t beaten. Not even close. Even with the Atramentar sweeping these decks clear, reinforcements were flooding in from other parts of the ship, storming their way to the strategium to defend their primarch. Not that he needs defending, Sevatar mused. Not if the last time they’d met was anything to go by.

He’d killed seven Dark Angels already. One of them ended life as a trophy, the warrior’s helm now chained to Sevatar’s belt. No higher honour for an enemy of the VIIIth Legion. In such remembrance, they paid respect to their fallen foes.

At the junction ahead, another three Dark Angels in pale tabards over their heraldic black held the line, bolters kicking in their fists. Sevatar crouched behind the relative cover of a corner, reloading his own weapon, lip curling as he crunched home his last magazine. He could kill them up-close easily enough, but putting a bolter in his hands evened the odds in a way he never enjoyed. He hadn’t lied when he told Trez he was Eighth Legion to his core. Just like his brothers, he’d never cherished a fair fight. Sport was one thing, but it hardly compared to hunting prey. In that, at least, he was made in his primarch’s image.

He risked a glance around the corner, pulling back as a shell detonated close to his faceplate, showering him in debris.

‘It’s Sevatar,’ he could hear them shouting to each other. ‘It’s the First Captain. I saw him.’

He grinned as he imagined the silhouette he cast in his armour, with the sweeping dark-iron wings rising from his helm. This accursed helmet crest, he thought. His enemies always recognised him by it.

The gunfire fell silent. He heard strangled grunts and the clanging wallops of weapons striking ceramite. Emerging from cover, he broke into a run, joining the melee.

Alastor Rushal, clad in the same black as the Dark Angels he was killing, nearly died first. Sevatar’s retinal display locked onto him with the Nostraman rune for Threat blinking bright, registering his Raven Guard armour and the thundering meteor hammer spinning in his fists. The First Captain turned, lancing his glaive through the last Angel’s back, letting the hungry teeth do their work. He ended the downed warrior with a boot stamped onto the Angel’s throat.

The blood patterning his armour went ignored, as did the bodies at his feet. One of them reached a weak hand to scrape strengthless fingers along his boots. Sevatar drew his bolter and fired downwards, without even bothering to look.

‘You won’t believe how I got here,’ he said to Rushal.

The Raven didn’t reply. He hadn’t replied to anything since Isstvan V. It was difficult to speak without a tongue.

The vox devolved into a choking mess of cries as he drew closer. Decades of listening to overlaying vox-chatter and deciphering the stream of runic updates on his eye-lenses stole the mystery of what he was about to see, but the majesty of the moment still struck hard.

Breathless, his armour scarred, Sevatar tore through into the fifteenth concourse – one of many thoroughfare hubs on the upper command decks. Dead serfs had decorated the tunnels on his way here, but the scale of the massacre taking place invited a rare laugh from his lips. Digital figures and flat-line readouts had nothing on the reality. The Atramentar and the Night Lords from the Excoriator were knee-deep in the dead, fighting amidst the piling bodies of serfs, servitors, armsmen, Dark Angels, and their own slain brothers. They fought back to back in diminishing circles, fighting to the last against a tide of Dark Angels reinforcements advancing from adjacent tunnels.

He’d never seen a weaker last stand, in a less defensible position, but the reason was clear enough. Here the primarchs had met, so here the battle raged. The two sons of the Emperor duelled above the warring crowds, above the crashing of bolters and the thwarted screeching of chainblades against ceramite. Their embattled children, screaming and bleeding and dying below them, were shadows in the wake of gods.

For the first time since Isstvan V, Sevatar saw his genetic forebear rise to reclaim the glory he’d once possessed in abundance. No one could ever claim Lord Konrad Curze was regal, nor could they describe him as handsome, dignified, or even healthy. His glory was starved and sickly; his majesty was cold and cadaverous.

Sickle-shaped silver claws scythed out from the tip of each armoured finger, every one of them dancing with coruscating energy-lighting. He moved not as some avatar of liquid grace, but as a jerking puppet controlled by an unseen, malicious sentience, forcing this cadaverous god to dance to a tune inciting spasm over joy. Sevatar had seen several primarchs fight, shedding blood in anger, and their raw lethality was beautiful to behold. Each one of them flowed through the dance of war – even Angron, in his uncontrolled theatrics of tormented rage.

Curze did not share that trait. His movements were faster, jerkier stutters too swift for the eye to follow, between moments of unnerving serenity. Each heartbeat of calm lasted just long enough to convince the witness it was real, before the laughing murderer moved back into his twitching, killing paroxysm.

This was Sevatar’s father as he’d been in the years after first taking the mantle of primarch. A creature of gaunt limbs, hollow cheeks, and sunken eyes, fuelled by some bleak energy brightening his gaze with the promise of dark fire. Lank black hair flowed across his shoulders, washed by the random spray of foes’ blood and never anything more. His smile was a gruesome flourish of filed teeth between the whitest, thinnest lips. Sevatar had seen Curze fight Corax on the killing fields of the Dropsite Massacre, when the Raven Guard primarch was exhausted by hours of battle and drained by the infecting truth of betrayal. He’d seen his primarch duel the Lion twice – first in the dust of a fortress’s foundations on distant Tsagualsa, and again only weeks before, fighting for less than sixty seconds in the rain of a world that held no value at all.

Here, for the first time, his father was locked in a fair fight. No low blows to begin with. No assaulting a weakened or demoralised foe. No attacking from surprise, with the gravity of a devastating ambush.

The Lion’s movements were clinical, a ruthless economy of muscle and motion, each thrust and parry executed to perfection without the audacity of dramatic flair. Curze’s jerked-string assault was a flailing of clawed hands, each potential embrace blocking the long blade one moment, and being turned aside by it the next.

It was the sound of Rushal’s meteor hammer that dragged Sevatar back to himself, tearing his eyes away from the spark-shedding divinities trying to kill each other on the platform above. The Raven whirled his flail in a heavy, propeller-blade circle, idling in a whoosh of ionised air. Blood sizzled on the mace head hanging from the end of the chain, its energy field burning all gore away into foul-smelling steam.

The Raven pointed with his free hand. Warriors in armour as black as his own were still running in from the twenty corridors opening out into this transit hub of hanging chains and raised gantries.

Sevatar vaulted a railing, dropping down another level, smashing boots-first into a melee in which several of his Terminator brothers were outnumbered by Dark Angels. The first foe went down, his head severed by a single sweep of the First Captain’s chainglaive. The second lost a hand, then most of his face. The third and fourth dropped from being disembowelled in the same swing.

It was happening again. Was he faster than everyone else, or were they slower? Every enemy he faced betrayed themselves in the subtlest ways. He saw a tension in the joints of their armour – each one a premonition of where their next blow would come from. Sevatar blocked them all with the ease of a soldier seeing every strike coming, lashing back before they could retaliate.

It wasn’t happening again; it was worse than ever before. Or… better? Lactic acid burned his muscles and the pressure behind his eyes threatened to break his skull from within, but each beat of his heart made everyone move slower and slower. He took a chainsword against the haft of his spear, and had time to spin, teeth clenched, to ram his glaive through the chest of a tabarded paladin behind him, before turning back to catch the first Dark Angel’s next blow. As he did, he saw the minuscule adjustment in balance signifying the exact angle of his enemy’s next attack. Sevatar impaled him before the move even began, standing face to face with the dying warrior as the chainglaive hewed its way through the other warrior’s innards.

Blackness edged across his retinal display. It took several seconds to realise it wasn’t blood in his helm, but a stain physically darkening his eyes. Something popped in his skull, something rupturing with a wet, bursting gush of fluid. His own life signs, scrawled across his eye-lens readout, twitched no differently from the primarch’s jagged fury.

He could hear his brothers shouting his name now. They thought he’d been wounded, and he wasn’t sure they were wrong.

Trez’s warning scalded its way through his mind’s eye, as if the words were written in fire upon flesh, rather than recalled through memory’s voice.

This will probably kill you, Jago.

You have the strength for this. But not the control.

There’s no going back from this. If you unlock the gift you’ve fought so hard to forget… Some doors cannot be closed.

He staggered, down to one knee, using the fall to cleave the legs out from the closest Dark Angel. The warrior cried out, dying a heartbeat later with Sevatar’s glaive through his chestplate.

I might be dying, he thought, and started laughing.

‘Valzen!’ someone was screaming. ‘Valzen, Sevatar is down! Apothecary!’

He turned his head to see Rushal standing above him, a sentinel in absolute black. The Raven swung his meteor hammer, the arc ending in a burst of lethal light as it cracked the helm of yet another Dark Angel.

The warrior of the First Legion went down in silence, because everything was silent now. Rushal’s meteor hammer no longer boomed with every impact. Sevatar’s own erratic life signs no longer whined warnings at him. His world wasn’t a chaotic storm of thudding boots, detonating bolt-rounds, and wrenching armour joints. It was, somehow, serene.

Sevatar vomited into his helm, forced to choke on his own bile because he couldn’t stop laughing.

And then, he was home.

Home. The city at night. The rooftop where he came to hide.

The sunless world hadn’t burned in his primarch’s misguided, futile rage after all. He was home, standing in the promise of rain before the true storm, and the pressure in his head was just as it had always been as a child: threatening to bubble over into a fit that would leave him shaking.

Food, food, food, they called at him.

He turned to them, where they pecked at the rockcrete rooftop and fluttered their ragged feathers.

Boy, Boy, Boy, they cackled. Food, food, food, and Now, now, now.

Jago reached into his pockets, offering a handful of breadcrumbs. Come, he said to the crows. Food for tonight.

Flesh, flesh, flesh, they called back.

He laughed as several of the black birds landed on his shoulders and outstretched arm.

Flesh, he agreed. Flesh soon. Breadcrumbs now.

Flesh now, flesh now. He let them complain as they took the breadcrumbs, each chunk pebble-hard and stale.

Flesh now, he said to them once they were finished. Wait.

He wasn’t gone long, but he was dizzy and sweating by the time he returned. Dragging the other boy’s body up the stairs left his arms sore and stretched.

Flesh, flesh, flesh, the crows cawed.

Jago dropped the dead boy’s ankles and sat down, catching his breath. Flesh, he replied. Save me some, he said to the birds as they flocked down onto the corpse.

Yes, Boy, they kept cackling. Yes, yes, yes. Save some for Boy.

You can have the eyes, he told them. I don’t like the eyes. They croaked crow laughter at this oldest of jokes between them. They knew the Boy never ate the eyes. He’d tried once, and the meal had made him see things. The Boy bled sweet man-blood from his nose and ears for hours, and slept all night, twitching on the stone.

Jago sat in silence while they ate, listening to the flutter of dark wings and enjoying the brush of mangy feathers against his cheeks. No other sound ever soothed him. No other feeling ever took away the headaches long enough for him to sleep.

EPILOGUE

Traitors

They’d thrown him into a cell, stripped of his weapons and armour. That was wise.

They’d incarcerated him with nine of his brothers. That was less wise.

Sevatar leaned back against the force wall, listening to the sound of his brothers’ easy breathing, subsumed in part by the half-living pulse moving through the energy field all around them. The Invincible Reason was in the warp. Where they were going, Sevatar could only guess.

He knew Curze had brought almost seven hundred warriors from the Excoriator in his hasty and ill-advised assault. Var Jahan had been one of them. Perhaps his Kyroptera brother was held in another cell. He toyed with the notion of believing it, but he wasn’t a soul ever given to blind hope.

They didn’t have the primarch. That much, he knew for certain. His surviving brothers spoke of it – of the Dark Angels’ final overwhelming assault – and Lord Curze at last realising the odds sweeping his sons into early graves.

He’d turned from the Lion in that moment, turned from the battle… and fled.

If Curze still lived, he was haunting the lower decks of the Invincible Reason even now. Perhaps he was coming to free his sons, but again, Sevatar wasn’t one to hold out in the name of unrealistic hope.

He knew the fleet had run; Admiral Yul’s plan had worked in part, at least. The fifty ships remaining behind had powered through the Dark Angels’ wider formation with all the lethal efficiency of a needle lancing a boil. He’d seen at least half of them punch through to the other side, and he’d seen a handful starting to tear their way into the warp. But he knew nothing more. The Excoriator was probably destroyed. The Nightfall almost definitely was.

So Trez was dead, along with Taye. The former was a shame, for the primarch needed the little eater of dreams. The latter was a shame for the most irrational of reasons; one Sevatar wasn’t comfortable admitting to any of his brothers, let alone the human maiden herself. He felt the same about four other mortals in service to the Legion, and he monitored each of them with care for the very same reason.

Dwelling on long-dead family and their resemblance to living humans over a century later had its place, but this cell wasn’t it. Besides, he didn’t know for sure. They might be his blood-kin – the descendants of the cousins he left behind when he left Nostramo – but there was no way to know for sure. The world was an urban battlefield in the last century of its life, with a scavenging population keeping no civility or morality, let alone historical records. He couldn’t shake the sense of connection with them, just as he couldn’t shake how much they resembled the family he’d once known.

Sevatar pushed the melancholy thought aside with no real difficulty. He wasn’t a doleful soul, just as he wasn’t an optimistic one.

At least in captivity, Sevatar had time to plot, to muse, to process. The Thramas Crusade was over. Most of the VIII Legion had escaped, scattering to the solar winds. The bulk of the Night Lords would join the march on Terra, though he doubted many would ever stay at the front lines long enough to besiege the Throneworld. He sensed a great deal of raiding for plunder in the Legion’s approaching future. The thought would’ve made him smile, if he’d been anywhere else but a Dark Angels containment cell, caged by a cube of shimmering force.

The first cell they’d thrown him into had been a more conventional trap of reinforced iron. Sevatar had spat his way through one wall in less than fifteen minutes, dissolving it with his acidic saliva. When a guard came to check on him, he’d merely pointed at the hissing hole in the wall, almost large enough for him to fit through.

‘I think rats did it,’ he’d said. ‘Big ones.’

The Dark Angels had moved him from the cell, throwing him into a force cage with several of his brothers – each of whom had evidently ruined their own cells, just as he had.

Lacking the protection of armour to hide his augmentations from their eyes, Valzen was a wretched thing, more chrome and haemolubricant fluid than blood and bone.

‘Stop staring at me,’ he said to Sevatar. His one black eye narrowed, his bionic lens trying to tilt and adjust in weak mimicry.

‘I was merely thinking,’ the First Captain said, ‘you are a testament to the Legion’s refusal to obey anything or anyone. You were too stubborn even to die on Isstvan.’

Several of the others chuckled. Even Valzen offered a crooked sneer, the smile one-sided not from any wry charm, but because one side of his face was a stroke victim’s bland visage.

‘Why did you order us into this attack?’ asked Tal Vanek. ‘The Atramentar survived Isstvan, only to die to the last dozen in this suicidal madness?’

Sevatar raised a dark eyebrow. ‘Is now really the time for petty recrimination?’

Tal Vanek grinned back, all teeth and wide, black eyes. ‘Never a better time, Sev.’

‘The primarch ordered this attack.’

Several of the warriors muttered in response. ‘The primarch,’ Tal Vanek replied, ‘is a fool and a madman. Those who didn’t know it before certainly see it now.’

This proclamation earned a general murmur of agreement. Sevatar had neither the patience nor the inclination to debate philosophy.

‘We’ll see,’ was all he said.

The only one of them to remain silent the whole while was Rushal. The Raven’s white skin, bare without his charcoal plate, was criss-crossed with dozens of aggravated scars – marks of excruciation, inflicted through torture, not earned in honest battle. He watched Sevatar from across the cell, his posture mirroring the First Captain’s as they sat with their backs to the force screens.

Sevatar nodded to the Raven. ‘I just realised I was wrong,’ he said. ‘I promised myself I wouldn’t lose to the Angels twice.’

Rushal’s scarred, split lips twisted into the ugly smile Sevatar’s knives had left him.

‘Sev,’ one of his men said. ‘Your nose is bleeding.’

He lifted a hand, feeling the trickle of hot blood against his fingers. ‘So it is.’

‘Are you all right?’

No. The secret I’ve kept for a century has just burst open, all because I couldn’t resist a joyride in our father’s psyche.

‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘Never better.’

‘Your ear is bleeding, too.’

‘It won’t kill me. I think it may be time to escape soon,’ he added.

‘How do you plan to do that?’ asked Valzen.

Sevatar looked at him for a moment, unsure if the question was sincere. Valzen looked blank, though whether it was because of his facial reconstruction stealing any expression, or simply a deadpan joke that Sevatar was missing, the captain couldn’t say for certain.

‘Is that a real question?’ Sevatar asked at last.

‘Of course it is. How do we get out of here?’

‘The same way we do everything, brother. By killing whoever tries to stop us.’

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 of the Emperor’s Children

Fabius, Apothecary of the Emperor’s Children

Eidolon, ‘The Risen’, Lord Commander

Julius Kaesoron, ‘The Favoured Son’, First Captain

Marius Vairosean, Captain, Third Company

Lucius, The Eternal Blademaster

Kalimos, ‘The Whipmaster’, Captain, 17th Company

Lonomia Ruen, Captain, 21st Company

Bastarnae Abranxe, Captain, 85th Company

Krysander of the Blades, Captain, 102nd Company

The IV Legion ‘Iron Warriors’

Perturabo, Primarch of the Iron Warriors

Forrix, ‘The Breaker’, First Captain, triarch

Obax Zakayo, Lieutenant, First Grand Battalion

Berossus, Warsmith, Second Grand Battalion

Galian Carron, Techmarine, Second Grand Battalion

Harkor, Warsmith, 23rd Grand Battalion, triarch

Kroeger, Lieutenant, 23rd Grand Battalion

Soltarn Vull Bronn, ‘The Stonewrought’, 45th Grand Battalion

Barban Falk, Warsmith, 126th Grand Battalion

‘Honourable’ Soulaka, Apothecary, 235th Grand Battalion

Toramino, Warsmith, Master of the Stor-bezashk

Cadaras Grendel, Legionary

The Sisypheum

Ulrach Branthan, Captain, Iron Hands 65th Clan-company

Cadmus Tyro, Equerry to Captain Branthan

Frater Thamatica, Ironwrought, Morlock veterans

Sabik Wayland, Iron Father

‘Karaashi’ Bombastus, Dreadnought

Vermanus Cybus, Morlock veteran

Septus Thoic, Morlock veteran

Ignatius Numen, Morlock veteran

Nykona Sharrowkyn, Raven Guard Legion, 66th Company

Atesh Tarsa, Apothecary, Salamanders Legion, 24th Company

The Ebonite Archymsts

Karuchi Vohra, Ovate Seer of the Paths Above

Varuchi Vohra, Ovate Seer of the Paths Below

The VII Legion ‘Imperial Fists’

Felix Cassander, Captain, 42nd Company

Navarra, Legionary, Sixth Company

‘The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation; the moment where man becomes something greater than his rude beginnings: a flying, godlike, shimmering, diaphanous, beautiful creature. That will be my apotheosis, where I become a general principle of Being, instantiated throughout all of the vistas of the Imperium.’

– The Primarch Fulgrim, My Phoenician Imago

‘Guilt upon the soul, like rust upon iron, both defiles and consumes it, gnawing and creeping into it, until at last it eats out the very heart and substance of the metal. But if all the world hates you, and believes you wicked, while your own conscience absolves you from guilt, you will not be without friends.’

– The Primarch Perturabo, In Willing Sacrifice

‘And I assure you, my children, it will not be long before your domain has become a place of insanity as the Angel Exterminatus sends his consorts, daemons in human flesh, to kill and maim. All shall suffer at the hands of this avatar of debauchery, and from its heart shall be loosed countless numbers of daemons, for the gates of damnation are opening wide.’

– Fragment of Firenzii manuscript,
The Division of the Prophecies

Theogonies – I

Death below, the unknown above. One choice. A moment’s inattention or a single slip and he would be dead, broken on the knife-bladed rocks below. His fingers were bloody, gripping the cliff by the narrowest handholds. The muscles in his calves were vibrating like plucked strings, and his arms burned with acids, though he had no memory of exerting himself.

How had he come to this place?

He had no answer to that, nor did he know much of anything save that the rugged wall of rock before him was slick with water and vanished into the mists of rain above him. What lay at the top of this cliff? No answer was forthcoming, but what lay at the bottom was clear enough. His right hand was cramping, and he eased each finger from the rock with the gentlest effort, trying to lessen the pain in each joint.

Long black hair hung before his eyes and he shook his head to clear his vision. The motion almost hurled him from the cliff and he clamped his fingers even harder onto the rock. He spat rainwater and looked up into the grey smirr of misty clouds. How close was the top of this cliff? Would it be easier to climb or was the ground, distant as it was, closer?

There was no way of knowing, but he had to make a decision soon.

A bad decision was better than no decision, and he understood that he had only two options. Retreat to a known fate or climb to an uncertain future. Though he had no memory of himself, he knew that going backwards was not in his nature. A decision, once made, had to be seen through to the end, for good or ill. How he knew this about himself he didn’t know, but with the decision made, he knew it was the right one.

He lifted his right hand and slid it up the cliff, looking for a higher handhold, and, finding one, gripped it tightly. Gently, he eased his left hand up and took hold of a thin slice of protruding rock. With his hand safe, he lifted his foot, the bare sole torn open (by climbing this far?) and placed it securely. He pushed down and lifted his body higher, feeling a potent sense of victory at even this small distance.

With agonising slowness and patience, he climbed upwards again, each movement painful and dangerous, but achieved with a relentless determination that he would not fail. The rain intensified and lashed his body with icy needles, as though spitefully seeking to dislodge him from the rock.

Rain, exhaustion and pain all conspired to weaken his resolve, but the more their combined efforts attempted to prise him loose, the harder he gripped. Hand over hand, one foot after the other, he pushed himself higher and higher. Each moment of ascension was a rebirth, each continued breath a revelation. The rocks below diminished as he climbed, yet the clouds above seemed to climb with him, revealing yet more of the cliff, but no sign of a summit.

For all he knew, there might never be an end to the cliff. He might climb until his strength finally gave out and he fell to his death. The thought did not trouble him overmuch. Better to fail after all effort has been expended than to die never having found the limits of his endurance. That gave him strength, and he climbed onwards, faster now that the mountain had become his enemy, a thing to be overcome. With an enemy to focus his thoughts, his strength grew and his will to succeed sharpened to a razor’s edge.

Now all he could see above or below him was the cliff face, an implacable black wall that wanted him to fail and die. He gritted his teeth and spat at the rock before him in anger. Blood ran down his arms in thick runnels, his hands torn and opened to the bone by the jutting slivers of rock bearing his weight, but the pain was nothing compared to the thought of letting this ascent beat him.

Why the thought of defeat should be so painful to him when he did not fear to die he did not know. After all, what did a man with no memory or future have to fear? On the heels of that thought came another. Looking at the thinness of his arms and his imagined height, he guessed he was not a man, but a boy.

His body was that of a youngster, one with a solid and muscular physique, but a boy nonetheless. Was this climb the result of some boyhood dare or initiation? A test of his manhood or some coming-of-age ritual? A thought danced on the edges of recall, a brusque figure of towering proportions instilling a will of iron within him, daring him to fail and knowing that he would not.

The memory faded, but with its departure another feeling stole upon his thoughts.

He was not alone.

Someone – or something – was watching him.

That was surely ridiculous, for who else would be so foolish as to climb a sheer cliff in the rain? Yet the thought persisted. Finding a ledge where he could rest without tearing open the many gashes on his feet, he eased his body around so that his back was to the cliff. The mist had descended, and an impenetrable sheen of moist fog obscured whatever lay before him, but in descending, it had revealed a measure of the sky above.

He saw the stars.

A veil of beauteous darkness strewn with pinpricks of brightness, sprays of light from unimaginably distant suns. He knew of stars – what they were and the chemical anatomy of their life-cycles – but where he had obtained this knowledge was as mysterious as how he had come to be on this cliff.

They wheeled above him in a sweeping arc, constellations and auroras like sunbursts.

And at the heart of it all was something else, something that had always been there, always watching him, and which always would. Dimly he sensed that this was no benevolent guardianship, but the patience of a hunter stalking its prey.

Like an ocean maelstrom lifted from the seas and set amongst the heavens, it spun with sickly colours and diseased froths of matter and light. A region of space that swallowed time and spat out its doomed fragments, it stared down at him like the eye of something monstrous and colossal, a power young to the universe yet which would outlive the stars themselves.

It made him sick to his stomach to see it and he closed his eyes as a lurching sense of vertigo slipped over him. His legs wobbled and he was suddenly dislocated from control of his body. His back came away from the cliff face and he felt the vast empty space in front of him, the dizzying sense of standing on a slender ridge of stone thousands of metres above the ground.

His hand scrabbled at the rock, but found no purchase. His body leaned out over the abyssal depths as his mind screamed at him to fight this weakness. A scratching finger found a thin crack in the rock and he jammed his hand into it as his body swung out into empty air.

Pain tore at his arm as his entire weight fell from the ledge. He bunched his fist as he felt his grip slipping, skin tearing back from the top of his hand. He gritted his teeth and fought against the flailing panic welling up within him. Anger fuelled him and forced it down.

Someone had abandoned him on this rock face and left him to die. He knew this with a certainty that was unshakable as it was unknown. Why would anyone leave a youth with no memory to die? What purpose would it serve? His anger at this needlessly cruel baptism of fire imposed an icy calm on him, and he took a deep breath as he blotted out the pain from his injured hand.

And then he saw something emerging from the mist above him, a length of rope being lowered down the sheer face of the cliff.

‘Grab hold, boy,’ said a voice above him. ‘Hurry now.’

The mist parted and he saw the top of the cliff, perhaps fifty metres above him, its lip fringed with thick gorse and wiry bracken. A group of men in white and gold armour were silhouetted against the night sky. Two of them held the rope, while another in a red-crested helm shouted to him again.

‘Come on, boy, we’ve got better things to do than haul your sorry arse up the cliff.’

His lip curled in contempt at the man’s dismissal of his chances of making the climb unaided. He reached up and secured a hold with his free hand, and let out a pained breath as the tension in his other hand eased. His feet found purchase after a quick scrabble, and he eased his bloodied hand from the crack in the rock.

‘I’ll climb myself,’ he said. ‘I don’t need anyone’s help.’

The man shrugged and said, ‘Suit yourself. Climb or fall, it’s all the same to me.’

The rope slithered back up the cliff and, with the end of his ordeal in sight, he found fresh reserves of strength to climb. Hand over hand he ascended, his confidence growing with every metre he gained in the war against the cliff. The closer he came to the top, the more numerous the handholds became, as though the cliff had finally accepted it would not claim his life. He pushed up once more and groped for a handhold, but his hand met only air, and he realised he’d reached the top.

Armoured gauntlets reached out to him, but he shucked them off and stood, exhausted, at the top of the cliff. His heart battered his ribs and the blood surged around his body in triumph. Despite the pain, he knew he was grinning from ear to ear. He sucked in a great draught of air and blinked grit from his eyes.

And saw the fortress.

It dominated the skyline all around, a squatting immensity that looked to have been carved from the very summit of the mountain. Surrounded by high walls of impervious stone and rounded, weapon-studded towers, only the roofs of its grand temples and glittering palaces were visible through marble embrasures.

He had no knowledge of this place, but knew it was where he was meant to be.

He took a step towards its great bronze gates, but white-armoured warriors surrounded him, raising weapons with fluted barrels and elaborate firing mechanisms.

‘Don’t take another step,’ said the man in the crested helmet, drawing a long, slender-barrelled pistol of chased gold and silver steel from its holster. Caged lightning crackled in a glass cylinder breech.

The boy looked at the pistol aimed at his chest, but he was not afraid.

‘You threw me a rope and now you’re going to kill me?’ he said. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Who are you, and why do you approach Lochos in secret?’

‘Lochos?’ he said, pointing to the fortress. ‘Is that Lochos?’

‘It is,’ said the man, his pistol wavering as their eyes met.

‘Who is its master?’ he asked in the voice of a much older body.

‘Dammekos is its master, the Tyrant of Lochos,’ replied the man, as though surprised he had answered at all.

‘And who are you?’

‘Miltiades…’ said the man, hesitantly. ‘Sub-Optio in the 97th Grand Company of Lochos.’

‘Take me to Dammekos, Sub-Optio Miltiades,’ commanded the boy, and Miltiades nodded.

He swept his eyes around the rest of the warriors, meeting each man’s gaze and watching as, one by one, they lowered their weapons.

‘Yes, of course,’ said Miltiades, still sounding confused at the words he was saying, but unable to stop himself from speaking. ‘Follow me.’

The boy walked with Miltiades over the rough terrain, following the line of the rocks until the edges of a road came into sight. As he set foot on the hard-packed earth of the road, he turned back to the cliff edge and looked up into the night sky at the leering, unnatural maelstrom of dark light. It seemed much closer now, blotting out the sky with its immense presence, as though spreading over the heavens like an infection.

‘What is that?’ he asked Miltiades.

‘What are you looking at?’

‘That,’ he said, pointing to the malignant wound in the sky.

Miltiades shrugged. ‘I just see stars.’

‘You don’t see the star maelstrom?’

‘Star maelstrom?’

‘You really don’t see it?’ asked the boy. ‘Any of you?’

The warriors around him shook their heads, oblivious to the sight it appeared only he could see. That it was invisible to them was just another of this night’s many mysteries.

‘Who are you?’ asked Miltiades. ‘I should have let you fall, but…’

A number came to mind, but he was so much more than just a number.

He had a name, and now that it had been asked of him, he found that he knew it.

‘Who am I?’ said the boy. ‘I am Perturabo.’

ONE

Beauty in Death
Regeneration
Sentinels

A small detail, almost inconsequential, but important nevertheless. A creature no larger than a man’s thumb: a winged clade with a segmented carapace and a brittle exoskeleton of variegated puce. Atop its head, whiplike antennae tasted the myriad new scents flavouring the air, moving with uncharacteristic slowness as toxic numbness spread throughout its body.

The creature, a Cordatus vespidae, moved with a drunken gait across the churned red mud of the hillside, buffeted by warring thermals gusting from the earthworks sprawling at its base like a virulent plague. Sky-bound anabatic winds carried the smells of war – burned iron, smoky chemical propellants, musky post-human oils, lubricant and blood.

To any student of xentomology, the creature’s behaviour would have seemed strange to say the least. Its feeder mandibles snapped at nothing and its legs twitched as though rogue impulses were firing from its tripartite brain along its nerve stems, like a palsy. Its hive-nest had once been situated in the waving branches of a tall polander tree, but shell-fire had long since reduced the stepped banks of agri-terraces to a cratered wasteland of splintered stumps.

Fire had gutted the nest’s interior and killed the hive-queen, though residual traces of excreted pheromone resins had been strong enough to guide the vespidae back home. Whether pure instinct or a desire to die within its former home had driven the creature to ascend the muddy ridges of the hillside would never be known, but whatever ambition had driven it to complete its upward odyssey was to be thwarted. Its body finally succumbed to the paralysing toxin, injected with a murderer’s thoroughness, and the vespidae ceased its climb. It sat unmoving on a flattened berm of earth beneath a shattered terrace of reflective stone. Jutting lengths of rusted steelwork radiated from the wall, like spread fingers with the ends burned black.

The creature appeared to be dead, but its belly and flanks still rippled with motion. Its head bulged and swelled as its internal structure seemed to rove within its exoskeleton with a frantic desire to reshape itself. Wriggling motion shook its carapace, undulant pressure bending its flexible segments outwards as though they sought to fly away and abandon its dying form. A chitinous plate detached from the creature’s body and beneath it writhed a gelatinous, worm-like extrusion, a parasitic passenger sating its newborn hunger by feasting on its host’s internal organs.

The cannibalising organism pulled itself from the shell of its birth vessel, its flesh already hardening in the air. From translucency to opacity in a heartbeat, its rapidly forming carapace was a riot of shimmering hues, a wondrous oil spill of colours designed to beguile and entrance. The cracked and husked-out remains of its vespidae host crumbled under the weight of the growing creature, its morphogenesis progressing at a staggering rate.

From a split along the middle, gossamer wings unfolded, dragonfly-long in proportion to its body and edged with a membranous web of trailing cilia. With its wings beginning to beat, a segmented tail of shimmering gold and jet unfolded from beneath the cuckoo creature to give it perfect symmetry.

Though its birth had been horrific and needlessly cruel, its final form was undeniably beautiful. An elegant swan hatched from a bloody carcass, a reminder that even the most terrible cruelty can fashion the greatest beauty.

An iron-shod boot slammed down, crushing the newborn creature into the mud beneath its tread. Brutal proof – if proof were needed – that the living world existed with no thoughts of compassion, justice or mercy.

The owner of the boot, clad in the hulking plates of Cataphractii Terminator armour, stared at the smoke-wreathed mountain and the golden citadel crowning its summit. Unaware of the tiny life he had just snuffed out, Forrix scanned the blasted terraces of the Cadmean Citadel, grudgingly admiring the elegance with which it had been integrated into the local topology and the surrounding city. The warmasons of the Imperial Fists were cold and efficient, but their master understood the first maxim of the victor: that the best people to leave in the wake of your campaigns were those who did not feel they had been conquered.

It was a maxim to which the Iron Warriors paid little heed.

‘The conqueror makes fair his walls, and all should welcome him as a liberator,’ said Forrix, looking back over his shoulder to the wide valley below. Sawtooth fortifications surrounded the citadel in jagged layers of razorwire and pugnacious walls, bludgeoning their way across the lower town and tearing through habitations, agriculture, industry and places of wondrous natural beauty with equal aplomb. Redoubts, bunkers, and high-walled donjons grew like rocky stalagmites in a dripping cave, and a pall of smoke hung low over the dusty red valley like a shroud.

The lower reaches of the promontory at the heart of the great starport were now clad in metal, each dawn revealing a higher course of steelwork and scaffolds that crept uphill like a spreading cancer that would climb and climb until the red-and-ochre skin of the mountain was entirely encased. Freshly laid funicular rails came with the steelwork, heavy-gauge tracks that would allow mighty bombards and howitzers to be raised into battery positions hacked into the stepped bedrock. Thus far the Basilisk workhorses of the siege train had shouldered the bulk of the barrage work, but the heavier guns were only days away from being brought high enough to lob fat cauldrons of high explosive into the heart of the citadel.

And when that happened, it was all over.

No fortress could long resist when the lords of the artilleryman’s craft were brought to bear. The Iron Warriors would flatten Dorn’s mountain and erase all trace of the Cadmean Citadel, heedless of the technological marvels worked into its walls.

Forrix watched the progress of a group of captured city folk hauling long lengths of steel-wound cable uphill, sweating and bloodied by the effort and driven by the whips of Obax Zakayo. Behind them, clawed and spider-limbed construction engines drilled into the mountain to lace its structure with the bolts, fasteners and clamps required of the siegemasters behind them. There was a relentless and pleasing regularity to the work, a dance of logistics, effort and planning that only those versed in the arts of making and unmaking fortifications could appreciate. Amid the brutality, the slavery, the misery and the rape of the landscape there was art and there was beauty of a strange, under-appreciated kind.

‘Admiring your handiwork again, triarch?’ said Barban Falk, climbing into the shielded observation post below the ruined outwork that marked the point where the Imperial Fists had first broken the earth of this world.

‘No, admiring theirs,’ he replied, jerking his head uphill. Smoke hung over the citadel, its walls pocked and scarred by shell-fire, but already wreathed in a haze of ancient mechanisms of self-repair. Driving dust squalls and oppressed sunshine rippled in the mirage of its void shields, throwing up splintered rainbows of distorted light.

‘You always did like living dangerously, didn’t you, Forrix?’ said Falk, the enormous bulk of their armour filling the small space.

Forrix didn’t have to ask what he meant.

Since the debacle at Phall, to speak of the sons of Dorn with anything other than hate was to invite terrible retribution from the Lord of Iron. Had it been anyone else, Forrix wouldn’t have spoken, but as far as any Iron Warrior ever trusted another, he trusted Barban Falk.

‘I know you think the same,’ he said.

‘True, but I know better than to voice it.’

‘You always played the politics better than I did,’ admitted Forrix.

‘Yet you hold a position in the Trident and have the ear of the primarch.’

‘Precious few of us can claim that now,’ said Forrix, with an honesty that surprised him.

Falk shrugged, no easy feat in such a bulky suit of armour. His monstrous Terminator plates were chevroned with gold and jet, and the smoothness of the heavy, barrel-vaulted pauldrons was in stark contrast to the war-worn condition of Forrix’s armour. Falk’s battle gear had originally been crafted for Warsmith Dantioch of the 51st Expedition, but after the triple disasters of Gholghis, Stratopolae and Krak Fiorina it had been reassigned to a more deserving wearer. Like Phall, no Iron Warrior now mentioned Dantioch. His legacy was utterly expunged; his name a byword for failure on an epic scale.

‘I do not claim to understand our master’s mind, but I can read the tides of his anger,’ said Falk, flexing the chisel-like fingers of his power fist, as though carefully weighing his next words. ‘Tides that grow ever stronger and more frequent.’

‘How are the western approaches?’ asked Forrix, unwilling to address Falk’s comment.

Falk chuckled. ‘Do you think I am trying to entrap you, Forrix?’ said the giant warrior, running a hand over his oil-dark hair and narrowing his already hooded eyes. ‘You think I seek to goad you into careless words I can then report back to the primarch? If I had any feelings to be hurt, they would be bleeding to death right now.’

Forrix allowed himself a thin smile. ‘No, I don’t think that,’ he said.

‘Well, you should,’ said Falk. ‘I’d betray you in a heartbeat if I thought it would earn me a place in the Trident. Especially now that Golg’s a corpse and Berossus is as good as a corpse and isn’t likely to be elevated.’

‘Complete the western approaches in the next day and you might get your wish.’

Falk nodded and pulled a waxy sheet of rolled parchment from the kilt of baked leather at his waist. He passed it to Forrix, who pulled it open and cast his eye over Falk’s schematics.

‘The work is proceeding as planned,’ said Falk, his pride and vaunting ambition plain. ‘The breaching batteries will be in place by sundown tonight, and ground-penetrating auspex readings suggest a wall density that will require a sixteen-hour bombardment to carve a practicable breach in the half-moon bastion.’

Forrix let his eyes wander the interleaved lines on Falk’s plans, the angles of approach, the interlocking fire pockets, the dead zones and the enfilading redoubts; admiring the brutal functional architecture of his fellow warsmith’s plans.

‘I see you favour extra storm bastions over breaching batteries,’ he said.

Falk had always preferred the blunt directness of frontal assault over the relentless mathematics of a carefully planned approach. Where Forrix viewed the reduction of a fortress as a rigorously applied equation, Falk saw it as a pugilistic battle where both fighters pounded until one was forced to yield.

An unsubtle mindset, but an effective one.

Many beyond the Legion believed this to be the Iron Warriors’ only means of waging war, but the Lord of Iron was far more subtle than that. Mathematics and the precise application of force made up the bulk of his campaigning, but the brute application of violence made far more dramatic remembrance.

‘There are enough guns to bring the walls down, even allowing for those damned repair mechanisms,’ replied Falk. ‘Once the wall’s down, I want enough warriors in place to be sure of punching through the breach. They won’t be expecting an escalade in the west.’

‘There’s a reason for that,’ pointed out Forrix. ‘The ground there is steeper and rockier than the other flanks. It won’t be easy to cover that ground quickly enough to avoid getting shot to pieces. And if there are seismic charges in place, they’ll bury you.’

‘There won’t be.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

‘The Lord of Iron says there will not be.’

‘You have spoken to the primarch?’ asked Forrix, struggling to mask the bilious jealousy flaring in his breast. ‘He has not emerged from his bunker since we made planetfall.’

‘He sends word through the Stonewrought,’ spat Falk, referring to Soltarn Vull Bronn, a warrior of the 45th Grand Battalion whose understanding of stone was such that some whispered it spoke to him, confiding its secrets and opening up its geological wonders to the touch of his entrenching tool. Perturabo, ever quick to recognise raw talent, now favoured Vull Bronn, despite the inferiority of his rank next to the three exalted warsmiths of the Trident who normally attended upon him.

‘Does he send word of the Third Legion?’

Falk shook his head. ‘No, he demands only that Cassander’s men must all be dead and this citadel in ruins before the Phoenician’s warriors arrive.’

Forrix grunted, his measure of the Emperor’s Children’s worth wordlessly expressed. ‘This prosecution will be done with long before then.’

As if to underscore Forrix’s words, the percussive drumbeat of artillery fire echoed from the far side of the mountain. Both warriors looked up as the echoes were carried away by the hot winds whipping around the mountainside. Forrix listened to the rhythm of the guns, as a maestro listens to the orchestra at his command, reading the subtle shifts in pitch and timbre of each weapon. He heard the urgency in the firing and the haste with which each gun was unleashing its explosive ordnance.

‘It’s coming from the north,’ said Forrix, reaching for the helmet mag-locked to his armour.

‘Harkor’s warriors,’ replied Falk.

‘Come on,’ said Forrix, turning and stalking from the observation post.

‘That’s not breaching fire,’ said Falk, arriving at the conclusion Forrix had already reached.

‘No,’ agreed Forrix. ‘The bloody fool’s mounting an escalade.’

Pain. It always came back to pain.

Berossus’s last memory had been of pain, of his life bleeding out through the broken meat-puppet his flesh had become. Bones smashed beyond the ability of any Apothecary to knit, organs pulped with seismic force and the searing heat in his flesh as the fearsome power of his genhanced metabolism tried in vain to undo the mortal wound done to him.

The pain was intense and had never left him, but worse than the pain was the shame of how he had been wounded. Not at the hands of an enemy warrior capable of wreaking harm on a battle-engineered post-human, nor at the hands of a terrible alien creature too hideous and nightmarish for him to overcome.

No, this pain had been wrought by the hands of his primarch.

The blow had been swift, too swift to avoid, and too thorough in its unmaking of his body for him ever to recover. Another had swiftly followed, an unnecessary blow, for he was already dead by any conventional measure of the word. But the IV Legion never did anything half-heartedly, and Perturabo’s attack was that martial philosophy distilled into two swift strikes.

Gulping blood down his ruptured oesophagus and frothing it out through his perforated lungs, Berossus had waited to die as he had lived. Embittered and in pain.

Ever since the war against the Black Judges and the screaming mob of hooded Accusators that had caught him off guard he had lived with pain. Individually, the Accusators were no match for a warrior of the Legiones Astartes, but he had been surrounded by a dozen, each armed with a chain-gavel that could cut armour apart with lethal ease.

Six died before they could touch him, but then their blows began to tell, cutting him apart piece by piece until the tearing teeth of an enemy weapon had all but ripped through his spine. He’d killed them all with the last of his strength before falling to the ground as his legs failed him. The Apothecaries had found him surrounded by their black-hooded bodies and worked wonders on his injured flesh. His body was remade and strengthened with augmetics and nerve grafts, but the pain of the ordeal never left him.

That pain had been eclipsed in one moment of incautious speaking. It had been his misfortune to bring ill-favoured news to the Lord of Iron, whose volatile moods had steadily worsened since the slaughters of Isstvan V. He had known his news was bad, but had hoped his position as a warsmith would keep him from harm.

A foolish hope, for Perturabo’s rages fell on high kings and holy fools alike.

Since then, blackness for the most part.

Muttered voices, sudden stabbing light and a sensation of floating, disembodied on a dark ocean. He felt dislocated, adrift and bereft of all the points of reference he had, until now, taken for granted. Berossus had tried to listen to the beat of his heart, thinking that if he could cling to that metronomic beat then he might have some means, how-ever transitory, of measuring the passage of time. Yet his heart was silent, and in his timeless madnesses he would often wonder if he had died and was trapped in some heathen limbo. He rejected the thought, but it would return to plague him often, a nagging suspicion that his life was over, yet would not end.

Memories intruded as he floated between life and death, a parade of conquest in service of the Emperor and, latterly, Warmaster Horus. He saw wars fought in the red rain, dug through the flesh of countless worlds, and ripped the meat from the bones of a hundred thousand foes. He saw righteous wars of species survival, fought by the light of Terra’s sun, twist under the transformative pressure of time, becoming wars of conquest, which in time became wars fought for the sake of the thrill of it.

When had that happened?

How had the martial traditions of the Iron Warriors been perverted so completely?

Berossus knew the answer well enough. Piece by piece, inch by inch, the Emperor’s wars had worn the proud warriors of the IV Legion down to little more than grinding machines bedecked in the blood and mud of the worlds they dragged into compliance. Perturabo’s warriors had done all that had been asked of them and their only reward was to be thrown back to the very wars that were poisoning the heart of their Legion.

And then, the bitterest pill to swallow…

Berossus remembered the words Warmaster Horus had spoken to the Lord of Iron after the wrack of lost Olympia and the news that the wolves of Fenris had been loosed upon the fair isle of Prospero.

‘The use of force alone is a temporary solution,’ Horus had said. ‘It may subdue for a moment, but it does not remove the necessity of subduing again. And the Imperium will not be at peace if we must perpetually reconquer those we have rendered compliant. You, my brother, will ensure that one conquest is enough.’

Perhaps the Warmaster’s words had been intended as a balm for Perturabo’s tortured soul, but so dark a benediction had only driven him deeper into abyssal guilt. What might once have appeared as the basest of treacheries now seemed like the only logical course, and Perturabo had reaffirmed his oaths of loyalty to Horus.

No one knew what else had passed between these two demigods, but when the Iron Warriors had set foot on Isstvan V, it was with a murderous rage that could only be quenched in the blood of those they had once called brothers.

Berossus floated through the chaos of the massacre on the black sand, the savage joy he had taken in the shock of betrayal on the faces of every midnight-skinned Salamander and ivory-faced Raven Guard. Of the Iron Hands, he had seen little, for the Phoenician’s warriors were making sport of them, their debaucheries unseemly but effective.

He remembered killing a Salamanders captain with a close-range blast of his meltagun, relishing the irony of ending his life with fire. The warrior’s helmet had run molten from his face, leaving the skull exposed and as black as the skin that sloughed from the bone like hot oil. Even as he died, the warrior had cursed him in a bubbling series of liquid gasps that made no sense. He’d left the Salamander to choke on his own liquidised flesh, dismissing the curse as a vestigial remnant of his upbringing on a feral world of savage-born reptile hunters.

Drifting in this timeless limbo of pain and isolation, the Salamander’s molten visage returned to haunt his nightmares, a leering skull with coal-red eyes that bored into him with accusatory force. The screaming skull never left him, braying meaningless static and pressing close to his awareness, forcing him to relive the agonies it had known in its final moments.

Behind the skull was another face, a bitter granite-carved mask with cold, blue-steel eyes and a voice before which all else was white noise. It commanded the blackened bone of the Salamander, telling it that Berossus would not die as everything else had died. Even in his disembodied state, Berossus knew these were commands that could not be ignored.

The Salamander’s skull brought life, but most of all it brought pain, its red eyes reducing him to scraps with chanted evocations. Berossus tried to retreat from its calls, but it had strength beyond what was left to him and a hunger for his suffering.

He felt a jolt of screaming agony course around his body, a shuddering paroxysm of electric rebirth, and even as dimensions of space and form coalesced around him he loosed a shuddering roar as he felt the immense power in his limbs.

The world of darkness in which he had existed for what felt like an eternity was washed away in a cascade of painful colours that made him want to close his eyes. The colours bled away, but not his rage, and he shook as he saw the Salamander’s red-eyed skull before him.

Except it wasn’t a Salamander and it wasn’t a skull.

The Techmarine’s eye lenses were whirring optics, enlarged orbs of clicking armatures and rotating ruby lenses mounted on a bulbous apparatus of bronze and silver. His helm was blackened iron and a trio of hissing pneumatics crouched at his shoulders like obedient stingers of metal and dripping fluids.

‘Who are you?’ he said, his voice a grating bark that sounded nothing like he remembered.

‘I am Galian Carron, and you are in my war-forge,’ said the Techmarine, who stepped back with a wary flinch as Berossus shook in the unbreakable fetters that bound him. Carron was looking up at him, for he was taller by far than the Techmarine. Grey-fleshed servitors and heavy lifter gear stood around him, some before him, some behind him – though how he could see them was, at present, a mystery. A host of robed acolytes bearing oiled platters, upon which were a variety of cogs, gears and machine parts, knelt behind Carron: the Techmarine’s devotees.

No, not Carron’s devotees.

His.

‘Why am I here?’ asked Berossus, feeling unfamiliar walls of cold iron pressing in around him, a life-preserving womb and a sarcophagus all in one. Claustrophobic madness extended a tendril into his mind, and found itself welcome.

‘You are here because the Lord of Iron willed it so,’ said Carron.

‘You lie,’ said Berossus, desperate and yet hopeful. ‘He killed me.’

‘No, he has transformed you.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Berossus.

‘By his own hand he has remade you in his image,’ said Carron as one of his wheezing pneumatics reached up and took hold of a rubberised control box. At the press of a button, the fetters binding Berossus’s limbs unclamped with a mechanised sound of grinding metal. His legs, twin columns of iron, steel and fibre-bundle muscles, were his again to command, and he took a ponderous step forwards, knowing, with his first, that there would be no release from this entombment in an iron coffin.

The sound of his splay-clawed footfalls rang from the floor plates of the war-forge with a boom of metal on metal. His arms, a monumental hammer and a heavy-barrelled rotor cannon, spun in time with his thoughts.

‘I am alive?’ asked Berossus, not yet ready to believe it.

‘Better,’ said Carron. ‘You are a Dreadnought.’

Holding the citadel had never been a possibility, Captain Felix Cassander of the Imperial Fists knew, but that had never been the point. The Iron Warriors were the enemy, and though his thoughts still balked at the prospect of the Legiones Astartes turning upon one another, the enemy had to be fought.

Yes, the citadel must eventually fall, but Cassander did not hold with the notion of the unwinnable fight, the noble last stand or poetic ideals of self-sacrifice. There was always a way to win or at least a way to cheat death, but even he had to admit that there was only the faintest hope of them surviving much longer.

Cassander was not a man to whom pessimism came easily, but it was taking considerable effort of will to keep its dark touch from infecting his thoughts.

When the Iron Warriors finally overcame the citadel’s ancient defences and broke open its walls they would run amok. They would slaughter his warriors, the heroic men and women of this world that had chosen to stand with them, and the refugees from the murder fields below. Fifty-two Imperial Fists and thirteen thousand men, women and children were crammed within the citadel’s walls.

When the end came, their deaths would not be quick and they would not be painless, but there was no talk of surrender or terms, no seditious mutterings to erode morale and no thought other than resisting these bastard invaders.

The Iron Warriors… our brothers…

No history told who had built this marvel atop the mountain, though the engineers and artisans who had raised its living walls must surely have been the greatest minds of their age. Wrought from stone and rock unknown to this world and laced with technologies whose secrets not even the Mechanicum could fathom, its walls reacted to damage like living tissue. Shell impacts would scab over with liquid silicates, and moments later the wall beneath would be whole again. Only when the hurt was sustained and catastrophic would any site of damage be irreparable. Attackers found the wall reacting to them with spiked extrusions of living rock, or were swallowed whole as the stonework opened up beneath them. Against any conventional foe, the fortress would have been, for all intents and purposes, impregnable and indestructible.

But the Iron Warriors were not conventional foes.

Lord Dorn had chosen the living citadel as the site upon which to plant the aquila, not as a symbol of Imperial dominance, but a seat of governance to be shared by all. He had brought the planet’s former rulers into the establishment of an ordered government, allowing the people to choose their own planetary governor, a respected civic leader named Endric Cadmus. Cassander smiled at the memory, thinking that perhaps some of the philosophy of the XIII Legion’s primarch had permeated the Imperial Fists after all.

Cassander and his fellow Imperial Fists had escorted the expeditionary iterators and remembrancers as they went from cities to far-flung townships, spreading word of the Emperor to a people ripe to embrace the Imperial Truth. It had been a glorious time, and when Lord Dorn announced that he was to lead the VII Legion to fresh campaigns, the populace had mourned his departure like the loss of a loved one.

He remembered the pride that filled him when the primarch had given him the solemn duty of standing with his battle company as sentinels to the newly compliant world, a potent sign that this was a world under the protection of the Imperial Fists. But that honourable gesture was to have consequences that not even Lord Dorn could have foreseen.

Cassander wiped dust from his scarred face and spat a mouthful of the wretched stuff to the ground, where it bubbled with a chemical hiss. His helmet was long gone; a bolt-round had punched through the faceplate and blown out in a spray of blood, bone and ceramite. Techmarine Scanion had died early in the fight, and without his direction the forge-servitors were of only limited use when it came to repair work. A few Mechanicum adepts remained, but they spent their days in the heart of the citadel, plumbing its secrets as though there were still a chance they might live to relay anything they might find.

Cassander’s features were careworn, as though abraded by the constant winds that scoured every smooth surface on this planet and gave it the texture of coarse sand. Eyes of deep brown that had seen the order of the galaxy overturned without any power to change it were deep-set and melancholic, his cheeks scar-blackened with the explosive passage of the bolt-round that had taken his helm.

When the order came to return to Terra, Cassander began preparations to depart immediately, but the sudden death of his vessel’s Navigator had left them stranded until a replacement could be despatched. The following day, word of the Warmaster’s treachery and the massacre on Isstvan V reached them, throwing Cassander’s world into free-fall.

Pride in an honourable assignment was replaced by frustration and bitter disappointment that they could not fight alongside their brothers, could not call Horus to account for his perfidy and punish those who had trampled their oaths of loyalty into the dust.

But the chance to make war on the traitorous allies of Horus had come soon enough.

The Iron Warriors made planetfall in the wake of a saturation bombardment that reduced the valley and the agri-settlements filling its fertile deltas to ash. Magma bombs and mass drivers boiled away the rivers and reduced fecund earth to arid dust. The Cadmean Citadel was left untouched, and Cassander still found it difficult to believe that such a precise bombardment was possible.

He knew why, of course.

The Iron Warriors could not pass up this chance to humble the sons of Dorn, and Cassander had rallied his men with grim certitude as the bulk landers of the IV Legion descended on towering columns of firelight.

The technological cunning of the ancient fortress builders, married to the artfully wrought geography and the courage of the defenders, had kept the Iron Warriors at bay for almost three months, but now Cassander’s defiance was almost at an end. With three-quarters of his company slain, and thousands of mortal soldiers dead, he was running out of ways to fight. The citadel had few heavy guns remaining to keep the Iron Warriors from bringing their artillery superiority to bear and overwhelming the citadel’s inbuilt defence mechanisms.

The traitors could not be denied for much longer, but every day Cassander’s warriors stayed alive kept the enemy from redeploying and bringing their strength to bear elsewhere.

A poor measure of success, but it was all Cassander had left.

He shook off such pessimism, knowing it did not become a warrior of the Imperial Fists to wallow in self-pity, and moved to the edge of the northernmost bastion. Once its gleaming ramparts had been a proud example of the military engineer’s art. Now they were chewed-up ruins-in-waiting. Locris and Kastor crouched behind the largest nubs of dusty stone, golden giants amid the hundreds of dusty ochre-clad local militiamen. Cassander had broken up his few remaining squads, deploying his men throughout the defence to bolster each section of wall and provide strength of heart to the thousands of soldiers who fought alongside them.

The sky strobed with concussive impacts that buckled the air with their force. High explosives on ballistic trajectories flashed and screeched as their impact violence was dissipated by the void-umbra. The shields on the southern approaches were close to failing, but thankfully the enemy wasn’t concentrating fire there.

Locris looked up as Cassander hunkered down in the lee of the rampart, and Kastor gave him a nod of acknowledgement.

‘They’re eager today,’ said Kastor, as a thunderous detonation rocked the base of the wall. Kinetic dampers in the citadel’s plunging foundations transferred the power of the blast deep into the bedrock of the mountain and the smell of metal shavings and oily secretions wafted up from the silicate scabs forming over the craters. Rock fragments rained down onto the ramparts, blanketing the long line of soldiers in yet more red dust.

‘Too eager,’ agreed Locris. ‘Something’s happening, the pace has changed.’

Like Cassander, Locris went bareheaded; the same shrapnel fragment that split his battle helm in two had given him the long scar down his cheek and taken his left eye. The scar made him roguish, the eye piratical. Both were wounds to be avenged.

The plastron, pauldrons and vambraces of Kastor’s armour were scorched black where the firestorm of an incendiary projectile had peeled the paint from its plates as he shielded a group of wounded soldiers with his body.

‘What do you think, captain? The Digger?’ asked Kastor.

‘I told you, Symeon’s squad spotted the Digger in the east today,’ said Locris. ‘This feels like Scrapper’s men.’

Cassander gripped the hilt of his sword and peered through a split in the rampart, where webs of connective stone tissue had failed to set, watching the uphill avalanche of burnished iron plate through a haze of dust. Smoke-wreathed artillery pits in sheltered batteries far below hurled high-velocity projectiles ahead of the climbing Iron Warriors, while mobile guns on walker platforms struggled to keep up with the assault force. This fresh attack was a salutatory reminder that Perturabo’s sons were warriors first and foremost, siege specialists second. Cassander watched their movements, fluid and aggressive, disciplined yet driven by core-deep fury.

Where had such raw hate come from?

They had taken to distinguishing between the Iron Warriors detachments by giving their commanders derogatory appellations based on their most apparent characteristics. The Digger’s men were bent-backed shovellers, methodical, precise and unstinting in their labours; the Malingerer kept his men in their dugouts as his artillery dropped tonnes of munitions on the citadel, the Voyeur liked to watch proceedings from a spike-topped blockhouse in the centre of the valley.

‘I think you’re right, Locris,’ said Cassander.

Unlike his fellow commanders, Scrapper liked to throw his men at the walls if so much as a sniff of an assault opportunity presented itself. Where other Iron Warriors displayed a measure of caution towards the citadel’s defences and an appreciation for the careful, step-by-step methodology of siege warfare, Scrapper liked to get his legionaries bloody in the swirling crucible of combat.

Cassander dropped back into cover as a whining solid slug zipped overhead.

‘Makes it easier, I suppose,’ noted Kastor. ‘His men have no fire discipline worth a damn.’

‘Maybe not, but they’re hard fighters,’ said Cassander. ‘We give them insulting names, but don’t ever under-estimate them.’

‘Duly noted, captain,’ said Kastor, placing a fist in the centre of his scorched breastplate.

Locris held up a spoon-handled detonator trigger and said, ‘You want the pleasure of these ones, captain?’

Cassander risked another glance through the rampart as the citadel’s artillery pieces opened up on the advancing Iron Warriors. Those guns alone weren’t going to make much of a dent in the assault force, but any thinning of the ranks could only be a good thing.

‘You do it,’ he said. ‘You’ve more than earned it.’

Locris grinned and mashed the trigger, detonating the last of the seismic mines dug into the northern slopes at the forefront of the Iron Warriors attack. Mushrooming blasts of tectonic shockwaves ripped a three hundred metre section of the mountain away and sent it tumbling downhill in a storm of pulverised rock.

Cassander relished the sight of scores of split-open bodies carried downhill in the raging avalanche, and pressed the throat bead of his borrowed vox.

‘All Fists – any movement in your sectors?’

Each of his section leaders replied in the negative, lending further credence to his growing certainty that this was Scrapper’s latest attempt to break the citadel open with a surprise assault. The tempo of the unequal artillery duel picked up as the Iron Warriors drew ever closer, climbing through the deep ditch carved by the seismic mines.

‘Symeon, Esdras, Phyros,’ said Cassander into his throat mic. ‘Redeploy your men to the northern bastion immediately.’

The enemy artillery shifted their aim as the Iron Warriors closed the last hundred metres between them and the wall. Shells screamed on direct flight paths, slamming into the wall with pounding hammerblows that shook the foundations of the mountain itself. A pressure wave of impact blew up and over the wall and the heat of incendiaries burned at the silicate scabs fighting to resist the detonations.

Cassander knew this was the last chance he would have to blunt the assault force before the Iron Warriors were tearing at the defenders.

‘Wait until they reach the closest markers,’ he ordered, bellowing in a voice that could reach from one end of the Phalanx’s training halls to the other. ‘Make every shot count or it won’t be Perturabo’s whelps you need to worry about!’

TWO

First Blood
Forgebreaker
The Trident Remade

Rubble and impact craters had made the wall scaleable, but the damned self-repair mechanisms were already remaking what the artillery had put asunder. From previous attempts at storming the citadel, Kroeger knew the wall would be flat and featureless in moments, so wasted no time in hurling himself onto the nearest hideously organic wound at the base of its structure.

Instantly, he felt his weight increase, his limbs become leaden and his armour exert an almost insurmountable attraction to the ground. Graviton generators buried beneath the wall were warping the local gravity field, making even the smallest movements an immense effort.

Kroeger roared and pressed himself to the wall, hauling his body upwards with a combination of brute strength and fury. The generators’ fields could only reach a few metres from the ground, and with every hauling movement up the textured wall, he felt their grip on him loosening. Behind his faceplate, he grinned as he felt his natural weight restored, and sprang up to the next handhold.

Behind him, three hundred warriors of Lord Harkor’s 23rd Grand Battalion knelt in covering positions or set up heavy weapons. Only a very few had the strength to overcome the graviton generators, and these were the bloodiest, meanest and most devoted of the warsmith’s killers. And of those men, Kroeger was the bloodiest, meanest and most devoted.

Servitor-crewed weapon turrets emerged from armoured blast shutters midway up the sloped wall and swept the ground with a mixture of heavy shell cannons and lighter infantry cullers. Explosions marched along the base of the wall as weapons and ammo caches exploded. Defenders at the ramparts poured their own fire down the face of the wall where the turrets could not reach.

Lord Harkor’s artillery had ceased firing, wary of inflicting friendly casualties, but the Imperial Fists had no such concerns. Plunging fire was pounding with earth-shattering force on the rock and the warriors clinging to the wall, wreathing the summit of the mountain in acrid smoke, flames and airbursting shrapnel.

Kroeger heard the long bray of an autocannon, its shells raking left and right wherever Iron Warriors clustered in groups of three or four. A long-barrelled melta-lance immolated a cluster of boulders with an ear-splitting screech of burned air, and individual blasts of lascannon fire hailed down like neon comets as they stabbed from narrow-gauge focusing muzzles.

Khamer went down, his chest a fused ruin of exposed bone where his innards had instantaneously cooked to superheated vapour, and Tumak was cut in two by a sawing blast of shell-fire. Ulgolan was hurled to the ground by a sudden growth of silicate stone that pummelled him from his climb. Another extrusion burst from a repairing gash in the wall, a barbed skewer that impaled Purdox like a corpse on a gibbet. An overhang grew above Straba, forcing him into the sheeting fire of a lascannon that sliced him in two.

Others fell, warriors whose names he didn’t care to know and never would.

Anger doused him at the thought of a single company of Imperial Fists and a few thousand mortal soldiers keeping them out, and he pressed himself to the wall as the storm of fire from above intensified. This was always the bloodiest part in any assault, the moment where the true worth of a warrior was measured, the last fifty metres in the open. A commander could have all the planet-killing weapons at his disposal, the most sophisticated fortress, the most advanced countermeasures, but he still needed men of flesh and blood to cross that last scrap of open ground to get to grips with the enemy.

Warsmiths like Forrix and Toramino viewed this stage of a battle with distaste, as an unpleasant necessity within the gracefully choreographed sophistication of fire plans, bombardment schedules, approach saps, parallels and line upon line of perfectly angled siegeworks. Warsmith Harkor was an Olympian of the old ways, a warrior who knew the value of occasionally strengthening the mettle of his subordinates by plunging them into the fire and beating them upon the anvil of war.

Kroeger had little taste for the logistical mechanics of a siege, though he was competent enough in their execution. Better to let others do the digging, the planning and the building. His home was in the thick of battle, where boldness was a virtue and fury a killing edge.

Warriors emerged from the hellstorm of explosions and scything fragments, searching for handholds beside him. They followed his example, knowing that where Kroeger led, the blood of the enemy was sure to flow. Fire and noise burst around him as he climbed higher and grenade dumpers ejected their payloads in tumbling cascades, but the enemy was running low on explosive ordnance and there were too few to do any real harm. Shrapnel whickered through the ranks of the Iron Warriors, but encased within layers of ceramite warplate, only a handful were blooded.

Vannuk climbed next to him, his burnished armour pitted with small-arms impacts, and his helmet scored with heat burns. He had his bolter in one hand and loosed a short burst of fire. A scream, and a torn-up body fell from the wall.

‘First blood to me,’ grunted Vannuk.

Kroeger’s bolter was still mag-locked to his thigh, and would likely stay there until he’d reached the rampart above.

‘Who cares about first blood?’ said Kroeger. ‘So long as there’s blood.’

Vannuk paused to take aim at another target, but Kroeger felt the wall beneath him tremble with substrate activity and punched his fist into a crack in the wall. He spread the fingers of his gauntlet to support his weight and swung out to grip a handhold over to his left as the wall ripped open in a leering slice, like the maw of an ambush predator. Vannuk barely had time to scream before he was swallowed. Oozing tendrils of liquid rock webbed the gap in an instant, drawing the seams of the wall closed again.

‘Idiot,’ was all Kroeger had to say on Vannuk’s demise, and pushed himself onwards.

He climbed with random leaps and surging effort, evading spikes of glistening rock and hails of gunfire with a mix of skill and luck. A turret slid down the wall in flames where he had been climbing only a moment before. The mangled wreckage trailed its cybernetic crewman on ropes of cabling before slamming into the rock below. Its armoured panels tore open as it exploded. Flames belched, and corkscrewing contrails ripped in all directions as its shell hopper cooked off.

A shell burst hit the wall next to him, and Kroeger flinched as the impact caused his visor to darken momentarily. He looked up to see a long line of frightened faces looking down at him and grinned. They feared him and they were right to.

‘Death is coming for you!’ he yelled at them. ‘This iron without will soon be iron within!’

Sporadic blasts of fire beat on his armour, a mixture of las-fire and solid rounds. The shots spanked from his pauldrons, but didn’t penetrate. Kroeger reached down and freed his bolter from his thigh. He swung the weapon to bear and squeezed off a three-round burst of shells.

One man’s head simply vanished, the impact trauma enough to tear his skull from his spine. Another soldier exploded from the chest up as Kroeger’s round detected enough mass to trigger the warhead’s detonation. The third man fell back screaming, his face torn up by bone shrapnel from the dead men beside him. It was wasteful to expend mass-reactives on mortals, but the sheer mess it made of their fragile bodies was too satisfying to ignore. Clamping his bolter back to his thigh, Kroeger hauled himself up, hand over hand, grinning beneath his iron visor as he saw the chewed-up battlements within reach. The wall’s integral defences were dead here, and now there was nothing to stop him.

He took hold of a twisted length of protruding rebar and hauled himself up, rolling over the broken-toothed remains of the wall. Shell fragments were embedded in the stone, and even as he dropped to the rampart, he had his bolter unclamped again and was searching for targets.

Only two Iron Warriors came over the wall with him: Vortrax and Ushtor, from the patterns on their helms and shoulder guards. Kroeger saw an Imperial Fists warrior turn towards them, a captain by the look of him. His face registered surprise, and he shouted a warning to another two Fists squatting in the midst of a company-strength of frightened mortals.

‘No helmet?’ hissed Kroeger, aiming and firing in one fluid motion. ‘Stupid.’

The captain went down, but Kroeger was irritated to see that his shot had merely grazed him. The other Imperial Fists rose to his defence, moving apart and firing at their attackers. The mortal soldiers loosed panicked shots at random.

Vortrax fell back against the ruined wall, his breastplate hammered by concentrated bolter fire. Spasming detonations and a crack of mashed bones told Kroeger he had been pulped inside his armour.

Ushtor traded shots with the Fists, but these warriors were too cool under fire to be caught out by such undisciplined salvoes. Kroeger took his time and pulled his gun hard into his shoulder. He sighted on the leftmost of the Imperial Fists and put two carefully placed shots though his helm. The warrior dropped instantly, the back of his head a hollowed out shell of dripping brain matter and scorched bone.

Where the mortal soldiers had turned their attention to the fighting on the ramparts, two Iron Warriors gained the wall. Bolter fire hammered the mortal soldiers, ripping arms from shoulders, torsos from legs like bodies caught in the flailing blades of a threshing machine. Their screams were pitiful, and Kroeger took little satisfaction in their meaningless deaths.

The Fists were the true prize here.

The fallen captain rose with a bared sword that blazed with golden light as he leapt towards the two Iron Warriors. First one, then the second died, carved up with powerful strokes aimed at the weakest points of their armour. The captain kicked them from the wall and turned to face Kroeger.

‘Come at me and die, traitors!’ he yelled, his face a mask of blood from where Kroeger’s shot had torn a finger-deep furrow in his skull. Kroeger shook his head and shot him twice in the chest.

Beside him, Ushtor collapsed, his armour blown outwards by the force of shell detonations. Kroeger ignored the dying warrior’s grunts of pain and loped towards the Imperial Fist who’d killed him.

Another warrior without a helm. Did Dorn’s weakling sons want their heads blown off?

The Fist backed away, ejecting his bolter’s magazine and slamming home a fresh clip.

‘Nowhere to run,’ said Kroeger.

‘I’m not running,’ answered the Imperial Fist. ‘I’m waiting.’

Despite himself, Kroeger’s curiosity was aroused. ‘Waiting for what?’

‘For them,’ said the Fist.

Hammering impacts spun Kroeger round, and he felt the pain of lacerating wounds punched in his side. He dropped to one knee, seeing at least two dozen Imperial Fists charging towards him. They fired from the hip, but suffered no loss in accuracy. Two more shells struck him before he could scramble to cover: one in the shoulder, one in the centre of his chest. Warning icons flashed to life on his visor, and he coughed a wad of blood through the vox-grille of his helmet.

Kroeger fought to get off a last volley, but his arm hung uselessly at his side and his bolter lay in pieces before him. He hadn’t even realised he’d lost the weapon. He looked over the edge of the wall, seeing only a handful of Iron Warriors clambering towards the rampart. Hundreds of mortal soldiers opposed them with explosives and massed fire. There would be no help from that quarter for now.

How demeaning to be kept out of a fortress by such dross.

Kroeger stared down at the dark blood pooling in front of him, its bright gleam and iron tang curiously pleasant even as it leaked from his numerous wounds.

A cold shadow fell across the bloodied ramparts, and a roaring blast of jet-hot air blasted downwards from screaming retros. Kroeger’s spilled blood boiled in the heat and mortals screamed as their uniforms erupted in flames. The Imperial Fist with whom he’d traded words fell as the ammunition in his bolter exploded and transformed his wrists into charred stumps of flesh and nubs of fused bone.

Something fell from the sky, monstrous and cold.

It landed in the heart of the citadel with the booming clang of a funeral bell – the Olympian master of battle, a demigod in burnished warplate, a hammer-wielding avatar of thunder.

Perturabo, the Lord of Iron.

With the arrival of the primarch, the battle was over.

The outcome of the siege, never in doubt, was finally decided by his indomitable presence.

Perturabo came to rest on bended knee, one arm angled before him as though swearing homage to an unseen master, the other extended from his body. In the outstretched hand, he held a hammer the length of a mortal man, its haft fashioned from an alloy that was as unbreakable as it was unknown, patterned like marble, veined with lightning and capped by an amber pommel stone set with a slitted eye of jet. The head of the hammer was steel and gold, its rear razor-spiked, the killing face flat and murderous.

This gift from the Warmaster himself was no hammer for smithing, no tool of the forge and no symbol of unity.

Forgebreaker was a killing weapon, an instrument of death and nothing more.

A mantle of interlocking steel leaves draped from Perturabo’s broad shoulders like the hide of some great silver-scaled dragon, and the primarch’s raised gorget threw a ruddy light across his chiselled features. Eyes of the coldest blue, like ice-burned steel, glittered in the half-light of the day, and his scalp was shaven bare, pierced and threaded with dreadlocks of tightly wound cabling.

The Imperial Fists who’d come to kill Kroeger, seeing this most sublime chance to wreak harm on the personification of their hate, ignored his blood-wracked frame and took the only chance they would ever get to attack an enemy primarch. Kroeger had marched with his Legion since the great muster at the columned glory of the tyrant’s palace, but he could count on one hand the times he had been privileged to witness his primarch make war.

Each time had been from a distance, and always it had been war made at range.

This marked the first time he had seen the Lord of Iron kill in person. It was a moment he would never forget.

Perturabo slew the first Imperial Fist before Kroeger was even aware he’d moved, spinning on his heel and letting the hammer slip through his grasp until he was holding it at its farthest extension. The killing face struck the first warrior, obliterating him in an explosion of meat and bone and shattered plate. Perturabo’s silver cloak sliced out, its razor-edged scales cutting through the armour of a second warrior and leaving his shorn halves bisected so cleanly that it looked to Kroeger as though they could be put back together without effort.

A third warrior managed to reach striking distance, but never got the chance to even raise his weapon. The Lord of Iron extended his right fist and a storm of lightning-shot muzzle flare stabbed through the Imperial Fist. A dozen or more shells detonated virtually simultaneously, tearing him apart as surely as if a demolition charge had exploded within his chest cavity. What little flesh and blood remained of Dorn’s warrior fell to the ground in a sticky red rain.

And then the Iron Circle slammed down around Perturabo.

They were hulking figures in heavy plates of gleaming iron and gold, each one breaking the ground apart with the force of an artillery strike. They straightened with a whine of pneumatics and a flicker of target acquisition protocols. The Colossus battle robots formed up on Perturabo, raising heavy siege hammers and monstrously oversized storm shields as their combat wetware took the measure of the foes arrayed before their master.

Gunfire streaked towards Perturabo, but the Iron Circle braced themselves in an impregnable shieldwall of iron, each shot deflected or ablated. The shields parted and Perturabo charged into the mass of Imperial Fists, his hammer looping around his body in deadly arcs, smashing armour, breaking bodies, crushing skulls, lopping limbs and ending lives. The Iron Circle advanced at his side, their siege hammers hurling shattered bodies from the walls with the force of their swings. They bludgeoned enemy warriors into the stonework, protecting Perturabo’s flanks as Forgebreaker battered the Fists into boneless pieces and his gauntlet-mounted bolters tore the remains to shreds.

Death surrounded the Lord of Iron and he was its messenger.

Kroeger forced air into his lungs in short, awed breaths as the last Imperial Fist died. Forgebreaker smashed into the stone of the rampart, gouging a crater like the aftermath of a high-explosive bunker killer. Powdered rock-dust billowed around Perturabo, settling on the plates of his armour like flakes of windblown snow.

Almost thirty Space Marines dead in the span of five heartbeats.

The blood leaking from Kroeger’s ravaged body was already sluggish, his flesh hot to the touch with the healing mechanisms of his post-human biology. He pushed himself to one knee and bowed his head as he felt Perturabo’s gaze turn his way. Heavy footfalls approached and the sticky edge of the primarch’s hammer touched the underside of his helmet. Gentle pressure lifted Kroeger’s head, and he looked up into his primarch’s eyes, the black, oversized pupils reflecting the crimson light of his gorget. Kroeger trembled beneath Perturabo’s gaze, but it seemed the primarch’s wrath had been spent on the Imperial Fists.

‘Remove your helmet,’ commanded the primarch, his voice like glaciers grinding together.

Kroeger nodded and reached up with his good arm, undoing the seal on one side. It wasn’t easy to undo the other, but the catch eventually released with a hiss of pressure equalisation. He lifted his helmet clear, blinking as he adjusted to seeing the world without the filtering effects of his enhanced optics. The air here was warm and heavy with dust, scented with a metallic tint of the ferrous deposits beneath the surface and the sheer amount of blood spilled over the stone of the citadel’s ramparts.

A halo danced around Perturabo’s head, motes of dust and powdered stone caught in the ionising energies of his cranial interfaces. His features were pale and waxen, bleached of colour after months of seclusion, but the low sun was already triggering melanin production and imparting a leathery texture to his skin.

‘You are Kroeger, aren’t you?’ said Perturabo.

For a terrifying moment, Kroeger couldn’t think of his own name, but the primarch’s question was purely rhetorical.

‘I remember you from Isstvan,’ continued Perturabo, speaking as though each word was begrudged. ‘You’re one of Harkor’s brawlers, an attack dog with a taste for blood.’

Kroeger didn’t know if that was praise or censure, and kept silent as Perturabo turned away, surveying the human wreckage of the bastion. The Iron Circle moved in perfect unison with the primarch, their shields held at their sides and their hammers hissing as spilled blood burned in the energy fields surrounding them.

Each automaton bore the heraldry of a Legion warrior, and their cold machine hearts were as loyal as it was possible to be. Perturabo had formed the Iron Circle in the wake of the attack on the Iron Blood; a self-sustaining unit of implacable killers, devoted servants and incorruptible praetorians all in one.

Kroeger winced as his injured arm flared with pain, and he curled his fingers into a fist. He heard the sounds of marching feet, bolter fire, iron on stone and the whine of aircraft engines from all directions. Clearly there was still some resistance left within the walls of the citadel, but the heart of it had been ripped out by Perturabo’s unexpected appearance. Kroeger turned his face to the sky, seeing a circling Stormbird with its rear assault ramp lowered. It gleamed silver steel, gold and black, its flanks buttressed and armed with racks of missiles and multiple sponson-banks of heavy bolters.

This was Perturabo’s latest transport, a heavy assault lander capable of carrying the Iron Circle while making an attack run into a hot landing zone with a high probability of making it out again. Where his brother primarchs liked to embellish their personal flyers with ornamentation and heroic names, Perturabo indulged in no such displays of ego-vanity.

Such craft were for battle and as one was destroyed another would be built.

‘Where is your warsmith?’ asked Perturabo, dragging Kroeger’s thoughts back to earth.

Kroeger spat a mouthful of blood-gummed dust before answering. ‘Triarch Harkor is with the guns, my lord. I expect he is on his way here now.’

‘No doubt,’ answered Perturabo, looking closely at him, as though seeing him for the first time. ‘You alone survived to reach the rampart?’

‘Yes,’ agreed Kroeger, seeing no need to mention Vortrax and Ushtor. If there was glory to be had, where was the sense in spreading it around?

‘Stand,’ said Perturabo.

Kroeger obeyed instantly, his body protesting at the interruption of its healing cycles.

Perturabo regarded him strangely, as though searching for something he couldn’t name, but which he sensed was there, hiding just out of sight like a seed in fertile soil, nourished though not yet ready to bloom.

‘Interesting,’ he said, leaving Kroeger to wonder what he meant.

Kroeger heard scaling ladders slamming against the walls and the screech of pneumatic lifters. Whatever protocols had empowered the defences appeared to have run their course with the death of the Imperial Fists, and it wasn’t long before Iron Warriors were clambering over the shot-blasted ramparts as victors instead of attackers.

A number of lightweight Thunderhawks screamed down to the hardpan of the interior precincts of the citadel as though making a combat drop. Assault ramps slammed down and the bulky forms of numerous Iron Warriors warsmiths emerged. Kroeger averted his eyes as he saw Warsmith Harkor marching towards him alongside Lord Forrix.

Harkor’s fellow triarch went bareheaded, and his vulcanised cowl was pulled back over his shaven scalp. Ribbed neural connectors lay flat across his skull like the woven braids of a feral world savage. Emerging from the same Thunderhawk as Lord Forrix came the towering figure of Warsmith Falk. Though his armour was superficially identical to that worn by Forrix, he was half a head taller, his physique the greatest among the Iron Warriors.

Last to emerge from his flyer was Toramino, master of the Stor-bezashk. Where the other warsmiths favoured the bulky protection of Cataphractii armour, Toramino was clad in a suit of burnished Mark IV Maximus plate. And where his fellow warriors were grimy and coated with a patina of this valley’s omnipresent red dust, Toramino’s armour was polished to a mirror finish, as though freshly unveiled by its creator in the Martian forges. A cloak of black mail cascaded from his shoulders like an oil spill, contrasting with the stark white of his braided hair.

The warsmiths approached their primarch with a degree of caution, for it was said that his humours had become ever more volatile and unforgiving of late. The rumours of how Warsmith Berossus had come by his horrifying injuries were still rife, and Kroeger didn’t envy them their exalted rank.

The warsmiths arranged themselves before the primarch, each dropping to one knee and hammering their right fist into their left palm.

‘From iron cometh strength,’ they said.

Perturabo stood Forgebreaker’s pommel on the broken stone of the ground, leaning forwards to rest his arms on its wide head. The gesture was intended to look relaxed, but Kroeger saw the simmering tension in the primarch’s body, like a taut cable at the very limit of its tensile strength.

Yes, he decided, better a foot soldier than a leader.

Forrix was not fooled by the apparent ease of their primarch. Though it had been many weeks since he had last laid eyes on Perturabo, he saw through the crack in the presented facade to the angry core within. Their lord was not a warrior who dealt with his subordinates with the easy familiarity some of the primarchs were said to enjoy. He glanced over at Harkor, his fellow triarch’s sycophantic features brimming with pride.

The Cadmean Citadel had fallen, and it appeared that Harkor’s Grand Battalion had been the one to finally break the Imperial Fists defences. Harkor’s thoughts would be turning to the honour that must surely accompany such an achievement, but Forrix saw this moment through a different lens.

Since Isstvan, Perturabo had become a giant of terrible rages and spontaneous violence, and Harkor was gambling that this humbling of Dorn’s sons would quench that molten anger. Yet as the silence between primarch and warsmiths stretched, even Harkor’s certainty of approbation began to falter. Only the creak of armour, the sigh of the suddenly quiescent wind, and the metallic rustling of the primarch’s cloak disturbed the emptiness.

‘I was specific in my orders, was I not?’ said Perturabo at last, slipping Forgebreaker back into its shoulder harness.

There could be only one warsmith intended to answer such a question, and Harkor rose to his feet, uncertainty making him an orphan amongst his peers.

‘My lord, I–’ was all he managed before Perturabo’s gauntlet took hold of his gorget and hauled him into the air. Though Harkor was encased in the heaviest battle-plate of the Legiones Astartes, Perturabo lifted him without difficulty until he was face to face with the steel blue of the primarch’s cold gaze.

‘Does Triarch Harkor now command the Iron Warriors?’

‘No, my lord,’ gasped Harkor. ‘You and you alone are master of Olympia’s sons.’

‘I see,’ said Perturabo, as if mulling this over. ‘And is Triarch Harkor aware of this?’

The choking warsmith nodded, his throat too constricted for words. A welded seam separated from the plastron and machined rivets snapped from their housing on the gorget. The power to crush such unbreakable plates was beyond imagining.

‘And yet he thinks to ignore my orders and devise stratagems of his own,’ said Perturabo. ‘An interesting interpretation of the chain of command, don’t you think?’

Harkor drew a breath as Perturabo’s grip loosened a fraction.

‘My lord, I saw an opportunity,’ he said between wheezing gasps. ‘A chance for victory.’

Perturabo nodded, as though he had known this all along, but did not release Harkor or lower him back to the ground.

‘Victory?’

‘The fortress is yours, my lord.’

‘Not through any design of Triarch Harkor,’ snapped Perturabo, turning towards the bloodied warrior standing behind him. Forrix didn’t recognise him, but he had the look of a killer, the kind of bare-knuckle brawler you’d want at your side in the hellstorm of a breach or the close-quarters bloodbath of a boarding action.

Perturabo dropped Harkor, and gestured to the warrior to step forwards.

‘This is Kroeger, and he is all your grand plan saw to the ramparts alive,’ said the primarch, gripping the cratered curves of the warrior’s shoulder guards. ‘The lives of fighting men were wasted while you watched from a gun battery below. I expect more from my warsmiths, Harkor, especially one of the Trident. I expect discipline and loyalty, but most of all I expect an unbending obedience to the orders I have given.’

Forrix awaited the blow that would crush the life from Harkor, the way it had been mashed out of Berossus, but it never came. Instead, Perturabo reached out and took hold of Harkor’s shoulder guard with his left hand. With his right, he ripped the plastron from Harkor’s chest with a single wrenching tear. Sparks, cables and electro-conductive fluids drizzled from the damage. The breastplate clanged to the ground, but Perturabo wasn’t done.

Piece by piece, the primarch tore Harkor’s armour from his body, dropping the sundered plates at his feet like shed skin. Every component was ungently removed until Harkor stood, much reduced, in his torn bodyglove, with ruptured connector tubes and lank ropes of chem-shunts dangling where they had snapped.

‘You are unfit to wear this armour, Harkor,’ said Perturabo. ‘From iron cometh strength. From strength cometh will. From will cometh faith. From faith cometh honour. From honour cometh iron. You have shown that you possess none of these qualities. You are the rust that eats at the metal, a failed cog that must be removed from the body of the machine before its damage spreads.’

‘My lord, please–’ began Harkor, but an icy glare from the primarch withered his tongue.

‘From this moment you are no longer a triarch,’ said Perturabo. ‘Each blade of the Trident needs to be as solid and unbending as the hand that wields it, and you are weak, Harkor.’

Harkor shook his head in mute denial as his world crashed down around him, and Forrix couldn’t help a small smile tugging at the corner of his thin lips. He had never believed Harkor worthy of a place in the Trident, but had wisely kept his opinion to himself.

‘You are stripped of all rank, and are now simply a warrior of the 23rd Grand Battalion,’ said Perturabo. ‘You will stand in the fighting ranks, a battle-brother like any other. Get out of my sight, you are dismissed.’

Harkor blanched at this terrible punishment, and Forrix wondered if he might attack Perturabo in his despair, but it seemed the disgraced triarch lacked even the spine for that final escape from shame. Harkor turned and marched away, a broken man whose every hope and dream of ambition had been crushed forever.

Perturabo returned his attention to his senior warsmiths, each one now smelling the sickly scent of opportunity. With Golg dead at Phall and Harkor disgraced, Forrix felt the strength of Toramino and Falk’s ambition.

‘It seems my Trident is two members short,’ said Perturabo, loosing a breath that looked like it had been held in his lungs for years. And with that exhalation, a burden seemed to lift from the primarch, as though the mordancy that had settled upon him after killing the boarders on the Iron Blood went with it.

Forrix rose to his feet, knowing that their obeisance was done.

‘We are ready to serve,’ said Barban Falk, standing with the rest of the warsmiths.

‘I am your humble servant, my lord,’ added Toramino. ‘Honoured veteran, proud son and trusted warrior.’

Perturabo smiled his mortician’s smile and said, ‘The Phoenician and his army of debauchers will be making planetfall within hours, and I need the Trident at my side when he comes. Forrix, who would you suggest as suitable replacements for your fallen comrades?’

Forrix had been waiting for this, and though there were many warsmiths in the IV Legion, only a very few had the will required to stand alongside the primarch. Dargron had perished in the last violent spasms of Phall and the primarch had despatched Varrek and his Grand Battalion to destinations unknown in the wake of that battle. Both had been groomed to be future triarchs, but Forrix knew what answer was required of him at this moment.

‘Warsmiths Toramino and Falk would make fine warriors of the Trident,’ said Forrix. ‘You wish strength and power at your side, and both possess such qualities in abundance.’

Perturabo nodded as though considering this answer.

‘On any other day I would have agreed with you wholeheartedly, Forrix,’ he said, looking to the sky with a throaty chuckle. ‘But today is not a day like any other.’

Forrix was unsure of the primarch’s meaning, and kept silent as Perturabo stood before Barban Falk and placed his hands upon his head in benediction. Though huge, even by Legiones Astartes standards, Falk was dwarfed by Perturabo’s bulk.

‘Barban Falk, you will become one of my triarchs,’ said Perturabo, and Falk hammered his fist into his palm once again. But if Toramino expected the same honour, his hopes of elevation were dashed by the primarch’s next words.

‘Toramino, you are a fine warsmith, but no one commands the Stor-bezashk like you,’ said Perturabo. ‘I want new blood in the Trident, a fresh voice to shake the dust from our complacency.’

‘My lord?’ said Toramino, his disbelief plain. ‘I do not understand…’

The primarch hauled to his side the bloody warrior who’d fought his way over the walls.

‘Kroeger will take command of the 23rd Grand Battalion,’ said Perturabo. ‘He will be the third blade of my Trident.’

THREE

New Blood
Cavea Ferrum
Sanctum

Perturabo decreed that they descend the mountain on foot, trudging through the broken flesh and burned metal remains of Harkor’s abortive assault. It was an unsubtle message, but the Lord of Iron wasn’t known for his delicate ways. Yet, Forrix reminded himself, a lack of subtlety did not equate to the simplistic. Decades of war spent in blood-filled trenches and shell-stormed breaches had worn the sharper edges of Perturabo’s wit and sophistication blunt, but the alchemically wrought intellect behind the primarch’s sapphire gaze was not to be underestimated.

The primarch marched ahead of them, ringed by the heavy shields of the Iron Circle. His pace was unhurried; he wanted them to see the ruin of Harkor’s Grand Battalion, the thoroughness with which the escalade had been gutted by the Imperial Fists, and the price of disobedience. Compared to Berossus, Harkor had got off lightly. Was that a growing sign that Perturabo had emerged from the deep well of black thoughts that had shrouded him of late?

Forrix walked with Falk and Kroeger, the newest triarch yet to break his stunned silence following his elevation to the Trident. Toramino walked behind them, wreathed in bitter frustration and excluded from their presence by Perturabo’s unexpected promotion of Harkor’s warrior. If Kroeger felt the daggers the humiliated warsmith was plunging into his back with every glance, he was doing an admirable job of ignoring them.

The silent walk downhill hadn’t yet changed Forrix’s opinion of Kroeger; the man’s broken-boned face told him all he needed to know. Kroeger was a dulled weapon, a tool to be wielded by his betters. Had it been an act of wilfulness on Perturabo’s part to make him one of the Trident, or had his talent for recognising raw, malleable potential seen something in Kroeger beyond his brutality? Best to step warily around this one then, until his worth could be gauged.

Pioneer crews passed them on their way uphill, followed by cadres of black-robed tech-priests and their walking, crawling and floating palanquins. Outlandish beyond any sane requirements of function, they were abhorrent monstrous things, bulbous, many-limbed and empowered by uncounted forms of locomotion.

‘Vultures picking upon a corpse,’ said Falk with distaste.

‘The Pneumachina?’ asked Forrix.

‘Is that what they’re calling themselves now?’

‘So I hear,’ said Forrix, watching as a heavy, segmented construction engine moved uphill on tracked cog-wheels with a rippling peristaltic motion. Oil-slathered slaves crawled behind it, their emaciated bodies pierced with metallic ribbons imprinted with black and white lines of variegated thickness. Hooded adepts wearing smoke-belching backpacks that reeked of embalming fluids and curdled lubricants lashed the slaves with barbed flails, reciting nonsense numbers and atonal braying vocalisations.

‘Well, whatever they are now, it’s unseemly to desecrate a place like this.’

‘Desecrate?’ said Forrix with an indulgent chuckle. ‘This isn’t a sacred place, it’s a fortress of stone and steel, walls and bastions. Worse, it’s a ruined one.’

‘For now,’ said Falk. ‘When we’re done with Horus’s rebellion, I’ll return to rebuild it.’

‘It’s your rebellion too, warsmith,’ said Kroeger.

‘What did you say?’ said Falk.

‘I said it’s your rebellion too,’ repeated Kroeger.

Falk’s eyes narrowed, the blackness of his pupils expanding as he tried to read the subtext of Kroeger’s words. Forrix had to give it to Kroeger – voicing a dissenting opinion before a warsmith was a virtually certain route to death, either on the end of a power fist or in a swift reassignment to a forlorn hope.

‘And what did you mean by what you said?’ pressed Falk.

Kroeger frowned, as though confused by the question. Forrix realised it wasn’t that he didn’t understand Falk, simply that there was no guile to his words, only unvarnished truth.

‘The Warmaster’s cause is our cause,’ said Kroeger. ‘We fight as one or we will be defeated.’

Forrix laughed, the sound echoing from the blasted rocks of the mountain. ‘I think I see now why the primarch wanted you in the Trident,’ he said.

‘You do?’ said Falk. ‘Then you’re a better judge of character than me.’

‘Kroeger here is a plain speaker,’ said Forrix. ‘Aren’t you?’

Kroeger shrugged. ‘I speak as I find, warsmith.’

‘There are no ranks within the Trident,’ said Forrix. ‘When we three are assembled, I am simply Forrix. You are simply Kroeger.’

Forrix jerked a thumb at the towering Falk. ‘But he’s still Warsmith Falk. Even to me.’

Kroeger nodded, ignoring Forrix’s attempt to defuse the tension, and said, ‘So am I a warsmith now?’

Forrix hadn’t thought of that. ‘Perturabo gave you Harkor’s Grand Battalion, so, yes, I suppose you are. Congratulations, Warsmith Kroeger.’

From the look on Kroeger’s face, Forrix might as well have handed him a chalice of graving acid and told him to drink every last drop.

‘I never thought to be a warsmith,’ said Kroeger. ‘It’s a rank that doesn’t suit my temperament.’

‘Then your temperament needs to change,’ said Falk.

Looking at the bloody streaks on Kroeger’s armour, Forrix wondered if that were possible.

Smoke fogged the lower reaches of the mountain promontory, propellant haze lying heavy on the metal-decked trench network like the noxious plague mists that attended the aftermath of a viral cleansing. Forrix watched the Stor-bezashk gun crews in reinforced artillery pits scrubbing out the scored barrels of the Thunderstrike artillery pieces, while bulky ogryn-servitors loaded unfired shells onto armoured leviathans for their return to the deep-storage magazines.

He passed slaves captured en route to this world toiling alongside servitors to shore up damaged portions of the circumvallation. With the fall of the citadel such efforts were largely redundant, but the whips of the discipline masters fell just as regularly and just as harshly. They lost Toramino somewhere near the gun batteries, and Forrix could already imagine the bile and venom spilling from his patrician lips.

Their route cut a zigzagging path through the siegeworks, each turn of the trench perfectly calculated to keep the warriors within sheltered from plunging fire. More like deep caissons for some undersea dig than mere trenches, their sides were high and sheathed in shock-resistant plates laced into the very bedrock. Blast-shielded shutters led down to the hardened redoubts that housed the Selucid Thorakite regiments. Natural-born Olympian soldiers who had joined with the Iron Warriors in the genocide of their home world, the Thorakitai were grim-faced men and women in faded khaki, scaled breastplates and helms fashioned in the image of a Mark IV suit. Their equipment was scoured a dull ochre by the omnipresent dust, but the firing mechanisms were protected in cloth wrappings, the focus rings in scratch-resistant foil.

Everyone Forrix saw was kneeling, for word of Perturabo’s coming had raced ahead of them with the speed of a rumour. Whatever industry was afoot in the trench network halted at the sight of Perturabo and his Iron Circle, but the primarch paid his devotees no mind, and the warriors behind him took his lead. Slaves abased themselves in the mud, the Thorakitai stood with rifles held across their chests and Iron Warriors hammered their fists into their palms.

Iron-skull standards and black banners bearing the amber Eye of Horus were unfurled as confirmation of the citadel’s fall spread throughout the surrounding army. Kroeger’s simple words returned to Forrix as he felt a tremor of unease at the sight of Horus Lupercal’s banners raised higher than the Legion standards. Trust was a hard-earned commodity within the Iron Warriors, and Forrix took a moment to wonder how the Warmaster’s commands would differ from those of the Emperor.

The cheering started slowly, for none in Perturabo’s Legion, whether mortal or post-human, were given to overt displays of emotion, but soon the bellowing roars of victory were ringing from one side of the valley to the other. Tales of how the primarch himself and his robot praetorians had ended the siege were already spreading and magnifying the farther they spread. Perturabo ignored the cheers as he ignored the abasement of his followers, marching now with purpose and direction towards his personal bunker complex.

The route to its sunken entrance was circuitous and fraught with peril, threading a tightrope-thin path through coiled banks of layered razorwire, constantly shifting minefields, conversion beam traps, las-nets, graviton crush-pits and melta-lined ditches. Even supplicants approached Perturabo’s inner sanctum as attackers must, and Forrix felt his skin crawl as the targeting optics of dozens of killing weapons tracked him towards the entrance.

Its heavy blast gates eased open on pneumatic hinges, unbreakable adamantium housed in tens of metres of kinetic-absorbent permacrete. Their outer faces were sheathed in beaten gold and silver murals taken from the sundered gates of the Palace of Lochos.

Guilt touched Forrix as he remembered the assault up the Kephalan Hill towards the last refuge of the self-appointed tyrant of Olympia, fighting through fortifications incorporated into the palace by a youthful Perturabo. Defences that would have been virtually impregnable with Iron Warriors defending them were overcome in days, but the cost of that victory had ripped a terrible wound in the Legion’s soul.

One from which it had yet to recover, thought Forrix.

Hard on the heels of that thought came another.

Could they ever recover from the atrocities wrought on Olympia?

The gates opened to the extent of their width, and the gold murals flattened by Perturabo’s assault were swept from sight. Forrix let out his breath, glancing left and right to see if his fellow triarchs were similarly affected by the reminder of their lost home world. Falk and Kroeger were keeping a tight rein on their emotions. Neither had set foot in Perturabo’s inner sanctum before this moment, and both warriors were eager not to let their awe show.

Of the two, Falk was doing the better job. Kroeger’s head craned back as they descended a widening ramp that led into the shadowed depths of the bunker. At the foot of the ramp was a semicircular arch of latticed ironwork, beyond which lay only shadows and the ambient glow of flickering electro-flambeaux.

‘Where are the defences?’ asked Kroeger, unable to keep silent any longer.

‘Defences?’ said Perturabo, finally turning to speak to his warriors. The Iron Circle stood behind him, shields locked together in an unbreakable wall. ‘What defences do I need when I have the Iron Circle and the Trident?’

‘I just expected more,’ said Kroeger. ‘Defence turrets. More guards. Traps.’

Perturabo grunted in amusement. ‘I like you, Kroeger. You are a simple man. You have none of the mistrust and scheming that touches most of the warriors who want to be where you are.’

Forrix wondered if that had been a barb aimed at him, but chose to believe it was directed at warsmiths like Toramino or Varrek, men who sought to rise in prominence and glory for its own sake. Forrix had never sought this position to serve his own ambition, but for the good of his beloved Legion. He was not immodest enough to brag of his skills, but knew there were few in the Iron Warriors who understood the mechanics of war and the logistical necessities of a mobile fighting force as intimately as he did.

‘I don’t know why I’m here,’ said Kroeger. ‘As you said, I’m a brawler.’

‘That is what you were,’ said Perturabo. ‘You are now a warsmith of the Iron Warriors, Kroeger. Start acting like one.’

So chastened, Kroeger pulled himself more erect. Perturabo turned and marched onwards, the Iron Circle parting to allow him into their midst before moving off in perfect lockstep. Forrix and his fellow triarchs followed the booming footsteps of the armoured robots, plunging into the flickering light of the Cavea Ferrum.

‘You wanted to know where the defences are?’ said Forrix as they passed beneath the ironwork archway. ‘This is it.’

Perturabo had designed the labyrinth of the Cavea Ferrum from a set of crumbling plans he had discovered a century and a half ago in the secret compartment of a tribal cremation pit of the Sabellian peoples of Old Earth. Perturabo had recognised the work as that of his beloved Firenzii polymath and instantly encased it in the preserving mechanism of a stasis field. That such a document could have survived the passage of tens of thousands of years was miraculous, but no less miraculous was how Perturabo had known a document so out of time with its final resting place had come to end up there.

Even then, newly reunited with his father, Perturabo had an affinity with earth and stone.

Had that been when the Emperor had chosen to yoke him to a singular purpose?

The walls of the labyrinth were featureless and grey, modularly constructed to be identical and to facilitate its dismantling and storage between warzones. Every surface was utterly devoid of markings that might help any lost souls trapped in its convoluted depths. Though Perturabo denied it, Forrix was certain the routes chosen by any who walked its paths altered in the wake of their passage, such that it would be impossible to retrace any foolish steps that led to dead ends. Even the ensconced flambeaux seemed to burn with the same dancing pattern of flames, the same shadows and the same crackle of electro-chemical reactions.

Perturabo led them deeper and deeper into the labyrinth, taking turn after turn through its featureless walls, sometimes appearing to lead them back to its edges, sometimes winding closer to its secret heart. As he did every time he travelled the Cavea Ferrum, Forrix attempted to map the labyrinth in his mind, but within minutes he was hopelessly knotted in turns that should have been physically impossible and a route that owed nothing to the surety of Euclidian geometries.

‘This doesn’t make sense,’ muttered Falk, and Forrix knew he was encountering the same untenable convolutions in his mental cartography. ‘We’ve been down this passage before, I know we have. But that’s…’

‘Give up before you go mad,’ said Forrix. ‘I’ve tried scores of times to map this place, but I never manage more than a handful of turns before it all stops making sense.’

‘How is it possible?’ asked Falk.

‘The genius of a long dead gentleman of Firenza,’ answered Perturabo, emerging from the unfolding shields of the Iron Circle. ‘A bastard son who changed the world with his works.’

‘He designed this labyrinth for you?’ asked Kroeger.

‘No, his death was tens of thousands of years ago on Terra, supposedly in the arms of his patron king,’ said Perturabo, turning on the spot to regard the blank walls of the impossible labyrinth. ‘After the Emperor first came to Olympia and brought me to Terra, I learned of the Firenzii and searched the ruins of Old Earth for copies of his surviving journals, gathering his hidden papers and learning of the works he pursued in private.’

‘Sounds more like something the Crimson King would be interested in,’ said Falk.

Perturabo nodded, the hint of a smile tugging at the edge of his lips. ‘Magnus and I spent many months together in search of buried secrets. It’s true though, it was the esoteric writings of the world’s former masters that most interested him. He cared more for the ancient philosophies of the lost civilisations than its mechanical wonders, but it was a heady time of exploration for us both.’

Forrix had heard the primarch speak of the dead genius before, and, as before, the retelling ignited a fierce desire to excavate the remains of forgotten civilisations with no thoughts of war, only exploration and the discovery of unknown histories. Forrix had once harboured ambition to dig the soil of Terra in search of the past glories swept away in the chaos of Old Night, but that dream was dead now. Only conquest would take them to Terra, and any digging would be to hack trenches into the earth, raise walls and bring to ruin what they had helped to craft.

‘The Cavea Ferrum was nothing more than an intellectual exercise for the Firenzii, but I saw how it could be turned to defensive purposes, its geometries used to lure an unwary enemy into a foolish assault, trapping them in a way that would allow no escape.’

‘It’s impressive,’ said Kroeger. ‘Are there any others like it?’

‘Yes, there is one other,’ said Perturabo, almost reluctantly.

Forrix hid his surprise. He had not known that Perturabo had crafted another such labyrinth, but in the frenetic aftermath of the massacre of their brother Legions, there was much he did not know of his primarch’s activities.

‘Where is it?’ asked Falk. ‘On Isstvan V?’

‘No, it is not on Isstvan V, it is aboard a gaol-hulk belonging to my Eighth Legion brother,’ said Perturabo. ‘I built him an imitation of this labyrinth in which to have his sport with… a uniquely capable prisoner.’

‘Who?’ asked Forrix.

Perturabo ignored the question and set off into the complexities of the labyrinth once more, tracing a path that was at once nonsensical yet led inexorably towards its secret heart. Forrix kept his eye on the primarch’s back, wondering what manner of individual could possibly warrant the construction of such an elaborate place of captivity.

After a span of time that his armour’s chronometer could not conclusively measure, the quality of light in the tunnels of the labyrinth began to change. The flickering light gave way to the diffuse illumination of candles and Forrix knew they had arrived at their destination. A last turn, and they had reached the centre of the labyrinth.

Forrix had known what to expect, but the others had not, and he savoured the expressions of surprise that spread across their faces as they beheld the primarch’s inner sanctum. ‘Organised chaos’ was how Golg had described it, where Harkor’s term had been ‘shambolic’. Forrix knew better, seeing through the apparent haphazard placement of drawing boards, model-making apparatus, T-squares, stretching frames and reams and reams of rolled manuscripts to the order beneath.

This was no random accretion of scattered detritus that had built up over the centuries, but a precisely ordered collection of genius to rival any work of Magnus or Guilliman. Its dimensions were modest in comparison to the scale and complexity of the surrounding labyrinth, yet the vaulted space was still the equal of a good-sized manufactory. The walls were faced in crumbling stonework that looked to have been brought block by block from some sunken ruin, and rebuilt with painstaking attention to restoring its previous incarnation as faithfully as possible. Murals depicting what might have been great birds were inscribed on one wall, and a flaking mosaic of painted clay covered another in a wide rendering of a group of faded men and women clustered around a central figure whose head was haloed in golden light.

Faded paintings held in shimmering stasis fields hung on the walls, one showing a semi-clothed man in the desert with a lion at his feet, another an unfinished work of a seated woman and her child in the centre of a circle of admirers while a great temple was rebuilt against a backdrop of fighting horsemen.

Heavy tables were strewn throughout the space, each one awash in rolled parchments, set-squares, wooden protractors and measuring rods. The tools of the mathematician and the engineer lay side by side with those of the warrior, the general, the anatomist and the statesman. Immense drawing desks bore architectural plans for grand pavilions, magnificent amphitheatres, complex industrial infrastructures, vast hives of habitation, impregnable citadels and ornate palaces to rival the mountain fastness of the Emperor himself.

Peeter Egon Momus himself had wept at the sight of these drawings and begged Perturabo to allow him to make them a reality. No architect of Terra had ever envisaged structures of such grandeur, and no fantasy of design had thought to render such magical buildings into life. That they had sprung from the hand of the Lord of Iron should have surprised no one, but the idea that a being so mired in destruction was capable of sublime creation seemed beyond comprehension.

Nor was Perturabo’s genius confined to the drawing board, for many of his tables and workbenches were home to hundreds of delicately wrought machines, trinkets and gewgaws of such fine construction that it seemed impossible one so huge had modelled them. A silver lyre in the shape of a horse’s head, gilded eggs, fabulously wrought birdcages that would never again confine a living creature, and miniature war machines competed for space alongside automata of all shapes and description – animal, mechanical, human and alien. A miniature Warhound Titan stood tallest of the automata, and Forrix felt an odd shiver of brooding prescience at the red, black and yellow of its carapace armour.

It was a treasure trove of wonders, miraculous creations and the most ancient history of Old Earth preserved in a hermetically sealed environment. None beyond the warriors of the Trident knew of its existence, and that was just the way Perturabo liked it. After so long spent taking the metal to the stone, better to be thought the simple journeyman than reveal the soul of the craftsman within.

Perturabo sent the Iron Circle to a cleared corner of the chamber and moved through the creative disorder to a bronze-edged hololithic table that was, by its very ordinariness, the most unusual item in the collection. Its surface rippled with light, course vectors, geostationary anchor points and dotted trajectories. They formed a map of the heavens above this world, where a grand fleet of iron awaited Perturabo’s order to break orbit and continue the prosecution of the Warmaster’s campaigns.

This world was a spiteful diversion only, a chance to wreak harm on a Legion whose disdain was harshly earned and well deserved. Rogal Dorn’s boasts of his Imperial Fists’ superiority had brought the metal to the stone here, and the Iron Warriors had taken great relish in humbling his golden Legion.

And in the aftermath of Phall, it was doubly satisfying to kill warriors of the VII Legion.

Perturabo scanned the display, and in the second before it flickered and changed to reveal a completely different world, Forrix saw that the parabolic image contained a great many more ships than they had brought with them. The Iron Warriors vessels were constant and motionless, while these new arrivals moved in dangerous proximity, describing sinuous arcs overhead.

‘The Third Legion are here?’ he asked.

‘They are,’ agreed Perturabo. ‘But knowing my brother it will be many hours before his arrival will be as perfectly choreographed as he wants and he sends word of his coming.’

‘Do we know yet why the Phoenician requested this meeting?’ asked Falk.

‘No,’ replied Perturabo, his curiosity plain. ‘Fulgrim has not yet deigned to reveal his purpose. Though he tells me it is wondrous.’

Forrix narrowed his eyes. ‘Wondrous?’

‘His words.’

‘I guessed as much,’ said Forrix, and Perturabo gave a wry grin.

‘My brother always had a flair for the overdramatic, which only seems to have got worse since we threw in our lot with the Warmaster,’ said Perturabo.

The Lord of Iron counted none of his fellow primarchs as close, but the Phoenician’s adherence to perfection in all things had once provided common ground between the two super-warriors and allowed them to talk as trusted comrades-in-arms if not beloved brothers. What the Emperor’s Children had sought with constant motion towards the attainment of perfection, the Iron Warriors earned with rigid discipline and methodical planning; two divergent paths to the same ultimate goal.

Perturabo brought up a fresh set of system schematics and warp corridor overlays, together with the latest immetereological projections for the emergent storm fronts. A red planet swam into focus, its surface almost entirely englobed by metallic growths like algal blooms of shimmering steel and toxic fumes.

‘Mars?’ asked Falk, leaning his elbows on the edge of the projection table with an ease that told Forrix he should have been brought into the Trident much earlier.

‘It is, Falk, well spotted,’ said Perturabo with a knowing look at Forrix. ‘Horus will need the Martian theatre fully secured before we move against Terra, and I think Fulgrim is here to seek our aid in breaking open the forge temples. If I’m right, then I want us to have a plan in place to achieve that objective.’

‘We don’t have orders of our own?’ said Kroeger. ‘We need to wait for Fulgrim’s painted fools to tell us what to do?’

‘We had our orders,’ said Perturabo, his gravelled tones warning against pursuing any line of inquiry that led to Phall. ‘Now we await new orders from the Warmaster. Until we receive those orders, I will humour Fulgrim and listen to what he has to say.’

Kroeger nodded in understanding and folded his arms, switching his gaze to the red planet’s areography.

Forrix let his eye rest a moment on Kroeger, wondering how long the primarch’s tolerance for his newest triarch’s plain speaking would last. If he didn’t last, there were others who could easily take his place. Putting Kroeger from his thoughts, Forrix switched his gaze to the highlighted quadrangles of the Martian surface: manufactories, forge-temples and fortified industrial hinterlands that yet resisted the Mechanicum forces loyal to the Warmaster.

‘They’ll be tough to break open,’ he said, studying the force disposition list and reading the contours of the fortified landscape surrounding the forges.

‘They will,’ agreed Perturabo. ‘But they’ll have to be taken sooner rather than later. The southern battle-forges of Arcadia and the Noctis Labyrinthus Line are still in enemy hands. If they’re reinforced they could threaten the supply lines from the armouries of Mondus Gamma and Mondus Occulum.’

‘You think the loyalists will try to retake the–’ began Kroeger.

Perturabo’s fist slammed down on the edge of the hololithic table, causing the veils of light representing the topography of Mars to shudder, and Kroeger flinched at the primarch’s violence, unsure as to what insult he had given.

‘Do not speak of “loyalists”,’ warned Perturabo. ‘If we call them loyalists, what does that make us? They are the enemy. In this fight there is no such thing as a loyalist or a traitor, only victor and vanquished. Remember that.’

‘I will, my lord. Apologies,’ said Kroeger.

Perturabo nodded and the tension in his body evaporated. The primarch’s anger was a volatile thing, quick to lash out, but just as quickly checked. The Lord of Iron spread the fingers of his bunched fist and, Kroeger’s error forgotten, outlined the opening moves of a campaign against the Martian forges that was as audacious as it was formidable. No sooner had he begun to describe the investment of the Tharsis uplands around the Noctis Labyrinthus than a vox-warble intruded on his words.

He stabbed the edge of the table with an impatient digit and said, ‘What?’

‘My lord, pardon the intrusion,’ said the bland tones of the Stonewrought, Soltarn Vull Bronn. ‘But the Emperor’s Children are here.’

‘I know,’ snapped Perturabo. ‘I see their ships capering in orbit.’

‘No, my lord,’ said the Stonewrought. ‘I mean they are here. On the planet’s surface. Now.’

Perturabo flinched as though struck, knowing it had been minutes only since the fleet of what had once been known as the 28th Expedition had achieved an orbit capable of launching trans-atmospheric craft.

‘Impossible,’ said Perturabo. ‘Fulgrim would never sanction a landing without hours of preparation. You must be mistaken.’

Even over the hiss and spit of the distorted vox, Forrix could hear Vull Bronn’s wary hesitation at the thought of contradicting the primarch.

‘Over three hundred drop-craft have landed beyond the mouth of the valley, my lord,’ said Vull Bronn at last. ‘They bear the heraldry of the Third Legion, albeit obscured by fresh markings we cannot identify.’

‘Fulgrim is here?’ said Perturabo, as though unwilling to believe his own words.

Forrix realised his gene-father did not know his brother as well as he thought.

What other surprises might the Phoenician have in store?

FOUR

Severed
Carnivalia
Closer than Brothers

A truth that all living things must come to terms with at some point is that their life is finite, that the energy they draw from the universal reservoir will some day be taken back. It was a truth that Apothecary Fabius dismissed as a failure of imagination. Life was motive force like any other: like electricity, like warp-fire, and once absurd notions of morality and right and wrong were removed from the equation, the restoration of that motive force became simply a matter of biological engineering.

His laboratory aboard the Andronius was a place of wonders and revelation, where the secrets of life and death, and the narrow spaces in between, were laid bare by the slice of his blade and exposed to his towering intellect. It was a labyrinthine warren of curving passageways, vaulted vivisectoria of cold iron and hermetically sealed chambers with armourglass portholes that looked into bedlams of grotesquerie.

Life had been made, reshaped and extinguished here. Experiments on living tissue, living beings and the ignoble dead had stocked the lair of Fabius with specimens of human, post-human and alien origin. Scavenging the battlefields of this newborn rebellion with his polished steel blades, he had accumulated an alchemist’s treasure trove of the macabre, the holy and the divine. Progenoids cut from the flesh of the living and the dead of Isstvan V and Prismatica had furnished Fabius with the genetic master-key to seven of the Emperor’s Legions, the code sequences that would form the basis of his ultimate revelation.

The secrets of the Emperor himself.

The cryo-frozen body before him was a distraction, but a necessary one. Its form was brutish and clumsy, but it was one Fabius had worked upon before, rewiring its synaptic receptors to create a cacophonous burst of pleasure in the subject’s mind at the merest hint of pain. The internal workings of the body were subtle and would have made a Biologis of the Mechanicum weep with a mix of admiration and horror.

Icy mists filled the surgical chamber, every last trace of warmth sucked from the space by powerful refrigeration units that chugged and growled beneath the metal flooring.

His custom-designed Chirurgeon array squatted at his shoulders like an eager observer, its grotesquely articulated arms darting around him with a mind of their own, suturing an oozing blood vessel or cauterising an open vein. Its clicking digits were more dexterous than his own hands, but there was a satisfaction in feeling the soft wet texture of an opened body beneath the haptic fingertips of his gauntlets.

Fabius wore armour contoured to his lean form, enhanced at the waist and shoulders to better support the Chirurgeon, with additional joints and custom-fabricated gauntlets that incorporated numerous tools of excruciation and healing. A long cloak of pale white hung from his shoulders, stained red with blood at its trailing edge.

Lank hair, bleached of colour and life, hung in matted ropes from his scalp, and eyes of utter blackness glittered in a face made gaunt by malnutrition and abstinence. A rasping tongue licked along Fabius’s lipless mouth, like a lizard tasting the air.

‘Are you not finished yet?’ said a voice from the far side of the laboratory, but Fabius did not turn from his work. ‘The Legion will be assembling for the drop to the planet’s surface.’

‘They have already left,’ said Fabius. ‘The Phoenician and his flawless host will soon be guests of the Lord of Iron.’

‘I should be with them! You promised I would be with them!’

Fabius shrugged. ‘More pressing matters arose,’ he said. ‘Be glad I attend to you at all. Had the decision been mine, I would have left you to die.’

‘I did die.’

Fabius waved away the semantics. ‘Life, death. Words. Life is a purely mechanistic process, the body a machine that can be restarted when the motive force behind it fails.’

‘Easy for you to say, Apothecary, you’re not the one that’s dead.’

‘And neither are you, though if you persist in distracting me, I may oblige you.’

‘The primarch would kill you.’

‘Oh, ironic fate that we should both perish by the same blade…’ laughed Fabius.

The voice fell silent, which surprised Fabius, but it gave him a chance to continue his work in peace. The cut was a clean one, the blow struck with enough force and by a sharp enough blade that there was virtually no tissue damage beyond the exact point of impact. It was a killing blow of perfect precision, one that only a primarch was capable of delivering.

‘What is taking so long anyway?’ said the voice, and Fabius ground his teeth at the tonal implications of his tardiness. ‘You are supposed to be the best, or was that another of your hollow boasts?’

Fabius bit back a caustic response and resisted the urge to wreak some spiteful harm on the body before him. Instead, he said, ‘The nerve clusters at the base of the neck have been severed completely, and, trust me, the consequences of them being reconnected wrongly would not be pleasant.’

‘I can live with pain.’

‘And you will,’ promised Fabius. ‘The greatest of pain. You will know pain like no other, and it will drive you mad with joy. Every instant of life I give you will be spent in a symphony of pain and pleasure. You will hate me and worship me in equal measure, I think.’

‘You should know that I have always hated you, Fabius.’

Fabius turned to address the speaker and grinned, the expression like that of a lecherous skull taking great pleasure in knowing that the living would soon be its kin.

‘You waste your hate on me,’ said Fabius. ‘I do not take enough notice of your existence for it to be anything other than an irrelevance. Loftier matters demand my attention, not this patchwork abomination of flesh.’

‘I think I will kill you some day.’

‘You will not,’ said Fabius.

‘You are arrogant.’

‘And you are a fool. Think of all the sensation that might yet be yours, the cravings of flesh and blood yet to be satisfied. Imagine the glories you will forgo by antagonising me and causing me to kill you.’

‘The primarch himself ordered you to restore me,’ said the voice, almost pleading.

‘A moment of misplaced remorse,’ said Fabius, bending back to his task as the Chirurgeon clicked impatiently. ‘One he probably already regrets. No, my friend, be assured that if you die down here you will not be missed. Already your fellow captains jostle and scheme to assume your mantle…’

‘I will return stronger and more powerful than ever before!’

‘That you will,’ agreed Fabius, turning back to the voice. ‘Now be silent and let me work.’

On the far side of the shadowed laboratory, a severed head sat atop a crown of surgical spikes, tube feeds, blood pumps, electro-cortical stimulators and coolant coils that kept the brain within from death.

Head and body belonged together, but had been shorn by a single blow from Fulgrim’s golden-bladed sword.

The severed head watched Fabius at work on his dead body and plotted on the many ways he wanted him to suffer.

Somewhere around the hardpan of the Emperor’s Children dropsite three kilometres beyond the valley mouth, a riot had collided with a triumphal parade. That could be the only possible explanation for the gaudy cavalcade of noise, colour and spectacle that processed into the valley. Ten thousand mortals provided a vanguard for the III Legion, a frantic host of screaming men and women, swirling banners and discordant noise blasting from instruments that bore no relation to anything crafted by a sane musician.

Blooms of coloured and perfumed smoke wafted ahead of the host, fanned by glassy-eyed ogryns whose contoured body-armour had been hammered to their flesh by barbed spikes. Forrix watched with a mixture of anger and horror at the sight of the approaching rabble, a decadent celebration of every perversity and degradation known to man.

The senior officers of the Iron Warriors had assembled at the towering barbican of the southern contravallation to greet the Phoenician and his Lord Commanders, and this was how they were met? With carnivalia and lunacy? Forrix glanced towards Perturabo for some sign of how this insulting display had skewed his humours, but the primarch’s visage was as impermeable as the hardest rock, as expressionless as the mechanical warriors of the Iron Circle arranged in an arc behind him. Forrix stood at the right hand of Perturabo, his heavy plate gleaming despite the meagre time that his armoury serfs had had to prepare him. Barely had Vull Bronn given his warning of the III Legion’s arrival than the primarch had led them from the Cavea Ferrum and summoned his Legion. A hundred and two Land Raiders chevroned in gold and jet growled at their backs, alongside heavy artillery pieces with their elongated bronze barrels raised to the heavens in salute. Ranks of smaller crew-served weapons were arrayed in honour of this meeting of demigods, their gunners resplendent in the bronze cloaks of the Stor-bezashk.

In the shadow of the monolithic walls, battalions of the Thorakitai stood ranked in their tens of thousands, shuffling and jostling as their discipline master’s electro-goads whipped them into formation. Before them stood two hundred Grand Battalions of Iron Warriors, fifty thousand warriors in amberdust-burnished warplate, like the ranked-up statues of a heathen king afraid to meet the souls his armies had consigned to the afterlife.

Such a display of might and magnificence had not been seen since the slaughter unleashed upon the black sands of Isstvan. It was a host to conquer the stars and remake the galaxy, the likes of which would one day shake the very foundations of the Imperial Palace on Terra.

And this was but one of the Warmaster’s armies.

The Stonewrought stood beside Forrix, and he took a moment to admire the iron-bladed entrenching tool slung across the warrior’s back. As much a weapon as a tool for breaking ground, it was a masterfully crafted implement. The edge was hard and given a subtle bevel that would bite earth and flesh with the greatest of ease.

Soltarn Vull Bronn was a shaven-headed lieutenant of the 45th Grand Battalion, with thin eyes and skin that was pale in the face, leather-brown at the neck from staring so long at the ground. Forrix had watched Vull Bronn lay his hands upon the rock of a dozen planets and, through some unknowable geological communion, learn its secret vulnerabilities, its strengths and its weaknesses. Where it would most readily break open and where it would resist every pick, drill and explosive.

The skin of a world spoke to him, and that alone was worth the price of his dull company.

Barban Falk, towering and absurdly solid, stood at Perturabo’s left hand. Only a head shorter than the Lord of Iron, he was nevertheless made small by the primarch, who imprinted his presence on the face of the world like a statement.

The Legion’s newest triarch took his place at Falk’s side, his armour still battered from the assault over the walls of the citadel. The ceramite of Kroeger’s plate had been cleaned of blood, and the unsullied suit made him look somehow less than Forrix knew he could be.

Toramino stood behind Forrix, and the master of the Stor-bezashk made no attempt to hide his disdain for Kroeger and the rank to which he had been elevated. As much as Forrix enjoyed Toramino’s displeasure, he had a nagging suspicion that this insult to the warsmith’s pride would not be forgotten or forgiven.

Behind the primarch stood the mighty form of Berossus, restored to the Iron Warriors through the genius of the Techmarine at his side. The iron and adamantium sarcophagus at the heart of his Dreadnought body was a funerary casket of machine-stamped skulls and exhumed bones, the siege hammer and rotary cannon his instruments of death. Oil drizzled from his armoured flanks and his augmitters growled with low-level static burrs like grinding metal. Twin lengths of chain hung from Berossus’s back, and fettered at their ends were two bloodied figures, one encased in a full-body splint cage, the other clad in the fragmented remains of the dusty gold armour of the Imperial Fists.

The forward elements of the capering host were drawing near, and coils of hallucinogenic fog writhed between the legs of the riotous assembly. It moved with a life of its own, eager to explore its creators’ bodies and taste their sweat, their breath and their dirt. The screams that reached to the skies were delirious and joyous, agonised and ecstatic, a braying wall of sound that echoed from the sides of the valley like the ravings of a million madmen.

Scarifier priests spun and leapt throughout the dancing horde, their hooked chains and envenomed blades whipping and stabbing with gleeful abandon to cause pain and excruciation. Where their poisoned tips pierced an artery, the grateful victim would be seized by mad choreomaniacal fits. Roaring observers aped their lethal convulsions and the dancing mania spread ever wider, becoming more and more elaborate until the original victim’s madly pumping heart emptied their body of blood and a new dance began elsewhere.

Mass psychogenic hysteria gripped the thousands of men and women, who screamed and laughed and cried like mourners or celebrants. They fought, they fornicated; moving to the rapid, pulsing beat of a driving imperative that none among the Iron Warriors could know. They carried towering banners, streaming gonfalons and serrated pennants ablaze with imagery that was at once obscene and alluring, repugnant and inviting.

Forrix recognised none of the heraldry, feeling a gut-deep revulsion at the graceful sweeps of the symbols worked into the textured banners; a meld of curves and voluptuous arcs penetrated by hard lines with barbed arrowheads atop their length. Nor were all the members of the host equal; kings and queens and princes were feted in all their finery; silks and steel, velvet and leather. Their crowns were bone, their orbs the skulls of willing sacrifices, and the sceptres made from the woven fingers of the handless handmaidens attending them.

And just as there were the gaudy courts of royal madness, so too were there regicides by the dozen as pretenders tore them down and took their bloodied crowns for themselves.

As degenerate as the dancing host’s behaviour was, it was nothing compared to the physical malformations wrought on the flesh of its number. Some disfigurements appeared to be congenital, others the work of swords or maces in ritualised combat, but the vast majority appeared to have been engineered by scalpels, bone saws and genetic modification.

Men with anatomies reversed by horrific surgery capered on their hands, with legs sutured to their shoulders and faces in their bellies. Vat-grown cherub-grubs led packs of wild, spine-backed creatures, like the bastard by-blows of loathsome centipedes and giant scorpions. Women cavorted naked with scented oils slathering their bared breasts. Many were gifted with breasts beyond the number decreed by nature, and these violet-hued individuals were attended by howling slaves and weeping devotees.

Amid the heaving, spasming march of the decadent host, some were content to dance, some to debase, others to violate, yet more to scream their throats bloody as they drove their bodies to lunatic extremes of excess. They howled with the hybrid monsters and the most desperate for sensation set themselves ablaze and laughed as the flames consumed them.

Forrix took his helmet from the mag-lock on his thigh as the rapturous mass of degenerates drew near and the acrid tang of perfumes began to discomfit him.

‘I saw some strange things on Isstvan,’ began Forrix, ‘but this is…’

He snapped his helm into the gorget seals as vocabulary failed him. No mere words could give name or reason to this behaviour, no codes of honour could reconcile this madness with the militaristic perfection and arrogant swagger the Emperor’s Children had once possessed.

‘What has happened to you, my brother?’ said Perturabo, his face betraying no hint of the terrible anger that was raging within his heart.

‘Where are the Legion warriors?’ asked Falk.

Forrix scanned the heaving mass of frenetic humanity as they spilled over the outermost earthworks; cavorting through razorwire-edged killing grounds, across spiked ditches and past iron-faced gun emplacements. What would take months of bloody siege to break through was overcome in moments by the vanguard of the Emperor’s Children.

At some unheard signal, the host fell utterly silent, halting in its maddened march a stone’s throw from the Iron Warriors. Clouds of kicked-up dust mingled with the twitching curtain of narcotic smoke issuing from hidden censers. After so cacophonous a din, the silence felt impossibly loud, and Forrix scanned the sweating, breathless host for some sign of what was coming next.

That sign came as the lunatics abased themselves on the sand, prostrating themselves as supplicant savages before burning flora. Soltarn Vull Bronn dropped to one knee, placing his palm on the earth.

‘Get up, damn you,’ snapped Forrix. ‘Iron Warriors bend the knee to no one.’

Vull Bronn ignored him and cocked his head to one side, as though listening to a voice only he could hear.

‘He’s here,’ said Vull Bronn. ‘The Phoenician. He’s coming.’

Forrix looked up as the flesh host before him parted, pushing themselves back with their bellies scraping the sand to make a wide corridor between them. Through the swirls of pink and mauve clouds, Forrix could see the outline of something huge and swaying approaching. Vague silhouettes of power-armoured warriors marched alongside it, their forms granting some hope that the III Legion had not abandoned all pretence of being a fighting force.

Five hundred warriors in the shimmering purple of the Emperor’s Children emerged from the smoke, and their appearance drew a gasp of shock from the assembled Iron Warriors. Slashes of vivid pigment were spattered over their armour, the myriad contrasting hues and clashing colours offending the eye with their garish disregard for the Legion’s heraldry. Jagged spikes jutted from pauldrons and their helmets were byzantine winged affairs, with amplification hoods and intensifiers worked into the visors.

They carried a banner of stiff pink that Forrix could tell was fashioned from human skin, its texture and stench all too familiar to him. A runic device was emblazoned at its heart, the recurring motif he had seen worked in various designs upon the armour and flesh of the maddened horde, but distilled into its purest form. Borne by Legion warriors, the symbol offended Forrix less than it had before, and he found himself drawn towards its beguiling curves and graceful loops.

But then anger touched him, and he threw off whatever glamours were worked into its shape.

Glamours?

Where had that come from? A word of ancient usage that was meaningless in this age of reason and technological certitude. Whatever toxin burned in the censers was a powerful psychotropic indeed if it could drag such an archaic term from the mind of an Iron Warrior.

Like the mortals before them, these warriors parted to form an honour guard, and behind them came a screaming, wailing mass of legionaries whose weapons were unlike anything Forrix had ever seen in a battle-barge’s armoury. Like oversized axes, they were fitted with all manner of amplification devices, tonal distorters and artefacts whose function Forrix could not even begin to guess.

Thrumming bass notes of raw kinetic force throbbed in their long necks, and he wondered if such weapons might be employed in the reduction of a fortress wall. These warriors went without helms, and their faces were a horror of distended jaws with eternally screaming mouths and gaping wounds in the skull where their ears had been surgically adapted to collect and render sound into its purest elements.

Amid the deformations, Forrix thought he saw a face he recognised: Marius Vairosean, his old comrade from the earliest days of the Great Crusade. But this twisted freak was a pale shadow of that honourable warrior, a waxwork left out in the sun too long, a noble statue beaten with hammers. Forrix took a step towards the warrior, but a taut shake of the head from Perturabo pinned him to the spot.

And then the primarch of the Emperor’s Children stood revealed, his entrance as dramatic and sudden and shocking as he had no doubt intended.

Atop a great palanquin of living beings fused, sewn and warped together, the Phoenician emerged from the sentient clouds of fumes. A squad of warriors in Terminator armour bore this flesh palanquin on their shoulders, the spikes and sharpened edges of their pauldrons drawing blood and screams of pleasure in equal measure.

Fulgrim’s frost-white hair spilled from beneath a helm of dazzling silver, and his entire body was wrapped in a cloak of shocking purple and golden feathers. Motion rippled beneath the cloak, like a metamorphic larva on the verge of hatching into the most beautiful creature imaginable. Fulgrim waited until his Phoenix Guard halted before throwing open his cloak to reveal his sculpturally perfect body. His elegantly curved pectorals, rolling deltoids and ridged abdominals were bare of armour and gleamed with fragrant oils. His limbs writhed with fresh tattoos of coiling serpents; tattoos that even now began to fade as his superhuman biology undid the damage to his epidermis.

Perturabo stepped towards the living platform as Fulgrim descended on a ramp of shields held out by his warriors. Forrix saw a warrior in perfect balance, who understood his body and its articulation to the highest degree. His every step was carefully placed, giving the lie to his flamboyant appearance.

‘Brother Fulgrim,’ said Perturabo, his voice as calm as the instant before the first impact of a breaching shell. ‘Allow me to present a gift to you.’

With pounding strides, Berossus approached the smirking Phoenician, who seemed amused by the stiff formality Perturabo insisted upon. The Dreadnought dragged the two Imperial Fists captives forwards, their bodies twisted in the chains and fettered in razorwire. At a nod from Fulgrim, a pair of purple-clad warriors with golden halberds stepped forwards and swept their blades through the chains. They dragged Perturabo’s gifts away as Fulgrim turned to receive a lacquered ebony case, such as might be used to contain charnabal sabres in a bygone age.

He held it out to Perturabo with a flourish.

‘And a gift to you too, brother dearest,’ said Fulgrim.

Forrix felt a twinge of unease as Perturabo took the case and opened its hinged lid. Inside lay a folded cloak of softest ermine, trimmed with foxbat fur and embroidered with an endlessly repeating pattern of spirals in the golden proportion. A flattened skull of chromed steel acted as the fastener. Set in the skull’s forehead was a gemstone the size of a fist, black and veined with hair-fine threads of gold. Both were exquisite and worthy gifts for a primarch.

Perturabo swept the cloak around himself and snapped the skull fastener around his neck. Fulgrim smiled to see his gift was appreciated, and lifted his gaze to the red rocks and barren landscape around him.

‘This is a grubby little rock you have chosen for our meeting,’ he said.

‘I had my reasons,’ said Perturabo. ‘Welcome to Hydra Cordatus.’

‘What is the meaning of this?’ demanded Perturabo, once they had returned to the heart of the Cavea Ferrum.

‘Meaning?’ said Fulgrim, examining the portraits on the crumbling stone walls with the detached fascination of a connoisseur of the fine arts. ‘Whoever said there had to be meaning in anything?’

‘You know of what I speak,’ said Perturabo. ‘That host beyond my walls.’

‘Don’t you approve of the company I keep?’ said Fulgrim, his tone playful.

‘That host of degenerates is beneath you,’ said Perturabo, gesturing to the violations of flesh, armour and decency wrought upon his brother’s companions. ‘And your legionaries? What has become of them?’

‘Exquisite, are they not?’ said Fulgrim.

Accompanied by three warriors as outlandish and varied as any Forrix might imagine, Fulgrim had swept into the heart of the Iron Warriors fortifications as though every gun and every warrior was his to command, every towering siegework and soaring wall had been raised by his own hand. All but one were armoured and clearly Legion warriors, albeit transformed beyond all recognition.

One, a lean, hawk-eyed swordsman with an arrogant swagger and a complex pattern of interlaced scars marring his perfect visage, another a bulky warrior whose virtually fleshless face was burn-scarred beyond all recognition and who wore armour swathed in a patchwork of stretched skin on spikes. Another’s skull had been surgically disfigured so that his mouth stretched impossibly wide, with taut sinews and implanted bone augmentation swelling in and out at his neck at the slightest sound. This was who Forrix had thought was Marius Vairosean, but surely this monster could not be his old comrade-in-arms…?

A fourth figure came too, this one without armour and clearly not of post-human stock. His frame was slender and he was possessed of a strange otherness in his movements that unsettled Forrix greatly. The others of the Trident had seen it too, even Kroeger, but whatever lay beneath this individual’s shadowed hood was clearly a secret the Phoenician chose not to reveal just yet.

Perturabo shook his head. ‘I know things have changed since we gave our oaths to Horus, that… secrets have been revealed to you, but this is unseemly.’

Fulgrim grinned, exposing brilliant white teeth that shone like polished ivory.

‘Secrets revealed?’ giggled the Phoenician, pacing a slow circuit of the vaulted chamber. His cloak brushed the flagstones and the seductive musk of the oils worked into his flesh saturated the underground space with scents of unknown worlds, secret desires and promises of pleasures and pains undreamed. Forrix kept his breaths short, but it was impossible not to taste the acrid flavour of the oils.

‘Oh, my brother, you have no idea of the things I know now,’ said Fulgrim with a bark of laughter that expressed pain as much as amusement. ‘Much I will share with you in time, and much is there that will bring us closer than ever.’

‘Closer?’ said Perturabo. ‘I wasn’t aware we were close at all.’

‘Perhaps not,’ admitted Fulgrim with a hurt pout. ‘And that saddens me. Do we not share a gene-father, did we not both spring from the loins of the same heroic god?’

‘No, we didn’t. We were created in a laboratory,’ said Perturabo. ‘And he is no god.’

‘Always so literal,’ sighed Fulgrim, moving from the paintings to the architectural drawings laid out on the wide plotting table. ‘But the point remains. We are brothers, and we should be close, especially now when all we have known is falling apart, ready to be rebuilt in a glorious new image. It is my fondest hope that the shared hardships of this joint venture will bring us the intimate bond I share with Guilliman.’

‘You aren’t close to Guilliman either,’ pointed out Perturabo.

‘No?’ said Fulgrim, looking up as though puzzled by his own words. ‘Ah, perhaps not yet, but I will finish what Lorgar’s zealots have begun.’

‘Not now. Not ever,’ said Perturabo. ‘Guilliman will never forgive us what we have done.’

‘Because there is nothing to forgive!’ snapped Fulgrim. The Phoenician’s mask of anger melted away in an instant, and he smiled. ‘Forgiveness is only required by those who pay heed to mortal laws, and we are so very far beyond that, brother. What I am proposing will lift us to a realm where we make the laws all things must obey.’

‘And what are you proposing?’

‘All will be revealed,’ teased Fulgrim. ‘For now let us say it will be a more profitable use of the Fourth Legion’s time than crushing a few rag-tag Imperial Fists on some backwater world for the sake of revenge.’

‘Humbling Dorn’s warriors is no waste of time,’ said Perturabo.

‘Well, quite,’ said Fulgrim, his delicate fingers flipping through the wax paper drawings with the occasional nod of appreciation. ‘These designs are wonderful. Tell me, have you built any of them?’

‘Only one,’ said Perturabo, placing a hand in the centre of the plans.

‘Yes, of course, the amphitheatre at Nikaea,’ said Fulgrim with sudden recollection that was entirely feigned. ‘An arena for Magnus to be thrown to the wolves.’

Fulgrim laughed at his jest and said, ‘Such a shame it was destroyed. The potential of something wondrous is only realised when it is embraced and let fly. You draw them, but never build them. Why is that?’

Perturabo met his brother’s gaze and said, ‘Because reality never matches our dreams.’

Fulgrim nodded in understanding. ‘So often that is the way. Too often when fantasies are made flesh they disappoint and must be dreamed anew. But what would you say if I told you I could make it so that your every desire could be made real and would never disappoint, never fail to live up to your fondest expectation, and never, ever be eclipsed?’

‘I’d say that you’ve gone more insane than you look.’

Again, Forrix saw the venomous hostility beneath Fulgrim’s artful smile, like spineless cowards who know the only way to get what they want is to play nice. Just as quickly as it arose, Fulgrim’s toxic anger was masked. Forrix couldn’t believe Perturabo hadn’t seen it.

‘It’s true,’ said Fulgrim at last.

‘How?’

‘All in good time, brother,’ said Fulgrim. ‘Have patience, and we shall tell you everything you desire to know.’

‘We?’ asked Perturabo, cutting to the most important word.

‘Yes,’ said Fulgrim, drawing the slender, cloaked figure to his side. ‘Karuchi Vohra is the teller of this tale, aren’t you?’

Fulgrim’s companion pulled back his hood, and Forrix understood the source of his earlier unease as finely boned features, full lips, cerulean hair and amber-flecked eyes were revealed.

Karuchi Vohra was eldar.

FIVE

A Poisonous Serpent
Thaliakron
Watchers in the Wings

A moment of stunned silence stretched. Broke. All that was left was reaction. Kroeger was the first to move, launching himself at the willowy form of the eldar with hand outstretched to its slender, easily broken neck. He snatched for a sword that wasn’t there, and reached out to wrap his killing grip around the eldar’s throat.

But as fast as Kroeger moved, another being moved quicker.

Too quick to follow, a phantom beat of purple and gold.

And Kroeger was pinned to the plotting table in a flock of scattered drawings and billowing paper. A bare arm of marble-white flesh held him down like a pile-driver forcing its way into hard earth, and the warrior with the web of scars criss-crossing his face leaned down so that his once-beautiful features, haunting eyes and full lips were less than a finger breadth from Kroeger’s.

‘Karuchi Vohra’s life isn’t yours to take,’ said the swordsman.

Kroeger thrashed against the warrior’s grip, furious at the touch as much as his failure to kill the eldar.

‘Take that hand away before I take it from you,’ growled Kroeger.

‘With what?’ asked the swordsman, indicating the empty scabbards at his shoulders. ‘None of us have blades here, or were you planning to bite it off?’

‘Enough, Lucius, this is not the time,’ said Fulgrim, though his tone was eager, almost daring his man to take this further.

‘I’d release him, but I see a killer’s rage in his eyes,’ said Lucius.

Fulgrim turned to Perturabo and said, ‘If Lucius releases your man, will it be the start of something bloody?’

Perturabo didn’t answer the Phoenician and took a step towards Lucius, touching him in the centre of the chest.

It appeared to be nothing more than a light push, an indication that Fulgrim’s warrior should withdraw, but Lucius was hurled back as through struck by a siege hammer. The swordsman slammed into an arched buttress and fell to the ground in a clatter of plate and splintered stone. Lucius rolled onto his back, struggling to breathe, his lungs battered empty and his organs reeling from the force of the impact.

‘Touch one of my warriors again and next time I won’t be so gentle,’ said Perturabo.

Fulgrim laughed and clapped his hands.

‘Wonderful, brother,’ grinned Fulgrim. ‘A perfect application of force.’

Kroeger rolled upright, ready to finish what Perturabo had started, but the primarch’s hand on his shoulder kept him immobile. Again, the gesture was apparently casual, but Kroeger felt the implacable strength behind it, and his killing rage only reluctantly diminished from furious anger to simmering hate. Across the chamber, Lucius climbed to his feet and returned the compliment, but the tiniest shake of Fulgrim’s head dissuaded him from further violence. The swordsman grinned and rolled his shoulders as through preparing for a bout.

‘Let me kill him, my lord,’ said Barban Falk, his monstrous gauntlets curling into fists.

‘No, he’s mine,’ snapped Kroeger.

‘One at a time, or both together,’ said Lucius. ‘It’s all the same to me.’

Perturabo ignored their posturing and fixed Fulgrim with the ice-chips of his eyes.

‘You bring a xeno-breed into my fastness? What were you thinking, brother?’

Fulgrim looked surprised and drew the eldar to his side. ‘You always were too puritanical in your hatred of our galactic neighbours, Perturabo. Trust me, Karuchi Vohra’s people are no threat to us. Their empire is dead and gone, and its people are faded ghosts clinging to the edges of existence with bloodied fingernails.’

‘You hold a poisonous serpent by the tail, brother,’ warned Perturabo. ‘We’ve fought his kind before and they are treacherous. They’re small and frail, but don’t make the mistake of underestimating them.’

‘I too have fought them. The very best of them,’ said Fulgrim, his eyes alight at the memory. ‘I crushed the life from one of their gods and know there is nothing to fear from the scraps of their pitiful remnants. No, Karuchi Vohra is no threat to us, for he is a new breed of eldar, one who recognises the new order arising in the galaxy.’

‘What does that mean?’ asked Perturabo, his suspicion evident.

‘It means that I know true power when I see it,’ said Vohra, his voice like warm woodsmoke, and just as hard to pin down. ‘Your Warmaster will be victorious, and I do not wish to be counted among his enemies when he sits upon the throne of Terra as master of the galaxy.’

‘Do not speak to me, creature,’ Perturabo warned him. ‘I have lost sons to your kind, and I’d just as soon let Falk and Kroeger finish you.’

Fulgrim stepped between the craven eldar and Perturabo, placing a slender hand upon his arm. Kroeger’s hackles rose at the easy familiarity, the touch fundamentally unwarranted and unwelcome. The Phoenician was a primarch, a demigod worthy of devotion, but some ill-defined quality within him made him repugnant to Kroeger’s eyes. Where others beheld beauty, he saw corruption and decadence. Where his soft words were a balm to the soul for some, they were mocking insults that pricked at his urge to do violence.

‘Brother, we should not be in discord,’ said Fulgrim, his tones low and soft. ‘I come to you with an offer to unite our forces in battle on a glorious quest. One that might tip the balance of the Warmaster’s rebellion.’

Kroeger was reminded of his words to Falk on the way down the mountain, and his anger’s sharp edges were made more intense by the surge of bittersweet perfumes anointing Fulgrim’s skin. Like the lingering traces of a chemical bombardment, years after the last bomb had fallen, the alluring musks worn by the Emperor’s Children seeped into the very walls and floor. If the sickly odour was intended to reduce the tension it was failing miserably. It was mere palliative, for the underlying causes of that tension remained.

‘Tip the balance how?’ asked Perturabo.

‘Always direct,’ answered Fulgrim. ‘One of the traits I always admired about you.’

‘One you would do well to emulate,’ said Perturabo. ‘Now tell me why you have come here and what you wish of my Legion.’

Fulgrim shook his head and cast his gaze around the shadowed interior of Perturabo’s sanctum, with its ingenious trinkets, faded works of art and memories of a forgotten genius.

His brow wrinkled in distaste. ‘No, not here,’ he said, drawing one of Perturabo’s designs from the pile of architectural artwork and holding it out before him – a magnificent playhouse of the grandest proportions, with towering porticos and triumphal stairs, a fitting stage where the greatest operas and theatrical works could be played to thousands.

‘This is a tale that needs to be told somewhere with more, what’s the word? Drama! Yes, more drama, don’t you think? Build me this grand replacement for La Fenice and I will tell you everything.’

‘Build you an entire theatre just for one story?’

‘Of course,’ said Fulgrim. ‘With your construction engines, it shouldn’t take you more than a day or so. Build it for me, and I shall tell you of the Angel Exterminatus.’

In deference to the myth-cycles of his adopted home world, Perturabo had named his grand theatre the Thaliakron, which meant ‘The Dwelling of Thalia’ in the Lochosian tongue. Thalia was a deity of ancient Olympia that legends told had fired the imaginations of fools, poets and writers with poetic verse and a love of strong wine. Though open belief in Thalia had long since been put aside, lavish banquets were still held on her sacred days in the ruins of her cliffside theatre-temples; proof that mankind was ever ready to pay lip service to false gods if it provided the opportunity to revel and feast.

Her theatres had tended towards the small, for even in Olympia’s heyday, pleasures had been few and far between under the iron rule of the mountain tyrants. Perturabo had seen a chance to rectify that and conceived of a towering palace of drama, comedy, love and heroism, of murder and intrigue and endings both joyous and tragic.

One of his early designs, yet no less magnificent for that, its structure was arranged in the form of an elliptical amphitheatre, carved into an imagined excavation the depth of a sizeable meteor impact. No such location existed on Hydra Cordatus, and so the titanic earth-moving machines of the IV Legion were set to work in creating one. Soltarn Vull Bronn had identified the place most likely to split apart in the desired fashion, and Toramino’s Stor-bezashk crafted earth-breaching charges to empty a vast bowl of rock.

Concentric rings of charges shook the world, and kilometres-wide plumes of fire blasted skywards, ejecting millions of tonnes of atomised debris into space. Even as the tsunami of dust spread over hundreds of kilometres and cascades of falling rubble rained down in a precisely directed fashion, Perturabo’s earth-moving machines were moving in.

Behind a screen of dust-laden clouds and unnatural thunderheads that would persist for decades and radically alter the local micro-climate, work began on the Thaliakron. It was a titanic endeavour, one that in ages past would have required the lifespans of a dozen mortal architects and master masons.

With Perturabo and Forrix at the head of an army of labourers, craftsmen and Pneumachina engines, this work was projected to last no more than two days. The Iron Warriors bent their backs to the task also, for each was a craftsman as well as a warrior, as schooled in the arts of structural mechanics as they were in close order drill. Battle-brothers as journeymen, sergeants as artisans, officers as artificers and warsmiths as grand architects.

Perturabo knew every aspect of this building’s construction, from the exact courses required for its supporting underworks to the precise dimension of the goddess statues on its uppermost architraves. No facet of its construction was unknown to him, and as the lower levels of the structure took shape with the rapidity of a time-lapse pict, a long-absent animation overcame Perturabo.

This was the first time one of his creations – his follies, Dammekos had called them – had been made real for the purpose for which it had been designed. The Nikaean structure, thankfully now eradicated from existence, still caused him great shame. It had never been intended as a place of trial and censure, but an arena for mighty games of strength and skill. The use the Emperor had made of his creation shamed Perturabo, and Magnus deserved better than to be made sport for the baying crowds whose closed minds had already placed the noose around his neck.

Forrix excelled himself, bringing his formidable talents for organisation and logistics to bear in raising the Thaliakron, manipulating a thousand tasks at once and ensuring that no stage of the construction was delayed by a previous element remaining incomplete. In peace, Forrix was a superlative overseer, in war a relentless foe who knew that wars were won, not with foolish courage and misplaced faith, but a full supply train of guns and ammunition.

Towering construction engines devoured millions of tonnes of rubble, grinding it, remaking it and finally shaping it into blocks with yoctoscopic tolerances. Towering siege cranes swung them into position, while gangs of soldiers more used to wielding lasguns took up arms with levers, rasps and chamfer-tools. Hundreds of titanic engines, more used to levelling structures, revelled in the task of bringing one to life. Like long-necked herbivores at a watering hole, the crane arms were in constant motion, a ballet of intersecting arcs that would have been recklessly dangerous had not an Iron Warriors warsmith been directing their operations.

Despite his initial reluctance to construct a grand theatre for the telling of Fulgrim’s tale, Perturabo now relished the chance to raise this building. As the hours went by, tier after tier of polished marble taken from the dismantled citadel was added to the Thaliakron, stepping down into the excavated crater like the advance of a glacier.

Fulgrim had led his carnivalian rabble to their dropsite, leaving hundreds of mutilated bodies in their wake. Burned to ash and worked into the mortar of the theatre, the bones of these men and women would forever be part of its foundations, for all drama was founded on the ghosts of the past, the dreams of the dead and foolish notions of immortality.

As day turned to night, the first ring of statues took shape around the upper perimeter of the Thaliakron: beautiful goddesses in flowing robes, bearing silver trumpets, shepherd’s crooks and masks that laughed and wept in equal measure. Tens of thousands worked on its construction, mortals and post-humans alike, for none were exempt from the inviolable logic of Forrix’s calculations and Perturabo’s demands. Like insects scurrying to build a great nest for their queen, they shaped the Thaliakron with a speed that was nothing short of miraculous.

By noon the following day, Perturabo’s vision rendered in antimony upon wax paper was made real, a brilliant white circle cut into the red flesh of Hydra Cordatus.

His irritation at Fulgrim’s abstruse motives for delaying the telling of his tale had faded with every hour spent in the work of raising the Thaliakron. His brother’s love of the dramatic had always been a source of friction between them, and this latest incarnation of his quest for perfection was confusing to a warrior of Perturabo’s direct manner. He knew something fundamental had changed within the Emperor’s Children, but could not imagine what purpose the disfigurements and degradations the Legion’s warriors now sported could possibly serve.

Perhaps this joint venture would grant understanding through common cause.

Perturabo was not a primarch to whom the natural ebb and flow of friendship came easily, and, truth be told, he felt no regret at turning on those who had let his Legion bear the brunt of the hardest fighting. They had stolen the glories of open battle while the Iron Warriors were mired in the broken earth of a thousand worlds.

No, his friendship was not easily achieved, but his loyalty, once won, was as unbreakable as the hardest iron. Or so he had thought, until time and taking the metal to the stone again and again had shown him that even the hardest iron can break if worn thin enough.

With the cooling of Olympia’s mass pyres had come the realisation that nothing he could ever do from that moment could ever atone for a worldwide genocide. His father would never forgive him so grievous a sin, but Horus had not only forgiven it, he had lauded his thoroughness and dedication. Horus had sworn Perturabo never to feel guilt over what he had done to Olympia, but that was an oath easier to make than to live by. Fools claimed Forgebreaker had sealed the pact between the Warmaster and the Iron Warriors, but only Perturabo knew it was forgiveness that bound the Iron Warriors to Horus Lupercal.

It had come as a shock to find that the loyalty of a primarch was not the fixed thing Perturabo had always assumed it to be. But like all such realisations, it could be incorporated into a new worldview, and once assimilated, a series of small steps was all it took to render everything he had once stood for as little more than a fading dream.

Perturabo had vowed that his oath to the Warmaster would be truly unbreakable, no matter the cost, no matter the nature of the fight and no matter the outcome. And if that meant hearing Fulgrim out and joining him on whatever mission might hasten the Warmaster’s victory, then so be it.

With the Iron Circle at his side, Perturabo stood before the Thaliakron’s towering gates of beaten iron, and stared at the vision of the goddess worked into the ironwork pediment surmounting the magnificent, columned portico. From a narrow-necked amphora she poured wine that ran down the fluted columns in a cascade of inlaid mercury. That wine was captured by the outstretched hands of her sisters carved into the two central supports: Kharis on the left, Euphrosyne on the right. Both carried masks of laughter and sorrow, yet each was subtly turned so that it was impossible to see which was which.

Perturabo smiled, enjoying the conceit, and pushed open the gates.

The sound of a waiting audience spilled out through the gates, and pride filled his chest at the thought of this dream made real, serving the purpose for which it had been conceived. He paused within the vaulted portico, letting the sounds of cheers and revelry transport him back to a time before the galaxy had split at the seams.

Perturabo shook off his misplaced nostalgia for a time that would never come again.

‘No one lives in the past,’ he whispered. ‘Everyone is dead there.’

Fulgrim, as good as his word, was waiting for him.

Performers could take the stage of the Thaliakron from a number of artfully concealed points, but Perturabo had chosen to descend into the guts of the building and enter via a set of narrow stairs in the centre of the amphitheatre known as the Charonian Steps. This was where actors shrouded as spirits of the dead entered the dramas being played out above, but, more importantly in this instance, allowed Perturabo to appear in the heart of the structure without warning.

From the darkness of the narrow enclosure of the undercroft chambers, Perturabo emerged into the wide open space of the theatre, and took a moment to savour one of his earliest creations finally made real. Stretching up to a height of six hundred and fifty metres, the tiered seating stepped up the gentle slope of the artificial crater, each seat perfectly arranged to provide an uninterrupted vista of the stage.

Tens of thousands filled the seats, a cheering crowd of soldiers, legionaries, hangers-on and mobs of Fulgrim’s followers. They cheered at the sight of him, and though he disliked being at the centre of such public displays, he found himself unexpectedly amused by the screaming yells of welcome.

Perturabo paused at the top of the steps and adjusted the cloak Fulgrim had given him, listening to the roars of the crowd and individual voices within it. Such were the acoustics of the space that even the softest line of dialogue could be heard by the most distant audience member, and Perturabo felt a rare flush of pride at this achievement.

Statues of the goddess and her sisters looked down from high arches that circled the amphitheatre, together with heroic actors of the time before the Emperor’s coming to Olympia. Thespis was rightly given pride of place at the goddess’s side, while Metrobius, his great rival, stood on the far side. Araros, the great lover of comedic poetry, rubbed shoulders with slender Hegelochus, the most chameleonic actor of his day, the so-called hero of a thousand faces.

Fires burned in scores of shallow bowls, held aloft on winged statues of ribbon-clad nymphs, each tens of metres wide and bathing the interior of the Thaliakron in a warm illumination. The air was scented with a faint chemical aroma that warred with a musky, smoky aroma of spices.

The circular stage was wide and paved with planed slabs of crushed quartz and granite, making it shimmer in the tortured glow of the irradiated clouds. No stars shone in the sky, the fallout from the short-life atomics blocking out the light from distant systems, though Perturabo’s eyes could still make out the faint smear of the violent warp anomaly of the far north-west arm of the galaxy. This close to it, Perturabo could see its tendrils distinctly, reaching out to him like questing arms, so close that it felt as though they might reach down and lift him from the surface of Hydra Cordatus.

No matter how many thousands of light years separated him from this particular warp storm, Perturabo was always aware of its presence and could perceive an echo of it on every world where he had looked to the heavens. He didn’t know whether this warp sight had been engineered into his perceptive apparatus deliberately, like Sanguinius’s wings or Corax’s eyes, or was simply a quirk of his genetic code, but it had been a blessing and a curse since his earliest memories. The storm haunted his dreams, threaded his nightmares and coloured his every thought since he had learned something of its nature.

He’d once asked Ferrus whether his silver eyes allowed similar insight, but his brother had just shaken his head and given him a look of faint scorn, as though he had just admitted to some secret weakness or vice. He had never mentioned it again.

Perturabo shook off the memory, his feelings towards it ambiguous now that Ferrus was no more, slain by the very primarch who now stood before him.

Fulgrim was dressed more like the brother he had last seen on Isstvan V, in his purple battle armour, its subtle shades worked through the deepening hues of each plate. A fur-trimmed cloak hung asymmetrically from his shoulders and the black leather-wrapped handle of his golden sword – the selfsame blade Ferrus had crafted in the Terrawatt forges of Mount Narodnya – hung at his hip.

His brother’s white hair was threaded into numerous elaborate braids that came together at the nape of his neck in a winding coil laid across his right shoulder like a sleeping serpent. In the light of the encircling flames, Fulgrim’s eyes appeared even darker, and Perturabo was relieved to see that none of his brother’s captains had accompanied him to this tale-telling, only the eldar creature he had named Karuchi Vohra.

‘I knew you would not disappoint me, brother,’ said Fulgrim, raising his arms and turning in a slow circle to encompass all that had been built for him. ‘It is a triumph of the architect’s art and worthy of the greatest dramas. Tell me, now that you have built one of your dreams, does it match the vision in your head when you first conceived it?’

‘It’s close,’ said Perturabo.

‘But not perfect?’

‘Nothing ever is.’

‘Not yet,’ said Fulgrim, lowering his arms and coming forwards to embrace him.

The two primarchs came together to thunderous applause that echoed around the Thaliakron as though it might never end. Fulgrim slapped him heartily on the back and kissed his cheeks, but the gesture was alien to Perturabo, and he did not know how to respond. The scent of the oils worked into Fulgrim’s hair was strong, and Perturabo took a breath of its seductive perfumes.

‘The cloak looks good on you, brother,’ said Fulgrim with a grin.

They came apart, though Fulgrim kept a grip on one of Perturabo’s arms, as though reluctant to break the moment of closeness they had just shared. He raised his other arm high, basking in the crowd’s adulation, as though feeding on their devotion.

‘We are gods, brother!’ shouted Fulgrim, and the crowd screamed its agreement.

Perturabo’s enthusiasm for his brother’s theatrics began to diminish, and he pulled his arm from Fulgrim’s grip. This overt display of brotherhood had all the appearance of an ambush, and Perturabo’s first instinct was to walk away from it.

Fulgrim stood before him, his voice lowered to a whisper that not even the superlative acoustics of the Thaliakron would fling out into the audience.

‘Where are your hammer bearers?’ asked Fulgrim, noting the absence of the Iron Circle. ‘They would look mighty in such a place.’

‘They are below,’ said Perturabo, taking a step away from Fulgrim. Though he had enjoyed the fleeting moment of brotherhood, he did not enjoy close physical presence.

‘Why automata, brother?’ asked Fulgrim, almost as an aside. ‘Why not warriors of flesh and blood who are not slaves to some Mechanicum doctrina-wafer?’

‘Robotic guardians never sleep, never let down their shields and will never betray me.’

‘But they will never be as responsive as mortal guardians, they will never give their last drop of blood or fight to protect you out of love.’

‘Love? What has love to do with anything?’

Fulgrim gave a crooked smile as though amused that Perturabo should even ask such a question. ‘No bodyguards can be counted upon who do not love that which they protect.’

‘And your Phoenix Guard love you?’ asked Perturabo, harsher than he intended.

‘They do indeed,’ said Fulgrim, raising his voice once again. ‘I am the Phoenician, beloved by all and the star around which my warriors orbit. Without me they would have no purpose, and a warrior without purpose is not worthy of breath.’

The audience cheered again, and Perturabo nodded absently, circling around to the right to better appraise the robed eldar who skulked in Fulgrim’s shadow. Seen in this light, his eye for weakness saw a hollowness to the alien’s frame, as though from some hunger that could never quite be satisfied. Though veiled by his voluminous hood, the eldar’s features were sculptural and handsome, his lips full and his violet hair lustrous. Yet Perturabo sensed something… missing in him.

Very well, if Fulgrim wished theatre, then Perturabo would indulge him.

‘You call yourself Karuchi Vohra?’ he said.

The eldar nodded and said, ‘It is more accurately a title than a name. I was a healer. In the Bielerai dialect it means–’

‘I know what it means,’ said Perturabo abruptly. ‘It means “the ender of suffering”.’

‘My lord understands the eldar tongue?’ asked Vohra.

‘One of many I speak,’ answered Perturabo in the alien’s own language.

Both Fulgrim and Vohra looked surprised, and Perturabo took a moment to enjoy that.

‘Or,’ he said, switching to a proto-speech of guttural barks and grunts, ‘we could speak in the language of the greenskins.’

Fulgrim laughed and said, ‘You are a wonder to me, brother. I had not known you possessed a talent for linguistics.’

‘I’ve spent my life at the business end of a siege, digging trenches and razing cities, so it’s easy for you to forget I have a mind as engineered as any of our brothers,’ said Perturabo, trying not to sound disappointed at such a failure of perception. ‘I may not have the warp-lore of Magnus or the war-craft of Horus, but being underestimated is one of my greatest weapons.’

Fulgrim smiled and said, ‘I shall never make that mistake.’

‘No, I think you will,’ said Perturabo, turning on his heel and folding his arms across his broad chest. ‘Now, tell me what is so important that it required my Legion to raise this amphitheatre to hear it.’

‘It is a story of the eldar gods and their wars,’ said Fulgrim. ‘Of a creature so terrible and so beautiful that its brothers locked it away from time and memory.’

‘The Angel Exterminatus?’ ventured Perturabo.

‘Yes,’ said Vohra. ‘The Angel Exterminatus.’

Anger touched Perturabo. ‘You had me build the Thaliakron just to tell me alien legends?’

‘It is no legend, brother,’ said Fulgrim, coming forwards to grip Perturabo’s arm. ‘It is a truth hidden in the grave of its doom, a weapon of such power that the stars themselves turned upon it rather than allow it to escape its prison.’

Despite Fulgrim’s needlessly overwrought language, Perturabo’s interest was piqued. He knew well enough that many a legend had a hidden truth at its heart.

‘Where is this weapon?’ he asked.

‘You know where it is, brother,’ grinned Fulgrim, looking to the volcanic sky. ‘You have always known.’

Perturabo followed Fulgrim’s gaze, staring up at the swirling vortex of warp energy that seethed and boiled in the heavens.

The star maelstrom.

‘Tell me this legend,’ commanded Perturabo.

Hidden in the shadows of the flame-bearing nymphs, two kneeling figures watched the meeting of the two primarchs. But where the audience packed into the tiered seating of the grand theatre were held in rapturous awe by the two beings, these individuals felt nothing but hate. The shadows and the dust conspired to mask every aspect of their armour that might mark them out as intruders, but no one was paying any attention to them anyway.

The larger of the pair wore armour of dark plate, its insignia and Legion markings obscured by carefully cultivated layers of red dust and strung canvas, upon which meaningless scrawls had been daubed. His armour bore numerous scratches and dents that had been left unrepaired by tech-artificers aboard the Sisypheum. He stared at the Phoenician with undisguised loathing, his entire body vibrating with the effort of will it took not to charge headlong at the being who had murdered Ferrus Manus.

His name was Sabik Wayland and he was of the Iron Hands.

Beside him, more slender, though still clad in the blackest Legiones Astartes plate – albeit customised to reduce its visual aspect and noise in a variety of spectra and wavelengths – was Nykona Sharrowkyn: Raven Guard warrior, stealth-master and slayer of traitors.

Neither was a stranger to operating deep in enemy territory, but this infiltration was perhaps as foolhardy a mission as they had ever undertaken.

At least since Cavor Sarta and that business with the Kryptos.

‘It makes me sick to even look at him,’ said Wayland, repulsed by the sight of Fulgrim.

Sharrowkyn didn’t look up and kept the lens of his helm pressed to the sight of the matt-black needle-carbine pulled in tight to his shoulder. Converted to take a variety of ammunition loads and operate in different fire settings, the weapon was a compact killing tool, able to slay in silence from afar or up close with a blitzing storm of solid steel needles.

‘So don’t look,’ said Sharrowkyn. ‘Listen. Use that parabolic vox-thief Thamatica gave you.’

‘Frater Thamatica,’ said Wayland. ‘Why bother? The acoustics here mean we can hear what those traitors are saying perfectly well. I don’t need the thief.’

He spat the last word as though it were distasteful to him.

‘True, but it can record what they’re saying,’ pointed out Sharrowkyn. ‘Branthan and the others are going to want to hear this.’

Wayland debated insisting that Sharrowkyn employ Branthan’s honorific, knowing the Raven Guard would probably take no notice. Their scattered and ad-hoc organisation of combat cells was hardly a Legion-sanctioned formation, so what did it matter the titles they carried? Yet somehow it did matter. Now Ferrus Manus was gone it mattered more than ever.

‘His rank is captain.’

‘Fine,’ sighed Sharrowkyn. ‘Captain Branthan is going to want to hear this. I get the impression he’s not a man who likes to make decisions based on second-hand information. Even from someone like you, my friend.’

Wayland nodded, ashamed at having this aspect of his task here pointed out to him. His thoughts, normally so clear and ordered like the workings of a machine, had been wrenched askew by the sight of the Emperor’s Children’s primarch. To see the killer of Ferrus Manus laughing as though his hands were not red with murder was a gross insult, a stain on the honour of the Iron Hands that was yet to be avenged.

No warrior of the X Legion had laid eyes on the Phoenician since the betrayal at Isstvan, and Wayland felt the heavy burden of the dead’s vengeful expectations fall to him. His heartbeat thundered in his chest and the metallic fingers of his left hand clenched into a fist as he remembered the Phoenician’s blow that had kept him from the side of Ferrus Manus.

‘Focus, Sabik,’ said Sharrowkyn, sensing his building fury. ‘My Legion suffered at their hands too. Do your job and we’ll be able to strike back at them all the harder.’

Wayland let out a breath, knowing Sharrowkyn was right, but finding it increasingly difficult to keep his Medusan anger in check. Disappointed with such weakness, he took a moment to calm his imbalanced humours, letting the choleric ease and the melancholic ascend to the fore. Where a great many of the Iron Hands were impulsive and quick to anger, Wayland had long ago mastered the ability to distribute his humours to be always in balance.

Or so he had thought until the moment he had seen Fulgrim take to the stage.

The memory of what the Phoenician had done cut through him like a las-solder through plastek, and only Sharrowkyn’s restraining hand had kept him from exposing their intrusion.

‘You’re right,’ he said, letting out a calming breath. ‘My weakness shames me.’

‘It’s not weakness to hate them,’ said Sharrowkyn. ‘Use it, brother, hone its edge until the time comes to strike. Then it will be all the more potent when unleashed.’

Throughout his uncharacteristically verbose response, the Raven Guard hadn’t moved so much as a muscle, the sight of his needle-carbine still pressed to the lens of his helmet.

‘Could you actually take a shot from here?’ asked Wayland, breaking out the vox-thief gear and setting the innocuous black box on a telescoping tripod. A number of matt-black cables extruded from his gauntlet and these he hooked into the back of the device, which immediately gave a soft buzz to let him know it was functional.

‘Yes, though they’re at the extreme end of my needle-carbine’s effective range, even if they weren’t primarchs.’

‘Tempted?’

‘Very much so,’ said Sharrowkyn, easing a slender finger through the trigger guard and applying fractional pressure. A range-finder clicked as it adjusted the muzzle grooving. ‘I might just do it to see if that Storm Eagle of yours is worth certifying.’

‘Trust me, there’s nothing flying these traitors possess that can catch it.’

‘I believe you, but here’s hoping we don’t need to put it to the test.’

The vox-thief chirruped as Wayland bracketed the three figures in the centre of the amphitheatre, and he heard the click of rotating cogs within as it began recording. As he had told Sharrowkyn, they didn’t need the device to hear what was being said, but Sharrowkyn was right; even in his current state, Captain Branthan would want to hear the traitors’ words for himself before committing them to a course of action.

Yes, the Iron Hands had been effectively gutted by the betrayal on the black sands, their veterans decimated and their demigod father cut down by a faithless brother, but that only made them all the more dangerous. Like a punch-drunk fighter who refuses to stay down, the Iron Hands had come back to the fight even stronger.

Wayland turned his thoughts from retribution to the figures below, as the primarch of the Iron Warriors circled around a thin figure swathed in obscuring robes. Who might be deemed important enough to stand in the presence of two primarchs was a mystery, but that he was here at all indicated he was worthy of attention.

The words of the two traitor primarchs drifted up to the highest reaches of the grand theatre. Sharrowkyn and Wayland listened to their discourse with a mounting sense of horror as the Phoenician explained why he had come to Hydra Cordatus.

‘Throne…’ hissed Wayland.

‘That doesn’t even come close,’ whispered Sharrowkyn.

‘I think maybe you should take that shot after all.’

Sharrowkyn flipped off the safety and said, ‘I think you’re right.’

SIX

Maelsha’eil Atherakhia
A Shot in the Dark

The tale belonged to Karuchi Vohra’s race, but it was Fulgrim who took centre stage to tell it. Never at ease with others sharing the limelight, the Phoenician had become narcissistic to the point of egomania, Perturabo saw. He watched Fulgrim as he circled theatrically, the great actor promenading before delivering his greatest soliloquy. Fulgrim took up a heroic pose, more like an actor pretending to be him than himself.

‘Brothers and sisters,’ began Fulgrim, with a deep bow. ‘I come before you all to tell a tale of forgotten days, of lost empires and an age of the galaxy before the rise of mankind. We rule now where an ancient race once claimed dominion, and though it declines to its inevitable doom, there are still remnants of its empire’s lost glory in the secret places of the galaxy. Listen well and I will transport you through the mists of time to the last days of this decadent race…’

Fulgrim’s words were delivered with panache and the precise variation in tone to hook the imagination of the audience. To Perturabo’s ears, they were needlessly ostentatious and took twice the time to tell as was required. Whatever the story to come, Perturabo knew he could tell it with more economy and clarity, but those were two concepts Fulgrim appeared to have left behind in his headlong plunge into whatever obsession was driving him.

He stood with his arms folded as Fulgrim stalked the stage like a prowling killer, his pallid flesh and ebony eyes sweeping the crowd as though searching for something.

Fulgrim lifted one arm to the sky. ‘We begin in a time before time, when mankind was yet to crawl on his belly from the primordial waters to the mud of the shore. We were not yet worthy to inherit the mantle of gods, for another race claimed that honour, and the universe does not permit more than one pantheon to name itself divine.

‘The children of Asuryan they were, wrought from the fiery flesh of their godhead and cast into the galaxy like seeds from a ploughman’s hand. They called themselves eldar, and their empire stretched from one side of the Monoceros Ring to the other, from Perseus to the farthest reach of Scutum-Centaurus. Their empire was mighty and proud, for their gods had granted them the means to travel the length and breadth of their realm in the blink of an eye. The warrior kings, Eldanesh and Ulthanesh, led their armies in wars of conquest that saw every foe who dared stand before them brought low. And yet, even with the entirety of the galaxy as their domain, the selfish eldar were not satisfied. Eldanesh wept for the emptiness of his playground, and Isha, the whore goddess from whose bleeding loins the eldar had sprung, shed bitter tears that brought fresh life to the galaxy. Her grief was a wellspring of creation that brought many new and wondrous races into being. All for the amusement of her children, an act of such foolish indulgence that it beggars belief.’

Perturabo watched Karuchi Vohra as Fulgrim spoke, and though his hood was still raised, it was possible to see the effect the storytelling was having upon him. With each pejorative mention of the eldar, a muscle in Vohra’s face would twitch, a nervous tic that would have been invisible to any perception save that of a primarch.

Whatever the audience might be feeling towards Fulgrim’s tale, Vohra was not enjoying it.

Fulgrim circled the amphitheatre, his voice mellifluous, a euphony of sound that was unwillingly drawing Perturabo into the web of characters and plots as Fulgrim gave name to eldar heroes and kings, their great thinkers and, of course, their enemies.

What drama would be complete without a nefarious evil to oppose?

‘As all here know, power begets jealousy and the king of the conquered Hresh-selain race plotted and schemed in the darkest reaches of the galaxy.’

As Fulgrim gave name to this king, he stooped and rubbed his hands together, like a children’s tale-teller making a pantomime of villainy. The effect was laughable, yet the crowds in the tiers responded with jeers and howls of outrage. Perturabo was dumbfounded at the effect his brother’s manipulative words were having, yet even he had to confess to a mounting interest in the legendary tale being woven around him.

‘The armies of the Hresh-selain, rebuilt in secret and scattered in dimensions beyond the reach of the eldar, finally assembled and struck back at their conquerors. With their king at their head, the Hresh-selain slaughtered the eldar by the tens of thousand in battles that left entire regions of the galaxy uninhabitable for millennia.

‘The eldar were mighty, yes, and their warriors peerless, but the armies of the Hresh-selain outnumbered the stars, and though each battle saw the dead number in the millions, it was but a drop in the ocean to the full might of their grotesque battle hosts.’

Fulgrim had by now unsheathed his sword and the golden blade drew fresh gasps of astonishment and roars of approval. Fulgrim spun and leapt like a dancer, yet Perturabo saw the fierce skill in his every move, the lethal grace that had made his brother a matchless swordsman, beyond even the technical ability of Guilliman or the enraged purity of Angron.

‘The eldar were on the verge of defeat, and the gods wept to see their favoured children so humbled. Once again Eldanesh cried for his mother goddess to aid him and she was shamed enough by his pleas to beg her brother-husband, the war god Kaela Mensha Khaine, to fight alongside the eldar. Khaine refused, for he had ever been jealous of Asuryan’s brood and relished the sight of their pain. But when Isha offered him the sanctity of her once-virgin flesh, the war god relented and took what she offered without heed for her life. No sooner had he planted his bloody seed in Isha’s belly, than a fiery avatar tore its way from her womb with claws of blood and a hunger for destruction beyond even the war god’s power to unleash…’

Perturabo felt the audience’s terror at the idea of so monstrous a creature, though what the allegory of legend actually meant in terms of real history was impossible to tell.

‘Isha’s death scream was her warchild’s birth scream, a battle cry that stilled the very heart of the galaxy in fear and echoes in the hearts of all who spill blood to this day. The eldar knew this being as Maelsha’eil Atherakhia, a name unspoken by their race, but which lives in their withered hearts as a gnawing fear.’

‘What does the name mean, brother?’ asked Perturabo. ‘I know the tongue of the eldar, but those words are unfamiliar to me.’

Fulgrim paused in the telling of the tale, his face a brittle mask that looked to be on the edge of violence at this interruption.

‘It is an ancient name, my lord,’ said Karuchi Vohra. ‘One never spoken aloud. It means the beautiful eagle from hell that brings the end of all things. Which translates imperfectly as–’

‘The Angel Exterminatus,’ finished Perturabo.

‘Then might I continue?’ snapped Fulgrim, still poised on the brink of hostility.

Perturabo nodded and Fulgrim slipped back into the tale as though he had not spoken.

‘The Angel Exterminatus joined the fight against the Hresh-selain, and mighty were the slaughters it wreaked across the galaxy. Eldanesh welcomed its aid, even as he realised his own cowardice had caused the death of his mother goddess. Ulthanesh was broken by the price they had paid for this newborn creature of destruction, a beautiful creature that inspired love and terror in equal measure. Truly the Angel Exterminatus was an eldar demigod like no other, blessed with the most beguiling countenance, the greatest strength and the highest intellect. What the gods knew, it knew, and what power they feared to wield, it unleashed with a song in its heart.

‘While Ulthanesh quailed at the power of the Angel Exterminatus, Eldanesh grew to love the stink of blood in his nostrils, the smell of charred flesh and the sight of carrion picking the flesh of the dead. He grew jealous of the power so casually wielded by the Angel Exterminatus and plotted to bring it to ruin once the war against the Hresh-selain was done. Yet even as his people’s enemies retreated in the face of the Angel Exterminatus, Eldanesh’s desire to utterly destroy the Hresh-selain grew to become an obsession. Only the total extinction of his foes would satisfy such bloodlust, and he bade the Angel Exterminatus to craft weapons that would wipe their worlds from time and memory. Blind to Eldanesh’s madness, the Angel Exterminatus agreed, and forged weapons of such power that their very concept drove those who learned of them to take their own lives, rather than live in a galaxy where such things were conceived.’

Now Perturabo’s interest was well and truly snared. Whether this was embellished allegory or wild fantasy didn’t matter. This was the heart of the matter and the crux upon which his indulgence hung.

‘To fashion such weapons was no little matter,’ said Fulgrim. ‘And the Angel Exterminatus was weakened by their creation, for much of its power was bound into their destructive hearts. Exhausted by its labours, it sank into a great slumber on an ancient battleground, leaving Eldanesh to revel in what it had created. But Eldanesh saw what the Angel Exterminatus had wrought and despaired, for he now understood that such weapons were an abomination. The veils of his madness parted, and he saw what he had become and what he had lost in his quest for victory. He summoned Ulthanesh to his side, and offering great prayers to Asuryan, they sought to banish the Angel Exterminatus to the netherworlds beyond the walls of space and time and consign it to the hells from whence it had been conceived. Sensing their intent, the Angel awoke from its rest and fought back.’

Fulgrim hacked his sword through the air as he spoke, each stroke theatrically desperate, as though he fought for his life against unseen opponents that were steadily wearing him down. Breathless and dishevelled, Fulgrim dropped to one knee, his golden sword held out before him, a perfect rendition of a beleaguered hero, bowed, but unbroken. Perturabo had long since tuned out the more mythic elements of the tale, focusing instead on what the truth behind the legend might be.

Fulgrim rose unsteadily to his feet, as though pushing against an invisible force that sought to keep him down. ‘Such a battle had never yet been seen in the ages of the galaxy. A being with the power of a god assailed by its wayward heirs, and no mercy was to be found in their hearts as blood flowed and the very warp and weft of the galaxy was torn asunder by the violence of their conflict. None now live who remember how long these demigods fought, but against the power of the Angel Exterminatus, Eldanesh and Ulthanesh could not hope to prevail. Both were driven to their knees, and faced the final wrath of the very thing they had helped to create. But before the Angel Exterminatus could slay them, Asuryan himself intervened to save his foolish sons. The Angel Exterminatus was a god, but Asuryan had ruled the heavens for an age before it had sprung from Isha’s bloody carcass, and his power was terrible to behold. He finished what Eldanesh and Ulthanesh had begun, and ripped the galaxy apart, folding the tortured skeins of space and time around the Angel Exterminatus and sealing it away in a prison from which there could be no escape, and no reprieve from the terror it had unleashed.’

Perturabo hid his scorn at such a deus ex machina ending to the legend, but as Fulgrim cast his eyes heavenwards, he knew what was coming next.

‘Behold the ancient prison of the Angel Exterminatus!’ screamed Fulgrim, thrusting his blade towards the fallout-wracked clouds. Though kilometres thick, a halo of light parted them for long enough for the night’s blackness to become visible.

And in that slice of darkness, the ugly bruise of the star maelstrom.

‘Range confirmation?’

‘Five hundred and six metres.’

Sharrowkyn used the tip of his right thumb to minutely adjust the focus of his sight. The position he had selected was an optimum kill site, in line with prevailing winds to prevent projectile drift that would alter his shot’s trajectory. Thermo-auguries on his cooled rifle sheath measured the surrounding temperature and blinked a correction to compensate for what lift the warm air would impart to the large-bore steel needle.

Likewise, the strength of the planet’s geomagnetic field factored into Sharrowkyn’s calculations when deciding upon the angle of his shot.

In his mind’s eye, any conventional target was already dead.

But a primarch was no conventional target.

‘As soon as I take this shot, we go,’ said Sharrowkyn. ‘We get out, and we get out fast. Even if I miss, you understand?’

‘I understand,’ said Wayland. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t go berserk and charge in single-handed.’

Sharrowkyn sighted on his target’s skull, slowing his heart rate and letting his breathing even out as he applied the tiniest pressure to the trigger. Ready icons winked to life on his helm, a dotted line tracing the route his needle would take.

Right through a primarch’s eye.

‘Taking the shot,’ he said.

The crowd bayed at the sight of the leering smear of unlight and tortured spacetime in the heavens and Perturabo despised them for their easily bought wonder. They had no idea of the danger it represented, the dreadful insidious canker that wormed its way into the heart. Like a wasting sickness of the soul, its appearance abraded all joy and all life from those who saw it, and Perturabo had seen it for a very long time indeed.

‘The great star maelstrom!’ cried Fulgrim, like a fiery preacher of a bygone age. ‘A wound ripped in the galaxy to imprison a godlike being by a race who would not accept that their time was at an end. This is where the greatest glory and the greatest shame of the eldar lies bound by chains that Asuryan decreed never be undone until the end of the universe itself. And so it has been from that day to this…’

Fulgrim paused, savouring the deliciousness of what he was about to say and letting the moment of anticipation build until Perturabo feared the audience might riot if he kept silent much longer.

‘But Asuryan is forgotten, his people broken by their own weaknesses, and we pay no heed to the decrees of a failed god. The way is open for those with the boldness to act.’

Fulgrim sheathed his sword, his eyes fevered, his skin sheened in perspiration.

His chest heaved with the effort of storytelling, as though he had played host to the spirit of Thalia herself. Perturabo saw through the fiction of his exhaustion, knowing his brother was playing to the crowd’s expectation and the grandeur of the amphitheatre.

‘While the Angel Exterminatus sleeps, we will storm Asuryan’s gaol and take for ourselves the weapons forged in ancient times!’ roared Fulgrim.

Perturabo saw the tiny puff of blood appear on Fulgrim’s skull a second before he heard the crack of the shot. Fulgrim’s black eyes rolled back into his skull.

‘No!’ cried Perturabo as his brother dropped to the flagstones of the arena, his ashen face masked with blood.

‘Go!’ shouted Sharrowkyn, already moving and collapsing the long-range scope of the carbine. He turned and ran for the shadowed cloister of statues that ringed the outer circumference of the great amphitheatre as pandemonium erupted behind them. Baying cries of horror and anger echoed all around them, amplified tenfold by the structure’s acoustical genius, but neither Sharrowkyn nor Wayland had time to savour them.

The hunters would already be on their trail.

‘Did you kill him?’ asked Wayland as they reached their exit point, where coiled lengths of high-tensile wire were hidden in the shadows.

‘I hit him where I meant to,’ said Sharrowkyn, looping his wire around the neck of a goddess statue before attaching it to a metal ring on his armour. ‘Whether that’s enough to kill him is another matter. Drop now, talk later.’

Both warriors turned back to face the centre of the amphitheatre, balancing on the lip of a carved stone ledge hundreds of metres above the ground.

‘Ready?’ asked Sharrowkyn.

‘Ready,’ confirmed Wayland.

‘Drop.’

Sharrowkyn pushed out from the ledge and fell in a curving parabola down the face of the building. He controlled the rapid descent with his heavy-duty gauntlets, slamming back into the face of the structure halfway down. Marble cracked beneath his boots and fell in a splintered white rain to the ground below. Wayland was still higher than him, his jumps shorter. Sharrowkyn jumped again, turning in mid-flight to face the ground as it rushed towards him.

Crowds were already flooding from the amphitheatre in a panic. Perhaps they feared Imperial retribution, a warfleet that had approached in secret and not fallen foul of betrayal.

Would that were the case, thought Sharrowkyn.

Shots rang out, blasting chunks from the carved bas-relief above him, and he saw three warriors in the dull, unpainted armour of the Iron Warriors with their weapons trained upwards. Sharrowkyn arrested his descent as he snapped the wire from the metal ring. He fell the last twenty metres to the ground, landing with his weapon unlimbered and ready to fire.

He dropped to one knee and put a burst of needles through the visor of the nearest Iron Warrior. The traitor fell without a sound and Sharrowkyn put a single tox-round through the grilled faceplate of the next before rolling aside as a tearing blast of bolter fire chewed up where he’d landed. Another rapid spray of needles punched through the thin neck joint of the third Iron Warrior and blood sheeted down his bare metal breastplate as he toppled.

Wayland crashed to the ground next to him, and Sharrowkyn winced at the awkwardness of the Iron Hand’s landing.

‘A Corrivane novitiate has more grace in the air than you, brother,’ said Sharrowkyn.

Wayland grunted a reply and ran south as the sounds of panic spilled from the amphitheatre with the baying mobs of enemy followers and warriors. Sharrowkyn set off after him, following the course they had plotted en route to their clandestine observation of the two traitor primarchs. What had been planned as a fact-hunting mission had become one of assassination.

They moved through the debris of the theatre’s ultra-rapid construction, a city of vast spoil heaps, trenches, material stores and towering construction engines. Abandoned worker camps and supply depots flashed past on either side as they made their escape. Amid the sounds of terror surrounding the amphitheatre, Sharrowkyn heard the unmistakable sounds of pursuit. A life lived behind enemy lines had given him a preternatural sense for being hunted. For all that he hated the traitors and all they had done, he didn’t forget that these were warriors of the Legions. They were just as deadly and just as proficient as any of the Emperor’s warriors.

But they had never fought a Raven Guard and an Iron Hand like this.

‘They’re coming,’ he shouted to Wayland.

‘Blowing the first charge.’

A thunderous detonation shook the ground as Wayland triggered the first of many explosives seeded along their escape route. A cascade of dirt and broken body parts rained down as the echoes of the thermic charge faded.

Sharrowkyn skidded to a halt behind an overturned skip-loader, resting his rifle on the battered metal lip of the hopper. A mob of men and women in garish robes emerged from the shadow of a heap of discarded rock debris, and Sharrowkyn put the first six down with as many shots. The rest faltered in their advance, but kept coming even as he killed another five.

‘Displace!’ ordered Wayland. Sharrowkyn snapped up his rifle and ran.

Screams of hate erupted at the sight of him and a ragged volley of poorly aimed shots chased him down. A chugging blast of bolter fire ripped through the mob, tearing a handful to shreds and blowing limbs from yet more. Where Sharrowkyn’s fire was more efficiently lethal, the savage roar of Wayland’s bolter cowed the mortals more effectively.

Sharrowkyn reached Wayland’s position behind a piled heap of steel rebar cages and slapped his shoulder guard, taking up a covering position as he heard the roar of engines and the thunder of booming footsteps that shook the earth.

‘Rhinos,’ he said.

‘No, Land Raiders,’ answered Wayland.

‘They’re looking to box us in,’ said Sharrowkyn. ‘We need to keep moving.’

‘Agreed.’

‘Go,’ said Sharrowkyn, shouldering his rifle as the weight of fire intensified around them.

Wayland ran for the narrow cut between two pyramidal heaps of broken stone and loose rubble. Shots burst around Sharrowkyn, and fragments scored his armour as the angry roar of a madly revving engine echoed from somewhere nearby.

‘Sharrowkyn!’ shouted Wayland as another buried explosive ripped through their pursuers.

‘Cover me,’ he shouted back.

Bolter shots punched through the screaming mob, and Sharrowkyn ran to join Wayland.

He risked a backwards glance in time to see a pair of Land Raiders crest a metallic dune and crash back down with earth-shattering slams of iron. Their hulls were maddening swirls of purple and pink, organically scaled as though clad in serpent skin. Glistening banners trailed from their topsides and smoke dispensers trailed a mist of iridescent fumes in their wake. The sight of them was so bizarre that Sharrowkyn’s step faltered at their appearance.

It was a hesitation that saved his life.

Flaring beams of incandescent las-fire pulverised the stack of rubble ahead of him, sending a column of ash and steel mushrooming skywards. Sharrowkyn was hurled through the air and landed hard on stacked entrenching tools. He rolled back to his feet and set off again as another syncopated blast blew out the ground behind him.

Sharrowkyn dropped into a wide trench bedded with rail tracks as shots spanked from the stone and earth and the rapid spray of heavy-calibre bolters sawed the air. One shot clipped the edge of his breastplate and spun him around. He rose, kept running. He looked up to see bulky figures in Legion warplate moving along the top ridges of stone and excavated earth either side. Mass-reactive fire stitched the earth around him, but the stealth upgrades worked into his battle armour were throwing off the targeting mechanisms of the enemy guns.

That’s what happens when you rely on machines and not a good eye.

A shot punched down into his shoulder guard, and he stumbled, weaving left and right as the screaming roar of the Land Raiders swelled behind him. He heard steelwork groan and buckle, the screech of tracks tearing over debris and the coughing howl of engines. The wide trench opened out into a circular materials depot, heaped with blocks of shaped stone, permacrete in moisture-proof vacuum sacks, steel reinforcement towers and rows of giant pipes the size of a Titan’s gun barrels.

‘Find cover,’ said Wayland’s voice in his helmet. ‘Now.’

Sharrowkyn ran for the wide-mouthed pipes, each twice as tall as his stooped-over height, and threw himself inside. He pressed himself flat against one curved wall.

‘Boom,’ said Wayland.

A cataclysmic detonation shook the world with seismic force. Atmosphere compressed and burst as a pressure wave pummelled its way along the pipe, crushing Sharrowkyn to the wall. Hammering echoes of secondary explosions crackled and thumped, and he felt the autosenses of his armour resetting in the wake of the pounding soundwaves and blinding glow. The pipe was concertinaed and warped as though it had been stepped on by a battle engine, and light broke in through cracks in the steelwork.

Sharrowkyn picked himself up and ran towards the far end, checking his rifle was clear of obstructions. A shape appeared silhouetted at the end of the tunnel: bulky, armoured and post-human. Sharrowkyn’s weapon was already at his shoulder and he put a single toxin shot into the target’s centre-mass. The warrior crumpled with a strangled cry and Sharrowkyn vaulted the body, only vaguely noticing the hideous facial disfigurements and the strange, long-necked weapon he carried.

Reaching the end of the tunnel, Sharrowkyn backed up against the buckled steelwork of the pipe, ducking a head out to see what was going on.

It wasn’t good.

The enemy had reacted far faster than they’d expected. Iron Warriors and Emperor’s Children were circling around to form an unbreakable perimeter. Gangs of soldiers in khaki uniforms spread methodically through the construction site, sweeping the area with a thoroughness that surprised him until he saw they were Selucid Thorakites.

Here and there, Sharrowkyn saw the bulkier shape of traitor legionaries, bellowing orders or directing their charges with a clubbing blow. Sharrowkyn took a moment to listen, trying to gain some sense of whether he had the dubious honour of being the first Imperial servant to succeed in killing a traitor primarch. Some wailing voices claimed to have seen Fulgrim’s head split open by the killer’s bullet, while others claimed the wounded primarch himself was leading the hunt for his would-be assassin.

The truth was impossible to know, and he didn’t have time to stick around and sort fact from fiction.

The enemy couldn’t have closed the noose just yet; he still had time.

But only if he moved now.

Sharrowkyn ducked out of the pipe and made his way farther from the amphitheatre, moving where the darkness aided him, embracing shadows where the harsh beams of searchlights passed over him. Every metre he gained was a victory, but he was running out of space and time to manoeuvre as more and more warriors flooded the construction yards.

‘Wayland, are you there?’ he hissed over the vox. ‘I could use some more back-up here.’

Static buzzed from the speakers in his helmet, and he wondered if Wayland had been caught and killed in the moments since triggering the charges. The Iron Hand didn’t have his flair for stealth work, nor had he trained in Raven Guard escape and evasion techniques. Sharrowkyn owed Wayland his life after he’d pulled his wounded body onto a gunship on Isstvan V, and the thought of that debt going unpaid left a bitter taste in his mouth.

Sharrowkyn pushed onwards, crawling through pools of stagnant oil-polluted water, beneath heavy lifter rigs and between stacked building materials. He ran along the edge of a high-walled ravelin, its interior stacked with coiled razorwire, bladed sawbucks and other tools of the besieger. He heard the creak of a footfall an instant before he realised there was someone behind him, and dived forwards as a squealing blast of sonic force blew a metre-wide hole in the modular plascrete wall. He rolled and brought his rifle up, pressing down on the trigger and emptying the solid needle magazine in the time it took to aim. His shots pierced the Emperor’s Children warrior’s breastplate and misted his chest in a mass of pulped flesh.

The legionary laughed hysterically and brought his weapon to bear again.

‘You only get one chance,’ said Sharrowkyn, dropping his rifle and drawing his two shoulder-sheathed gladii. Each black blade was a slice of utter darkness, non-reflective and near frictionless. Sharrowkyn leapt, and his first blade sliced through the warrior’s sonic weapon, the second buried itself in his neck.

And still he wouldn’t die.

Sharrowkyn wrenched his blades clear as the warrior opened his distended jaws impossibly wide. He’d thought the warrior’s monstrous appearance was a hideously carved helmet, but now saw the error of that assessment. Nightmarish surgeries had transformed his enemy into something less than human, a parody of what evolution had wrought over millions of years and deemed fittest for survival. He screamed with deafening volume, and though Sharrowkyn silenced him with a blade thrust that punched through the back of his plasticised skull, the damage was done.

The enemy had a fix on his position.

Sharrowkyn sheathed his blades and scooped up his rifle, running for the edge of the construction site. More gunfire puffed the earth and more screams of the hideously transformed warriors echoed around him. Sharrowkyn climbed to the top of an earthen ridge, violating the cardinal rule of not skylining himself, and looked for a way out.

There wasn’t one.

He ducked back as more gunfire punched the ridgeline and dropped to his haunches as a host of mortal soldiers and traitor legionaries converged on his position. Four glistening Land Raiders rolled into sight, followed by a dozen Iron Warriors Rhinos. Traitors disembarked with grim efficiency, marching towards their trapped prey.

Sharrowkyn slotted home his last clip of solid needles and scrambled back up the slope as more gunfire stabbed towards him. Las-burns scorched his armour, and damage indicators flickered angrily on his helmet visor. He turned and brought his rifle to bear, each shot pitching an enemy warrior to the ground.

He saw crew-served guns being wheeled into place: quad-lasers, small-calibre howitzers, tunnelling mortars. At least a thousand enemy soldiers surrounded him, intent on taking him alive and making him pay for what he’d done.

‘Damn, but they’re making sure,’ he said.

Sharrowkyn heard the roaring of engines behind him, the throaty intake of hot air being gulped into powerful vectored ramjets. A storm of dust devils blew up around him as a multi-spectrally camouflaged gunship rose up behind the ridge on throbbing banks of jetwash. Coloured a dull midnight grey, its swept-back wings bristled with cannons, and its stubby prow with linked banks of heavy bolters. Missile racks on its upper fuselage locked into place with a clatter of loading mechanisms.

The Storm Eagle dipped its tapered nose and Sharrowkyn saw Sabik Wayland in the cockpit.

Wayland nodded and Sharrowkyn dropped flat as a hurricane of shells blitzed down the slope, shredding anything living in a storm of explosive mass-reactive shells and armour-busting penetrator rounds. The traitors scattered as the nose of the Storm Eagle swung left and right, turning the ground below Sharrowkyn into a boiling cauldron of hot metal and chewed-up flesh. The noise was incredible, a never-ending hellstorm of chugging bangs, rotating ammo hoppers and clinking shell casings falling in a brass rain.

The enemy Land Raiders weathered the storm of gunfire, but Wayland wasn’t done.

Four missiles detached from their mountings and slashed down at the heavily armoured vehicles. Three of the tanks detonated instantly, blooming fireballs immolating the soldiers who’d taken shelter behind them. A fourth lurched like a wounded animal, crushing Emperor’s Children beneath its flaming bulk before internal explosions blew it apart from the inside.

The quiet that followed was like the aftermath of a terrible accident, the stunned silence before true horror kicks in. Sharrowkyn used that moment to scramble up the slope towards the Storm Eagle. The assault gunship hovered on a cushion of superheated air that turned the top of the ridge to glass. The barrels of its rapid-firing cannons bled heat and drooled smoke. Its assault ramp slammed down and Sharrowkyn wasted no time in leaping aboard.

‘Go!’ he shouted as he slammed a palm into the closing mechanism.

The Storm Eagle spun on its axis, furiously nimble, and Sharrowkyn was hurled against the fuselage as Wayland punched the engines. The gunship dropped and flew close to the earth as it jinked and wove an evasive pattern through the siegeworks. Sharrowkyn struggled to reach the cockpit, dragging himself along via handholds on jutting stanchions and crew harnesses.

He dropped into the co-pilot’s seat, seeing the red earth and rocky mountains swinging wildly through the armourglass canopy.

‘You cut that one fine,’ he said.

‘If you’d kept up with me, I wouldn’t have had to,’ returned Wayland.

Sharrowkyn shrugged, unwilling to argue the point as the gunship’s wild manoeuvring threaded a path through waving streams of anti-aircraft fire. Wayland’s hands danced over the controls, flaring the engines, pumping out targeting decoys in their wake and avoiding the most predictable flight paths. The Storm Eagle’s agility was far greater than any Legion aircraft Sharrowkyn had flown in, and its stealth capabilities ensured that none of the coordinated fire patterns of the Iron Warriors came close to touching it.

As the craft powered away from the valley, its madly twisting course was replaced by something approaching level flight.

‘We’re clear?’ he asked.

‘Their own gunships will be scrambling, but they’ll not catch us before we’re back aboard the Sisypheum,’ said Wayland.

‘What about their orbital launches?’

The Iron Hand snorted in derision.

‘You’re sure about that?’

‘Of course I’m sure,’ said Wayland. ‘I designed the Nighthawk-pattern, remember?’

Sharrowkyn grinned and rapped his knuckles on the edge of the armoured bucket seat. ‘You know, Sabik, I think the Mechanicum might give this variant their seal of approval after all,’ he said.

‘Yes?’

‘Yes,’ said Sharrowkyn. ‘Eventually.’

SEVEN

I Was There
The Paths Above
Flesh Tribute

Fulgrim toppled in slow motion, like the mightiest tree in the forest felled without even knowing the rot was in its roots. Perturabo was at his brother’s side before anyone else in the amphitheatre was even aware of what had happened. He caught Fulgrim’s head as it struck the flagstones of the stage with a sickening crack. With a thought he summoned the Iron Circle and bellowed at the crowds now surging from their seating in horror to keep back.

‘Brother!’ cried Perturabo, scanning the upper tiers of the Thaliakron for signs of the sniper. He replayed the moment of the bullet’s impact, analysing and triangulating the shot’s origin point. He saw nothing, but any marksman worthy of the name would have already displaced.

The crashing footfalls of the Iron Circle surrounded him, forming an unbroken ring of protection. Legs braced, shields locked, the robots swathed Fulgrim and Perturabo in shadow and steel. The shot had struck Fulgrim on the right temple, a neat wound that appeared to have no twin on the opposite side. Whatever projectile the would-be assassin favoured was still inside his skull.

‘Fulgrim,’ said Perturabo. ‘Speak to me.’

‘Brother…’ said Fulgrim, his eyes like nuggets of onyx amid the streams of blood running down his face.

‘I’m here.’

‘Just think,’ whispered Fulgrim. ‘You will be able to say you were there…’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘You were there the day that Fulgrim fell.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Perturabo. ‘This is nothing. You and I both have taken worse wounds than this in our time.’

‘I fear you may be wrong, brother,’ said Fulgrim, reaching up to grip his arm as though ready to deliver a valediction.

Blood continued to stream down Fulgrim’s face, and Perturabo knew that shouldn’t be happening. Even a legionary’s body should have sealed the wound by now. A primarch’s physiology should have ended this blood flow almost instantaneously. Had the Emperor stooped to using the envenomed tools of the assassin now? Perturabo’s anger coalesced into a compressed supernova at such dishonourable stratagems. Only cowards refused to face their foes in the arena of battle, and the thought that his gene-father had sanctioned such shadow killers was a stain on every memory he had of him.

Perturabo heard the growl of his automata and the whine of their hammers powering up. Artificial muscles thrummed with building power, ready to destroy whoever or whatever was approaching.

Fulgrim stirred from his repose and said, ‘It is Fabius, my Apothecary…’

‘Let him in,’ ordered Perturabo, and the Iron Circle parted long enough to allow a hunched figure in the livery of the Emperor’s Children through. Perturabo took an instant dislike to this Fabius: the hollow cheeks, the unkempt hair and the gaunt hunger in the gimlet eyes that looked him up and down as though measuring his coffin.

The Apothecary’s armour seemed out of place on his body, like the carapace of something larger worn by the parasite that had killed it. A squatting spider of a mechanised contraption lurked at his shoulders. As he set to work on his fallen primarch, Perturabo smelled a witch’s brew of evil aromas – embalming fluids, noxious chemicals he couldn’t place and an abattoir’s worth of stale blood – that no amount of disinfectant would ever conceal.

The warrior was post-human, no question of that, but the sheer number of self-administered surgical scars visible through his thinned hair and upon his exposed forearms made Perturabo question whether that was enough for this man. Had the grotesques in Fulgrim’s carnivalia been his creations?

‘My lord!’ exclaimed Fabius, examining the bright, oxygen-rich blood leaking from the wound. ‘This must be how the Sons of Horus felt on Davin. It is truly the worst feeling I have known.’

‘Shut up and heal him,’ ordered Perturabo, in no mood for melodrama and disliking the comparison with the Warmaster.

‘Fabius,’ said Fulgrim. ‘I can feel it in my head.’

Fabius addressed Perturabo. ‘What manner of weapon did this?’

‘I don’t know, but the entry wound is too small for a bolt-round. There’s too much impact trauma for a las-weapon, so my guess is some kind of solid-slug rifle.’

Fabius nodded and turned back to Fulgrim, the flexing narthecium unit mounted on his shoulders obscuring the work he was doing. Perturabo wanted to step from the protection of the Iron Circle to find out what was happening beyond the Thaliakron, but he didn’t trust Fabius to be left alone with Fulgrim. Something told Perturabo that no one would be safe in this man’s company for long, their flesh a canvas upon which he would practise unnatural surgical experimentations.

Beyond the shields of the robots, Perturabo could hear the furious anger and growing terror of the crowd. They had all seen the Phoenician go down, and every second they were kept in the dark as to his fate would spawn ever more elaborate rumours. With a final suspicious glance at Fabius, Perturabo stepped from the Iron Circle’s protection.

He found the warsmiths of his Trident waiting for him, circling the artificial guardians like bull grox protecting a birthing mother. Emperor’s Children stood beyond them, scavengers waiting to pick off the weakest member of the herd. The imagery was unpleasant, but apt.

The Emperor’s Children moved with bow-taut urgency, desperate to learn of Fulgrim, but unwilling to risk the wrath of the Iron Warriors and their primarch’s bodyguard.

A warrior in thickly-ornamented Cataphractii plate strung with flayed skin and hung with ribbons of bone stepped forwards, his whole face a burn scar that had healed poorly and been inexpertly treated. The warrior’s eyes were cataracted nightmares of pink-veined fluid that wept viscous tears along the craggy ruin of his features.

‘Who are you?’ asked Perturabo.

‘Julius Kaesoron,’ answered the warrior. ‘First Captain. The Phoenician?’

‘He lives,’ said Perturabo. ‘It will take more than a poor marksman with a rifle to end a primarch.’

‘Let us see him,’ demanded Kaesoron, making to push past.

Perturabo put his hand on Kaesoron’s chest. ‘Don’t make me stop you,’ he said.

‘He is our primarch!’ protested the warrior.

‘And he is my brother,’ snapped Perturabo.

Kaesoron’s milky eyes swept over the highest tiers of the Thaliakron, his expression unreadable through his scarring.

‘So much for the vaunted Iron Warriors security,’ he said; an arrogant dismissal that made Perturabo want to smash his skull with Forgebreaker’s head. ‘This should not have happened.’

‘No,’ agreed Perturabo, forcing his anger down. ‘It shouldn’t. And if Fulgrim hadn’t insisted on this theatricality, then it could have been avoided. Not even Valdor’s warriors could have protected him.’

Kaesoron opened his mouth to disagree, but Perturabo shut him down first. ‘You can do nothing for your primarch now. Busy yourself with catching whoever did this. Hunt him down and kill him.’

‘The hunt is already under way,’ said Kaesoron. ‘A single marksman has no chance of escaping this treacherous act. Likely he will be caught within five hundred metres of the building.’

‘And if he is not?’

‘Even if by some miracle he manages to slip the net, there is no way he can get off-world or escape the fleets of ships in orbit,’ said Kaesoron.

Perturabo tested that thought and found it wanting. ‘If your fleet assets were arranged in any halfway recognisable formation, I might agree with you,’ he said.

Kaesoron stiffened at the insult, and Perturabo arched an eyebrow as he saw the man’s gauntlets curl into fists.

‘Do you want to die, little man?’ said Perturabo. ‘Or has my brother’s Legion become stupid as well as barbaric since swearing their oaths to Horus?’

‘We swore no oath to Horus,’ spat Kaesoron.

Perturabo hid his shock, but rather than pursuing Kaesoron’s remark with a logical follow-up question, he let its implication settle in the back of his mind.

‘Then listen to me, Julius Kaesoron, First Captain. This is my world and my amphitheatre. You are just an annoyance. Irritate me again and I will kill you.’

Kaesoron stepped back, contrite but also appearing energised by the threat of death.

Perturabo put Kaesoron from his mind and scanned the high reaches of the amphitheatre, his eyes coming to rest on the spot from where the assassin’s shot had been fired. A good position, with commanding views of all the major entrances to the amphitheatre. Plenty of shadows from which to shoot, and a convenient escape route at the rear. Whoever had taken the shot could not have wished for a better sniper’s perch.

Perturabo found that he hated the Thaliakron now. Its grandeur was sullied and its function perverted. Once again, a wonder he had created as a thing of beauty had been tarnished by those he had once loved.

Could nothing he raised up in glory be allowed even a moment to shine?

Perturabo turned as a Land Raider in the purple and gold of the Emperor’s Children drove into the Thaliakron through the main gates, its bulk dominating the stage and crushing the flagstones beneath its heavy tracks. Its guns were ornamented in filigree and carved scrollwork had been embellished with garish smears of blood and other bodily fluids. A row of Legion helmets hung from butchers’ hooks suspended on iron chains from the upper track guards: Iron Hands, Salamanders and Raven Guard for the most part, but Perturabo recognised a World Eaters helm and a Death Guard rebreather amongst the battlefield plunder. If Fulgrim possessed an Iron Warriors helm, he at least had the sense not to display such a trophy.

The Iron Circle disengaged from their defensive posture, straightening their legs and returning their shields to the locked position at their sides. Fulgrim stood proud in the centre of the battle-constructs, reborn from the ashes of his death. His features were still bloody, but where before Perturabo had seen the face of a martyr, now it was that of the resurrected.

‘Brother,’ said Fulgrim, coming forwards to embrace him again. ‘A miracle.’

Perturabo shook his head and said, ‘You live.’

Fulgrim lifted his hand to show Perturabo a long sliver of bloodstained steel, finely tapered and bent around its middle where its tip had flattened.

‘Barely,’ said Fulgrim. ‘Fabius had a devil’s job fishing that out. The angle of impact was just obtuse enough for it to deflect rather than penetrate. It travelled over the crown of my head and lodged on the opposite side.’

Fulgrim swept his bone-white hair back to show the raw incision Fabius had made in his opposite temple in order to remove the needle. A vivid purple line traced the route the projectile had taken, an arcing path of graceful curves and whorls that linked the two wounds and which had a pleasing symmetry to it.

‘Just as well you have a thick skull,’ said Perturabo.

Fulgrim laughed and said, ‘You have the truth of it, brother.’

Safely ensconced in the underground sanctuary of the Cavea Ferrum, Perturabo poured two tankards of heavily spiced wine and passed one to Fulgrim, who made a grand show of testing its vintage and aroma before sipping like an ingénue at her first performance. A convoy of Land Raiders had brought them from the chaos at the Thaliakron to the heart of the circumvallation at speed, as whooping bands of Fulgrim’s lunatic devotees spread the word of his miraculous survival.

‘You tell a grand tale,’ said Perturabo, draining his tankard and refilling it. ‘How much of it was true?’

Fulgrim grinned and shrugged. ‘Who knows? All of it, none of it. It does not matter how much is true and what is the sedimentary accretion of tale-tellers through the ages.’

‘If you’re looking for my Legion to join yours, then it damn well matters to me.’

‘You misunderstand, brother,’ said Fulgrim, idly scratching at the twinned wounds at his temples. ‘Gods and wars, ancient prisons… it is all mythic window-dressing. Yes, I may have… embellished some elements of the legend for dramatic effect, but the eldar bardic tradition is so dry it must be enlivened with a healthy dose of sturm und drang.’

‘So what is the truth of the legend?’ asked Perturabo, circling the plotting table piled high with his hundreds of architectural plans, knowing he would destroy them all when Fulgrim was gone. ‘Is there any at all?’

‘There is indeed,’ said Fulgrim, beckoning Karuchi Vohra to his side.

Perturabo halted in his circling, and fixed the eldar with his cold gaze.

‘So tell me, Vohra,’ he said. ‘What is the truth? And spare me my brother’s embellishments.’

‘The truth is that these weapons are real.’

‘You infer a lot from legends.’

Fulgrim put his hand on Perturabo’s shoulder. ‘Whether there ever was a creature known as the Angel Exterminatus means nothing at all. In all likelihood it is simply a constructed fantasy invented to conceal the darker truth of these weapons’ very existence,’ said Fulgrim.

‘Why would the eldar bother inventing such a fantasy?’

‘A terrible daemon god is a convenient way to excuse the creation of such dreadful things,’ answered Fulgrim. ‘Better for history to believe in its existence than the unpalatable truth that their so-called advanced species was capable of such destructive invention.’

‘I still don’t understand how you can say that their existence is fact,’ said Perturabo.

‘Because Karuchi Vohra has seen them,’ said Fulgrim.

Perturabo turned to face the amber-eyed eldar.

‘You have seen them?’ he demanded.

‘Yes,’ confirmed Vohra with a curt nod. ‘I have walked the spectral halls of the ancient citadel at the heart of what you know as the star maelstrom. A place called Amon ny-shak Kaelis.’

‘The city of unending night,’ translated Perturabo. ‘Sounds inviting.’

Vohra ignored his sarcasm and said, ‘I saw its great vaults and the wards placed around the weapons. It is a fastness of such strength that only the greatest siege-master could defeat its defences in order to seize the weapons.’

Perturabo ignored the blatant flattery and turned to Fulgrim. ‘Now I see why you want my Legion, brother. You need my warriors to break this eldar fortress open.’

‘True,’ admitted Fulgrim. ‘But that is not the only reason I come to you. This is your destiny, brother. Every path of your life has been leading you here. Why else would you alone have been plagued by visions of the star maelstrom since your earliest days?’

‘How do you know of that?’ asked Perturabo, suddenly wary and angry. ‘I told only Ferrus Manus, and he mocked my question.’

‘You forget, brother, I killed Ferrus,’ whispered Fulgrim with a conspiratorial grin that made Perturabo complicit in the act. ‘And there is no bond more intimate than murder. The Emperor saw to it that we primarchs are bound by ties of blood, Perturabo, blood and so much more. When Ferrus died, I drank down his thoughts and dreams – bitter and bland as they were – and learned something of his memory.’

Fulgrim tapped the pommel of his sword and said, ‘To be frank, I did him a favour by cutting off his head. He was such a mono-directional fool, so shut off to all the myriad sensations life has to offer. His was a wasted life, one that did not appreciate that gift for the boon it truly was.’

‘I suspect he might have seen things differently.’

‘Perhaps,’ laughed Fulgrim. ‘But that is the past, and I waste no time there. Only the future concerns me, and our future lies together. This is where you are meant to go, to help me in obtaining these weapons for the Warmaster. Help erase the memory of Phall by seizing this opportunity to remind Horus of the Fourth Legion’s power. This is your moment to claim the glory you have always been denied!’

‘You’re forgetting these weapons are still in the heart of a warp storm.’

‘Karuchi Vohra can guide us.’

‘How did you traverse the storm?’ asked Perturabo, rounding on Vohra. ‘You’re no Navigator.’

The eldar nodded and said, ‘I have travelled the Paths Above, my lord.’

‘The Paths Above?’

‘A secret and stable route that leads right to the heart of the star maelstrom, known only to a handful of my people. It is one of our most closely guarded secrets, and I offer it to you freely, my lords.’

Perturabo was sceptical, yet the prospect of such weapons lying in wait for someone to give them purpose once again intrigued him. The siege guns the Lion had handed over at Diamat were powerful, yes, but they were powerful in a mortally obvious way. They could level walls, decimate cities, but devices capable of toppling a galactic empire…

‘I don’t believe a lot of what you’ve told me, Fulgrim, but if there’s even a hint of truth in this, then we should act on it.’

‘The Emperor clearly believes in its truth,’ said Fulgrim, reaching up to tap the scar on his forehead. ‘He sends assassins to prevent me from harnessing your aid. A fraction of a degree higher and I would be as dead as Ferrus. We have to act now. If we don’t, our enemies certainly will.’

Perturabo hated the feeling he was being railroaded by Fulgrim’s argument, but without instruction from the Warmaster, this would at least put his Legion to good use until such orders arrived.

‘Very well,’ he said. ‘If they exist then we need to take possession of them. They can end this war by the threat of their existence alone.’

Fulgrim looked disappointed at his lack of imagination, but Perturabo hadn’t finished.

‘Of course, we’ll need to use them for that threat to be taken seriously, though the Emperor will have no choice but to surrender when he sees such awesomely destructive power.’

‘Surrender?’ said Fulgrim, his voice a low, seductive purr. ‘Horus does not look for surrender. Leave an enemy alive behind you and he will only turn on you. No, once the weapons are in our hands, we must use them to utterly annihilate the Emperor’s armies.’

‘Then you will do this without me,’ said Perturabo.

‘What did you say?’ said Fulgrim, setting down his tankard.

‘I will only join my Legion to yours if I take complete control over the weapons,’ said Perturabo with unbending finality. ‘I shall be their keeper and I will choose where and when they are used. The threat of their power must end this war before it gets out of control.’

‘Out of control?’ laughed Fulgrim with a mocking lilt. ‘We have long since passed that point. Please, brother, what is the point of having such weapons if we shrink from using them? Like your grand amphitheatre, that once existed only as a dream on wax paper. Look how wondrous it is. You would build it just to leave it empty and bereft of function?’

‘It has served its purpose, so I could tear it down without regret.’

‘Truly?’ said Fulgrim. ‘All that effort to raise it, and you could tear it down without a moment’s sorrow? You would not leave its legacy for others to chance upon and wonder at the genius of its creator?’

Perturabo shrugged. ‘It was built for you, brother. Do what you want with it.’

‘I shall,’ snapped Fulgrim.

Pain. It always came back to pain.

Cassander’s eyes flickered behind their lids, gummed shut by blood and dust. His mouth was dry and his flesh was hot. He let out a soft sigh as he realised he was still alive. His genhanced biology was re-knitting his broken body, regrowing blood vessels, weaving dense organ tissue and extracting every last molecule of his bodily reserves to heal his wounds.

Taking slow breaths, he appraised the biological messages his damaged flesh was sending him. He remembered a grazing shot to the head, and the throbbing tightness at his right temple told him that he would have a vicious scar to remind him not to lose his helmet. His breathing was laboured, most likely a lung collapsed, and the sluggishness of his limbs could only be the result of his secondary heart taking up the burden of his blood’s circulation.

He was cold and lying prone, but beyond that he knew little else.

His armour was gone, though he felt the invasive penetration of biometric trunking slotted home in many of his body plugs.

Apothecarion?

No, his last memory was the twin bloom of fire from a bolter’s muzzle, followed an instant later by searing pain in his chest. He’d been shot before, but never with such anger. It seemed a ridiculous notion – what did it matter how you were shot? – but the venom he’d felt from the Iron Warrior as he pulled the trigger was palpable.

He’d hated Cassander, more than anything else in the galaxy.

The citadel had fallen, that much was obvious, and a corollary to that was that he was now a prisoner of the enemy. Cassander tried to sit up, but he couldn’t move. His wrists, ankles, waist, chest and neck were secured by heavy clamps of leather and steel. He grunted and pulled against them, feeling something tear within him as he strained to break his bonds.

Conserving his strength, Cassander forced his eyes open, twisting his head around to learn of his surroundings. A domed ceiling of black bricks curved above him, and a bare lumen globe swayed in a cold breeze blowing through a low arch to his right. Water glistened on the tiled walls and banks of strange machines lurked in the shadows, bearing gurgling, hissing dewars of green glass. Strange scraps of flesh floated within each one, unknown things that defied any easy classification of form.

He smelled blood and ordure, the stench of large animals and cold metal.

The slab on which he lay was part of an arrangement of eight identical mortuary slabs arranged in a circular pattern around an encrusted drainage grille at the centre of the chamber. Several of the slabs bore opened bodies, the leavings of what looked like failed experiments in hideous transplant surgery, and a device of bronze and flesh hung suspended from the dome’s cupola. Its structure was a horrific meld of several combat servitors and surgical apparatus, a collection of withered scalpel limbs, drill appendages and cabling that looped around like intestines.

‘You shouldn’t struggle,’ said a voice. ‘He’ll hear you…’

‘Who’s that?’ demanded Cassander. ‘Locris? Kastor? Is that you?’

‘I don’t know those names.’

As more of his senses returned to normal, Cassander realised that one of the other slabs was occupied by a living being. Though much of the speaker’s body was encased in a full-body splint cage, Cassander saw the voice belonged to a Legion warrior.

And not just any Legion.

‘Imperial Fists,’ said Cassander, seeing the tattoo on the man’s exposed shoulder.

Even within the immobilising cage of the splint, his fellow legionary flinched. ‘I was. I failed. I don’t deserve to bear the name.’

‘Who are you?’ demanded Cassander. ‘How did you come to this place? Where are we anyway?’

‘You ask too many questions,’ said the Imperial Fist. ‘I’m no one. I should be dead. You shouldn’t talk to me.’

‘I am Captain Felix Cassander,’ he said slowly. ‘Identify yourself, legionary.’

The immobilised warrior didn’t speak, and Cassander was about to repeat his order when he received his answer.

‘Navarra,’ he said. ‘Legionary of the Sixth Company, weapon bearer to Captain Amandus Tyr of the Halcyon. En route to Isstvan III.’

‘Isstvan III? Then how are you here?’

Again a long pause before answering. ‘We never reached Isstvan. Ambushed. I was taken. On the Iron Blood.’

‘An Iron Warriors ship?’ guessed Cassander.

‘Aye,’ said Navarra. ‘Captain Tyr led an assault onto Perturabo’s vessel. We were to kill the enemy primarch. We failed. Thirteen hundred warriors dead for nothing. We reached the bastard’s throne room. He killed Tyr with one blow. The rest of us didn’t last much longer.’

Anger and guilt gave Navarra strength, but it was fleeting and his tortured voice drifted into silence. Cassander looked closer, peering through the complicated lattice of steel pins and bone-drilled splints that covered his body. Navarra’s flesh was hideously scarred and Cassander saw his legs ended at mid-thigh. Numerous feed lines had been inserted into his arms and neck and the stumps of his legs, and whatever these were, it was clear they were not pain balms.

‘Are we aboard an Iron Warriors vessel?’

‘No,’ said Navarra. ‘Would that we were.’

‘What do you mean? Where are we?’

‘This is the lair of Apothecary Fabius,’ said Navarra, his voice dropping to a whisper.

‘Who is Fabius?’

‘Emperor’s Children,’ hissed Navarra, his eyes screwed shut and his entire body tensed.

‘Fulgrim’s warriors?’ said Cassander. He hadn’t expected that, but it made no difference which of the traitor Legions held them. As Imperial Fists, it was their duty to try and escape and wreak as much harm on the enemy as possible.

‘How long have you been here? What do you know of the layout of this place?’

‘Nothing,’ said Navarra. ‘I should be dead.’

Anger flared in Cassander’s breast. ‘You have been grievously hurt, legionary, but you are not dead. You are an Imperial Fist, and you never stop fighting until they kill you. You disgrace the memory of your battle-brothers by giving up. We will find a way to fight back or we will die trying. Do you hear me?’

‘I hear you,’ said Navarra, and Cassander wondered what pain and tortures the Iron Warriors had inflicted upon him to so break his spirit. But hearts could be repaired, spirits mended and courage restored.

‘We are proud sons of Dorn, Navarra,’ said Cassander. ‘Our gene-father is the bulwark in our soul, the cold wind of Inwit that cools the reckless urges. We will either find a way to survive or we will make one.’

‘A noble sentiment,’ said a voice with the rasping dryness of a belly-crawling serpent. ‘But a misplaced one. There is no escape from my vivisectoria, Captain Cassander. Not alive anyway.’

The speaker slid into the room, silently and without apparent locomotion. Cassander hadn’t heard his approach, and a primal sense for loathsome things raised the hackles on the back of his neck at the sight of the flesh-cloaked surgeon who drew level with his chest.

The man was genhanced like him, but there the resemblance ended. Gaunt and hunched, his armour’s power unit clung to his back like a parasite, and clicking, wheezing armatures reached over his shoulders. Several of the organic-looking tubes had detached from the central apparatus and were busy suckling the bio-mechanical creation, retching gobbets of a foul-smelling black ichor into its veinous structure.

The man’s lips parted, as though enjoying the sensation.

‘I am Fabius,’ he said, stroking Cassander’s scarred chest. ‘And this is my chamber of wonders.’

‘Wonders? It is a place of abomination,’ hissed Cassander, struggling once again at his bonds. ‘You are a madman, and I will kill you.’

Fabius laughed, genuinely amused. ‘You would be surprised how often I hear that,’ he said. ‘But everyone who is transformed by my knives and nightmares soon learns to love the pain I give them. Pain leads to pleasure and pleasure can be such sweet suffering. I know you don’t understand that yet, but you will.’

The intestinal tubing released the bio-mechanical contraption on the Apothecary’s back as he moved to the edge of the chamber with soft footsteps. Cassander followed him as far as his restraints allowed, but lost sight of Fabius as he busied himself in the shadows with apparatus that clinked with the sound of metal on glass.

‘So kind of the Lord of Iron to present us with flesh tributes,’ said Fabius as a number of lumen orbs spontaneously ignited. ‘Gifts from a vassal to a master, you might say.’

Cassander now saw the full horror of the green glass dewars arranged around the room – a menagerie of body parts, harvested organs and preserved heads. Even in his horrified shock, the scale of these grim specimens told Cassander that they had come from the bodies of Space Marines. He saw markings denoting at least eleven Legions.

‘A hobby of mine,’ explained Fabius, relishing Cassander’s disgust. ‘I have viable tissue samples from all the Legions present on Isstvan V. Some given willingly, others… less so. But of all the samples I have in my collection, yours is the one I most anticipate unlocking. I imagine Dorn’s gene-seed is closest to the source.’

‘You would not dare tamper with the Emperor’s great work,’ said Cassander.

‘Dare?’ snapped Fabius. ‘I dare what even the Emperor fears to repeat. I have already learned much of His knowledge, and with every step I draw nearer to perfecting what He began in ignorance – the creation of the ultimate warrior.’

Cassander struggled against the bindings holding him fast to the slab, but there was no give in them.

‘Don’t waste your strength,’ chuckled Fabius, leaning over him as a host of blades unsheathed from his gauntlets with a loud snick. ‘You’ll need it for screaming.’

EIGHT

Departures

Little had changed in Perturabo’s command chamber since the Imperial Fists had boarded the Iron Blood. Its rivet-stamped beams arched up to a cross-latticed vault hung with empty birdcages, and the thrum of powerful machinery echoed in the depths of the walls. Dusty banners and tattered maps of Old Earth were hung with strips of oath paper, recording victories no one beyond this room could name and of which no remembrancer had ever taken note. The door would never be closed again and the bloodstains on the wall had dried to a sticky brown. A broken console on one wall still spat sparks whenever current surged through the local circuits.

Only the fragmented corpses of the Imperial Fists had been removed, tossed from an airlock in the wake of the engagement at Phall like so much waste.

Perturabo’s throne of cold iron, crafted from the molten remains of his adopted father’s treasury, stood empty at the far end of the chamber beneath high lancet windows of latticed armourglass that looked out onto the ruddy sphere of Hydra Cordatus. Reflected illumination from the system’s sun bathed the chamber in a cold, sepulchral light, and glittering points moved against the starfields, exposing the lie that they were stars themselves.

A vast fleet of ships orbited at high anchor, the bulk of two Legions jostling for space, but Forrix paid the sight no mind. His entire attention was focused on Perturabo, who stood staring at the fleet as it prepared to break orbit.

The order to withdraw from the planet’s surface had come swiftly, and he had broken down the circumvallation works in a matter of hours. Bulk lifters and siege-train workhorses had hauled the shaped ironworks and prefabricated elements back to the Legion freight ships, leaving the once-fertile valley an irradiated wasteland of churned earth, bare rock and iron-rich dust. Specialised bulk-haulers had dismantled the Cavea Ferrum in darkness and transported its component parts back to the Iron Blood under a shroud of secrecy. Barban Falk had once again made his boast that he would return and build here, but Forrix ignored his ingratiating words.

Yet even as the last ship had climbed into orbit, Forrix had a powerful sense that perhaps Falk might not be the only one returning to this world. With the siegeworks removed, the fleet had assumed position ready to depart orbit, a graceful ballet of efficiency that cared not for which master it fought.

The primarch stood on a raised dais, upon which sat his bloodstained throne, with the Legion’s senior warsmiths arranged before him in precise ranks, nearly two hundred warriors of superlative skill and genius. There at the front was Toramino, still eager to impress despite his earlier humiliation. Several of his fellow Stor-bezashk warsmiths gathered around in a show of solidarity, and Forrix again felt the stirrings of some vague unease at the sight of Toramino’s white hair and cold eyes.

Perturabo stepped forwards to the edge of the dais. ‘We are done with this world. Its fortress is dust, and its defenders ash.’

No cheer greeted Perturabo’s words, for he did not court the passions of his warriors, only their understanding.

‘We join our forces with that of the Third Legion, our mission to break open a xenos fortress and obtain weapons of such power that we will no longer need to take the metal to the stone. Win this war and our days of breaking earth will be over. We will be warriors again.’

Before Perturabo could continue, Toramino spoke up. ‘My lord, do we now take our orders from the Phoenician?’

Forrix held his breath and awaited violence, but Perturabo shook his head. ‘No, Toramino, we do not. Brother Fulgrim presented me with an opportunity to wipe away our failure to destroy the Imperial Fists at Phall, and I chose to take it. In the absence of orders from the Warmaster, we will seize the initiative and become stronger then ever before.’

Perturabo shifted his focus from Toramino and said, ‘That is all. Return to your Grand Battalions.’

The warsmiths snapped to attention, hundreds of booted feet slamming down in unison as they turned and marched from Perturabo’s chambers. Toramino and his cohorts were the last to leave, and Forrix watched them go with a mixture of trepidation and eagerness to achieve something worthwhile.

With the warsmiths gone, Perturabo turned and sat upon his throne, sitting back and letting the echoing silence of the chamber settle upon him. Forrix, Kroeger and Falk moved to their allotted positions before the primarch, each at the tip of a trident blade carved into the iron deck plate.

‘Opinions?’ asked Perturabo.

‘I don’t trust… the Emperor’s Children,’ said Forrix.

‘Diplomatic,’ said Perturabo. ‘But I can be more honest. I don’t trust Fulgrim.’

‘My lord?’ said Kroeger. ‘Then why are we going along with his scheme?’

Perturabo sighed. ‘Because we have no choice.’

Barban Falk spoke up. ‘We always have a choice, my lord. We are not slaves to the whims of the Phoenician’s… questionable honour.’

‘Once I would have killed you for a remark like that, Falk,’ said Perturabo. ‘Now I think you are being too lenient on my brother.’

‘Then why do we trust him?’ asked Forrix.

‘We don’t,’ answered Perturabo, leaning forwards to rest his chin on his steepled fingers. ‘I don’t know what lies in the star maelstrom, whether it’s some dead eldar god, a stockpile of weapons or something else entirely. But there’s something valuable there, that’s for sure.’

‘How can you know that?’ said Kroeger.

‘Because my brother knows the best lies are the ones with a measure of truth at their heart,’ said Perturabo. ‘And if there are weapons there, I think Fulgrim intends to seize them for himself and claim the glory of their discovery as he presents them to the Warmaster.’

‘If he even hands them over,’ added Kroeger.

Perturabo nodded. ‘Now you’re thinking like a triarch.’

Gathered from the scraps that had fought their way out of the killing ground of the Urgall Depression on Isstvan V, the crew and command structure of the Sisypheum was ad hoc at best. It was an Iron Hands strike cruiser, but that distinction had meant nothing when the bloodied survivors of the massacre had staggered back through the firestorm of betrayal in search of escape. Iron Hands and their mortal serfs formed the bulk of the crew, for most legionaries attempted to reach their own craft, but warriors of the Salamanders and a single Raven Guard were counted among its number.

In the wake of the slaughter, escape from the Isstvan system had been a nerve-shredding series of mad dashes under fire and silent runs through the traitor blockade, culminating in a final sprint to the gravipause, the minimum safe distance between a star’s mass and a vessel’s ability to survive a warp jump.

The Sisypheum had escaped the trap, but not without great cost.

The months that followed saw the Sisypheum embark on a series of hit-and-run attacks on traitor forces on the northern frontiers of the galaxy, wreaking harm like a lone predator swimming in a dark ocean. Traitor forces seeking flanking routes through Segmentum Obscurus were their prey; scout craft, cartographae ships, slow-moving supply hulks heavily laden with mortal troops, ammunition and weapons. Disruption and harassment were their main objectives until contact had been established with fellow survivors.

A series of coded astropathic blurts were detected on a shifting cycle of frequencies that matched up to numerical codes relating to the orbicular structure of a particular type of igneous rock found only on Medusa. Frater Thamatica had decrypted the message, and contact was established with disparate groups of loyalist forces that had escaped the massacre, and a stratagem of sorts agreed upon. With the X Legion too scattered to function in a traditional battlefield role, its surviving commanders found their own way to fight back: as the thorns in the flanks of the leviathan that distract it from the sword-thrust to the vitals.

Nykona Sharrowkyn was one of the stragglers swept up by the Sisypheum, Atesh Tarsa another. Neither was an Iron Hand, but such a distinction had become largely irrelevant in this arena of shadow war. Both had proven instrumental in allowing the Sisypheum to function and remind the traitors that the Emperor’s loyal warriors were far from out of this fight.

Around the moons of Ophiuchus they had ambushed a gaggle of bulk haulers filling their cavernous holds with weapons looted from its polar manufactories. Ten ships had been crippled or punched into the gravitational clutches of the planet, and another two forced to flee with their hulls trailing fire, spilling their cargo into the void.

When a squadron of Death Guard escorts had paused in their pursuit of an Imperial vessel to refuel, the Sisypheum had fallen upon them like a raptor at the hunt. With Sharrowkyn’s unparalleled knowledge of ambush tactics, they had caught the enemy ships at their most vulnerable and destroyed all three, never knowing if the naval crew ever learned of their mysterious benefactors.

At Cavor Sarta, Wayland and Sharrowkyn had captured an Unlingual Cipher Host – one of the so-called ‘Kryptos’ – a hybrid abomination creature of the Dark Mechanicum that had previously kept the enemy’s code network a cryptographic impossibility to break. With the Kryptos, loyalist commanders could now access the traitors’ coded communications.

And with that knowledge, Captain Ulrach Branthan had ordered the Sisypheum to make the circuitous journey to Hydra Cordatus and a meeting of traitor primarchs.

As Guilliman had once said of the XIII Legion, if you must fight an Ultramarine, pray you kill him. If he is still alive, then you are dead. The same could be said of the Iron Hands, and never more so than when they had suffered such inconceivable loss. If the heresiarch Warmaster expected the X Legion to crumble and fall apart with the death of Ferrus Manus, then it only went to show how fundamentally he had underestimated his brother’s Legion.

To allow grief, no matter its cause, to abrade the fighting heart of the Iron Hands would be to admit weakness into their ranks. If anything, the awesome, unimaginable scale of their pain had hardened their resolve and made them even more dangerous.

They had turned grief into hatred.

Ulrach Branthan was a revered captain of the Iron Hands, but Wayland always felt a great sadness each time he went to the chamber. Together with Nykona Sharrowkyn, he made the approach to the captain’s sealed quarters under the watchful gaze of two Morlock warriors.

Septus Thoic and Ignatius Numen stood at the end of the wide corridor. Both were warriors who had seen the very worst the galaxy could throw at them and had spat back in its face. Fellow survivors of Isstvan V, they had been amongst the very first Iron Hands to make planetfall, marching alongside the best and bravest of the X Legion. Like all those who had escaped the massacre, they had cut their warplate with the names of the fallen, but these warriors had a name acid-etched on their shoulder guards that marked them out as special even in a brotherhood of remarkable warriors.

They had seen Ferrus Manus die.

The lights were low, for power consumption was rigorously controlled by Cadmus Tyro, the de facto commander of the vessel in the increasingly extended times between Ulrach Branthan’s moments of wakefulness.

The black armour of the two Morlocks was inscribed with intricate scriptwork, each name inscribed over the cuts, tears and burns inflicted on Isstvan V. Like other veterans, they had refused to repaint or repair their armour until the traitor who had murdered their primarch was dead.

Thoic’s face was bisected by a curling series of scars inflicted by a laughing swordsman of the Emperor’s Children, while Numen’s features had the plasticised sheen of synth-skin after a close-range plasma detonation had seared his battle helm to his skull. His flash-burned eyes had been replaced by simple targeting optics, but his hearing was almost entirely gone.

Wayland nodded to the Morlocks.

‘Iron Father,’ said Septus Thoic. ‘Good to have you back aboard.’

‘It is good to be back,’ responded Wayland. Sharrowkyn simply nodded.

‘Did you see him?’ asked Ignatius Numen, too loudly, each word carefully enunciated.

Wayland didn’t need to ask who Numen meant.

‘We did,’ said Wayland, turning to Sharrowkyn.

‘What did he look like?’

Wayland wished he could tell them that he had seen a monster, a creature of ultimate evil, but that would be a deception, and any Iron Hand would prefer the truth over glossed fiction.

‘He looks unchanged, my brothers,’ said Wayland, signing his answer for the virtually deafened Numen. ‘He is the Phoenician.’

Seeing their disappointment, he added. ‘But he is no longer handsome. Our Raven Guard brother shot him in the head.’

‘Did you kill him?’ cried Numen.

‘He fell,’ said Sharrowkyn. ‘I can say no more than that.’

Septus Thoic at last looked directly at Sharrowkyn. ‘You and I do not see eye to eye, Raven Guard, and we never will, but I thank you for that shot.’

‘Pay Septus no mind,’ said Ignatius Numen loudly, gripping Sharrowkyn’s hand and shaking it hard enough to hurt. ‘Anyone that spills that bastard’s blood is a brother of mine.’

Sharrowkyn nodded his thanks, but kept silent.

‘You’ll be needing to speak to the captain?’ asked Thoic.

‘Yes.’

‘The Frater and Captain Tyro are in there with Tarsa.’

‘Apothecary Tarsa,’ said Wayland. ‘He has a rank and you will use it, regardless of his Legion. Is that understood?’

Morlocks were the veterans of the Legion, but even they had to respect the word of an Iron Father. Both warriors nodded and made a fist of their iron left hands.

‘Enter, Iron Father,’ said Thoic, placing his fist against the lock plate and making a complex series of micro-movements with his fingertips. The cog-toothed mechanisms securing the door hissed open and a wave of cold, static-charged air washed over Wayland and Sharrowkyn. They passed through the door and into Captain Ulrach Branthan’s cryonic sanctum, a place of sterile white and silver. A laboratory, a sepulchre, a shrine to mortality and the defiance of time’s passage all in one.

The chamber was an insulated blast-chiller, lined with machinery and floored with thermally shielded cabling, power sources and frost-limned lights that cast their illumination in anti-senesence frequencies. Four figures filled the space: one standing apart with his arms folded across his broad chest, two working on the guts of a machine that even Wayland struggled to understand.

And the fourth…

The standing figure was Cadmus Tyro, a captain and former equerry to Captain Branthan. His hairless head was tanned walnut brown, one eye a cold green augmetic, the other an equally cold hazel orb, and his half-mechanised, half-human face was pulled in a permanent grimace of ill-temper. A golden-winged eagle, beyond the ken of the Mechanicum adepts who had studied it, perched on one shoulder, preening its glitter-sheen wings with its razored beak. The mechanised creature had been with Branthan since a foolhardy expedition into the Land of Shadows as a youth, but had since attached itself to Tyro, faithfully watching over its new master.

Branthan called it Garuda, and it had gone into battle many times atop the war standards of the Iron Hands. The crew of the Sisypheum simply knew it as ‘the Bird’, and it had survived the Isstvan massacre without so much as a scratch on its golden body. Some said its ancient technologies were beyond the reach of contemporary weapon tech to harm, others that it was simply lucky. More desperate whispers even claimed it was a sign of the Emperor watching over the Legion in these troubled times.

Frater Thamatica knelt with his four servo-arms repairing a chugging coolant unit, as a dozen probes simultaneously worked on multiple components at once. His red cloak was pulled to one side, and the heaviest of his mechanised servo-arms turned a heavy fuel cylinder around, as if looking for a leak or other imperfection that was causing it to function at less than optimal efficiency. Thamatica looked up briefly from his labour and gave Wayland a curt nod, a gesture of respect between Iron Fathers.

Beside the Frater was a warrior in the muted jade of the Salamanders, the ivory heraldry on his shoulder blurred by the accumulation of frost. Atesh Tarsa’s black skin and coal-red eyes were in stark contrast to the monochromatic chamber, almost alien, yet Wayland had found the Salamanders Apothecary to be among the most human of them all.

It had already been decreed that, upon Tarsa’s death, his name should be carved on an iron plaque and hurled into the magma-filled caldera of Mount Karaashi. There it would become part of Medusa itself and the molten metal that flowed beneath its shifting lands.

No greater honour could be conferred upon a warrior not of the Legion, and Tarsa had accepted the accolade with quiet solemnity. It was an honour well deserved, for the care the Salamanders Apothecary had given the final occupant of the chamber had earned him the undying respect of every Iron Hand aboard.

Encased in a silver casket with a frosted canopy of ice-cold glass lay Ulrach Branthan, Captain of the 65th Company, iron-blooded son of the Nirankar Clan. His body was unmoving, shrouded in motionless streams of freezing vapour. Even through the white mist and frost-webbed glass, Wayland could see the mortal wounds done to Branthan. Both his legs were horribly mutilated, one little more than stringy sinews of ruptured meat and heat-fused bone, the other severed just above the knee.

One arm was held to the body by a splintered nub of bone and tattered scraps of skin. His arm was missing much of its mechanical structure and all but one of the fingers had been broken off in the flight from Isstvan. Branthan’s chest was a ruin of four bolter impact craters that ran in a ragged line from hip to sternum.

Under anything approaching normal circumstances, the captain would have been accorded the honour of being interred in a Dreadnought sarcophagus, but such an option was unavailable with their severely limited resources. Brother Bombastus had already demanded the Iron Fathers remove him from his sarcophagus, surrendering his own existence to allow the captain to live again as their only functional Dreadnought. Branthan had graciously declined the offer, knowing that he would never be as fearsome as ‘Karaashi’ Bombastus, the Iron Thunder of Medusa.

Clamped across the captain’s torso like a mechanised arachnid parasite was a glittering device of coiled silver and bronze. Its central mass squatted on his chest, while its segmented appendages encircled his body. Monofilament wires extruded from its multiple limbs wormed their way into the captain’s flesh all across his torso, and though it looked painful, Wayland knew the Heart of Iron was all that was keeping Branthan alive.

That and the stasis field generated within his casket.

Tyro turned as Wayland and Sharrowkyn entered, his grim face somehow managing to look grimmer than usual. The cyber-eagle fixed whirring optics on them both, passing their biometric information to him in a series of binaric squawks.

‘This had better be worth it, Sabik,’ the captain said.

‘You know it is,’ answered Wayland. Tyro and the other senior officers had already heard the recording Wayland and Sharrowkyn had made on Hydra Cordatus.

‘It sounds like they’re chasing blind superstition,’ said Tyro. ‘And I don’t like basing a mission on the words of a traitor.’

‘You don’t have to like it,’ said Wayland, tiring of Tyro’s sniping. ‘That they believe it is enough, and if there’s any substance to what the Phoenician said, then do you want to risk being wrong? If those weapons exist, we can’t risk Horus getting his hands on them.’

‘He doesn’t have long, you know,’ sighed Tyro, as if Wayland hadn’t spoken. ‘The Heart’s keeping him alive, but it’s killing him too. We’re taking a great risk in bringing him out like this. For all sorts of reasons.’

‘I know that, Cadmus,’ said Wayland. ‘But he needs to hear this.’

‘So you saw Fulgrim and Perturabo?’ boomed Thamatica, finally standing from his work and sweeping his cloak back around him. ‘Shame you didn’t kill them. I’m cooking up a little something that might have helped with that, a thermic displacement beamer. Deadly little thing. Works on the entropic quantum theory of all things existing at all times. If I can get it to work properly, you could swap elements in the heart of a star with a corresponding element of a person. I imagine that would ruin anyone’s day, even a primarch’s.’

‘Sharrowkyn took a shot at Fulgrim,’ said Wayland.

‘Did he now?’ said Thamatica with an appreciative grunt. ‘Didn’t kill him though, I expect.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Sharrowkyn. ‘We had to leave in a hurry.’

‘Aye, we’re aware of that,’ snapped Tyro. ‘The Sisypheum had to make dozens of manoeuvres to avoid detection by the traitor fleet, and you don’t need me to tell you how much fuel that cost us.’

‘You’re right,’ agreed Wayland. ‘I don’t need that. So we should get started.’

Tyro conceded the point and nodded to Thamatica and Atesh Tarsa. ‘How long?’

Apothecary Tarsa consulted a data-slate and said, ‘I would not recommend removing the stasis field for more than a minute. Captain Branthan’s life is limited, even with the Heart of Iron attached.’

‘It’s supposed to heal him, but you say it’s killing him?’ said Sharrowkyn.

‘I understand little of what it is doing to him,’ confessed Tarsa, his voice cultured and precise. ‘It appears to be attempting to regrow some of his major organs, but with each iteration of renewal, his vitals go down across the board. If we were to let time take its course, the captain would be dead before it had repaired him enough to live.’

‘None of us truly understand its workings,’ said Thamatica. ‘It’s old tech, one of the few pieces left intact after Old Night, much like Branthan’s eagle there. The primarch himself found it during one of his travels into the Land of Shadows.’ Thamatica laughed warily. ‘Said one of the ghost clansmen gave it to him while he hunted the great silver wyrm.’

‘Enough,’ said Tyro. ‘We don’t need another history lesson, Frater.’

‘Ah, youth,’ said Thamatica, addressing Sharrowkyn and unimpressed by Tyro’s brusqueness. ‘They forget that history is the great constant of our species. So much changes, yet so much, sadly, remains the same.’

‘Frater?’ said Tarsa. ‘We’re ready. Brothers Sharrowkyn and Wayland, are you ready?’

Wayland nodded and unclipped the vox-thief from his belt. He plugged the trailing copper wires running from its internal memory coil into a pair of sockets on the side of Captain Branthan’s casket.

‘I’ve compressed the vox-recording into a data blurt,’ he said. ‘Everything we heard will be transferred to Captain Branthan in less than a second. Give the word when his cortical functions are high enough for cognition.’

Tarsa bent to the console controlling the cryo-suspension as Thamatica busied himself with the stasis field. Both men faced each other like mortuary attendants.

‘Raising internal temperatures,’ said Tarsa. ‘Zero point five degrees to one point five on a ten-second gradient.’

‘Disengaging stasis field in five, four, three, two, one. Mark.’

A digital chronometer began counting down the seconds as the mirage-like shimmer enveloping the medicae casket flickered out of existence. A wave of cold spread from it, freezing air kept at bay by a tiny bubble of time taken out of the universe. Wayland alternated his glances between Branthan’s hollowed-out face and the readouts on the monitors. Slow-arcing waves were growing in amplitude as brain activity magnified with the steadily increasing temperature.

Branthan’s eyelids flickered, and the blood oozing from his many wounds flowed sluggishly onto the absorbent mat upon which he lay. The Heart of Iron tightened its grip on his chest, its serpentine arms constricting around his body as though seeking to crush him. More of the monofilament hairs whipped from its glistening limbs and pushed through his hard skin to the organs below.

The captain’s head arched back and a tortured breath escaped him, as though the pain that had been kept at bay renewed its attack with interest. The eagle let out a plaintive squawk at the captain’s renewed signs of life.

‘Now,’ said Tarsa, and Wayland pressed the transmit button on the vox-thief. There was no outward sign that anything had changed, but the panel on the front of the device indicated that the data had been successfully transmitted. All they could do now was wait.

The seconds ticked by and Wayland watched the count reach thirty. The captain’s breath came in short, pain-filled hikes, the flow of blood from his ruined body becoming steadier as his body thawed. Each revivification was taking longer to rouse the captain from his deep hibernation, and it was only a matter of time before he would simply slip away rather than awaken.

‘It’s not working,’ said Cadmus Tyro. ‘Shut it down.’

‘Give it time,’ said Thamatica. ‘Brain activity is increasing.’

‘Temperature at optimal levels,’ said Tarsa, modulating the admixture of stimulants and Larraman coagulants being pumped into the captain’s bloodstream.

‘I said shut it down,’ ordered Tyro. ‘He’ll be dead before he reaches consciousness.’

‘We have time,’ said Thamatica.

‘No. You don’t. Re-engage stasis. Now.’

‘No.’

‘Ulrach?’ said Cadmus Tyro, and Wayland saw the equerry’s bitter countenance soften at the sound of his friend’s voice. Even artificially rendered through the casket’s augmitters, there was no mistaking the power and authority of the Iron Hands captain. Garuda flapped its metallic wings and perched on the edge of the casket, cawing in welcome. Branthan’s eyes opened, and Wayland’s heart went out to this wounded brother as he saw the sheer effort of will it was taking to maintain his composure in the face of such agony.

‘Wayland’s recording inloaded. No choice. We go after them. We stop them.’

Blood flowed freely from Branthan’s wounds. That he was still alive, let alone able to communicate and process information, was a miracle of endurance and fortitude.

‘We don’t even know if there’s any truth to what they were talking about,’ said Tyro.

‘Irrelevant. Something is there. The traitors want it, so we deny it to them.’

‘This is your order?’

‘It is. Make it happen. Upon the anvil.’

‘And by the Iron,’ finished Tyro. ‘It will be so.’

‘One minute,’ said Tarsa, and a mist of cold air billowed around the casket.

‘Re-engaging stasis field,’ said Thamatica.

‘Until the next time, broth–’

Branthan’s words were cut short as he was shut off from the passage of time by the shimmer-haze of the stasis field. The captain’s eagle loosed a cry of machine sorrow and the silence that followed was that shared emptiness at a beloved’s deathbed, leaving each of the Iron Hands wrapped in their own thoughts of mortality, grief and anger.

‘We have our orders,’ said Wayland, as much to break the silence as to say anything of use.

Cadmus Tyro nodded, struggling to mask his emotions and setting his jaw. He exhaled deeply and Wayland was reminded of the decades of friendship that bonded Tyro and Branthan. No easy thing to see a friend in torment, worse if that torment was maintained by your own hand.

‘A damned thing,’ said Thamatica, placing an iron gauntlet on the frozen glass of the casket.

Wayland stepped towards the casket and placed his mechanised hand next to Thamatica’s.

‘We’ll see it done, my captain,’ he said.

Tyro nodded and placed his iron fist next to the silent mech-eagle. ‘Sleep, friend, and know peace while we shoulder your burden.’

The moment passed and, respects paid, the Iron Hands stepped away from their mortally wounded captain.

‘The word is given,’ said Cadmus Tyro at last. ‘We need to keep ahead of the traitors if we’re to stop them, is that understood?’

‘It will be done,’ assured Wayland.

‘And when we get to the warp storm?’ asked Thamatica, addressing Wayland. ‘Can that guide of yours get us through it?’

‘I believe so,’ said Wayland.

‘I don’t like it,’ said Tyro. ‘I spent a lifetime fighting his kind. Can’t trust them.’

‘He knows a way through,’ said Wayland. ‘A secret way known as the Paths Below.’

Once again the Legion captains gathered in the Heliopolis. Fulgrim was to hold court and word was that it would be rapturous. Wounded starlight from the churning warp storm beyond the system’s edge fell in a column through the coffered dome of blood-splashed gold. Lucius had often wondered what secret debauches had taken place here to have splashed blood so high, and why he had not been part of them.

He contented himself with the delicious images his imagination conjured to fill that lacuna. Reality would only disappoint, so where was the value in knowing the truth? Lucius’s twin swords were sheathed at his narrow hips, one a blade Fulgrim had given him in the wake of Isstvan, the other a fractal blade taken from the corpse of a skitarii suzerain on Prismatica.

They were itching to be held, though Lucius told himself that was simply his need to match himself against an opponent of worth. Something sadly lacking within his own Legion. He’d hoped to goad one of the Iron Warriors into a challenge, but even the hulking brute with the temper had looked like poor sport.

The pale, bull-headed statues arranged around the walls were sticky with a fresh layer of death fluids. Blood trails arced in long teardrop sprays that spoke of severed arteries and great violence. The scorched banners were no less defaced, the reminders of the Legion’s heritage virtually illegible now and telling nothing of its former allegiance. Lucius wanted to rip them down, to burn them and dance in the flames.

He circled Fulgrim’s black throne upon its garish and vulgar plinth of broken stone, remembering a time when he had thought to test his blades against the Phoenician himself. The thought of how he had nearly fallen into the primarch’s trap gave him a delicious frisson that few things could in these bland days. His mouth went dry at the memory of watching the captains of the Legion in battle against Fulgrim in the Gallery of Swords aboard the Andronius.

They had believed Fulgrim to be something other than he appeared and had captured him, intending to inflict the most sublime pain to drive out whatever had infested their primarch’s body. It had been a ruse, of course, the Phoenician’s perverse way of testing their devotion; self-indulgent theatre to flaunt his power and reveal his true purpose to his devoted warriors.

Those warriors were gathered around him, arranged without heed for old ranks or former position. All that now mattered to the Emperor’s Children was that sensation be indulged, that every experience be wrung dry of indulgent excess. The archaic terminology of rank was slowly becoming a thing of the past. Lucius regarded each one in turn, imagining them coming at him with weapons unsheathed and picturing how he might despatch each one with a single blow.

Julius Kaesoron circled in opposition to him. The Favoured Son, as he was now known, avoided his gaze with a fixedness that made Lucius smile. His face was cut with fresh recasting, moulding his features into a nightmarish pastiche of humanity, a mask of flesh transfigured beyond all sanity by bone grafts, horn implants and ocular components that had reshaped his eyes into too-wide orbs of utter blackness.

Marius Vairosean and his Kakophoni basked in the shrieking discordia blaring from the ceiling-mounted vox-casters. The screams of Isstvan V had been replaced with the music composed by Bequa Kynska for her great Maraviglia, suitably amplified, distorted and reworked by the primarch himself. Its shrieking cadence was a rare note of stimulation, and Lucius paused a moment to listen to the jagged spikes of music that jangled and tore at his senses. Its violence was diverting, but the armoured bodies of the Kakophoni jerked and danced like the marionettes of a demented puppeteer, their bizarre sonic weaponry crackling and throbbing as they absorbed the potency of the diabolical sounds.

Krysander of the Blades stood immobile, his pouting expression hardened at having been summoned from his chamber of terror and flesh brutalising. His hooked tongue licked cracked lips, putting Lucius in mind of a basking lizard too far from water. The daggers thrust through the flesh sheaths of his bare chest and thighs made him look like some pre-Unity techno-barbarian warlord, an impression only enhanced by the cloak of razor thorns tearing at his back.

The hooks and rings piercing the face of Kalimos were linked by taut chains that would prick and tear the flesh in new and exotic ways with each word he spoke. Idly, Lucius wondered which words would cause Kalimos the most pain, and resolved never to say anything that would give him cause to voice them. To deny Kalimos his desired pain gave Lucius a moment of pleasure, but it vanished a heartbeat later, as ephemeral and fleeting as most such petty amusements.

Lonomia Ruen and Bastarnae Abranxe stood together, the latter having transferred his blood affections from the dead Heliton to the venom-master. Ruen’s armour was festooned with daggers and razor spikes, each coated in one of his many amusingly lethal toxins. Abranxe wore his twin swords in imitation of Lucius, and the idea that his skill with a blade was even close to matching his was laughable. The scar Lucius had given him as a reminder of that fact was now hidden beneath a tattoo.

Fulgrim swept into the Heliopolis with a fanfare of shrieking slaves crawling before him, a roiling carpet of flesh to be crushed underfoot by the primarch’s titanic strides. They pulled and clawed at one another to feel the primarch’s killing weight upon them as it snapped their bones and pulped their organs, each skeletal slave howling in pleasure as it died. Fabius trailed in the primarch’s wake, his monstrous Chirurgeon clicking and snapping like a living thing, and his appearance made Lucius want to kill something. Two hooded figures marched on either side of the Apothecary. One Lucius recognised as the eldar guide, but his interest was piqued at the sight of the second. He had the bulk of a legionary, but moved with the shuffling gait of a sleepwalker or a cripple.

‘My sons,’ said Fulgrim, ascending to his throne with a single bound and leaving his hooded companions at the foot of its rubble plinth. ‘Everything I desire is within our grasp. We are a step closer to realising my dream of the City of Mirrors and seeing the reflection of the Angel Exterminatus looking back at us.’

Clad in armour of gold and purple, Fulgrim wore his long white hair braided into painful-looking cornrows and a single scalp lock with a silver blade woven into its end. A patchwork pelisse of draconic scale, torn from the bodies of dead Salamanders, hung from his left shoulder, while a quilt of midnight black feathers draped his right. A mosaic of ivory chips that had once been the iconography upon the armour of Ferrus Manus formed an eagle upon the primarch’s breastplate, one with both heads sagging upon broken necks.

‘Perturabo has aligned his Legion with us, and his warriors will storm the gates of hell to bring about the apotheosis whispered of in the farthest corners of the warp,’ said Fulgrim, and his warriors cheered themselves hoarse in adoration. Fulgrim basked in their devotion, feeding on their love with an indulgent smile that did not include them.

The primarch lifted his hands to his head, placing his fingertips just below the marks on his temple, one an entry wound, the other a scar where Fabius had dug the needle from his skull.

‘Though my brother’s help was not won without cost,’ said Fulgrim with a winning smile. ‘I had to allow our enemies to shoot me in the head to secure it. Ah, with such unsubtle wiles do we ensnare the foolish and the naïve.’

The Emperor’s Children roared, yet Lucius felt himself curiously detached from the cheering, as though Fulgrim’s plans were an irrelevance.

‘And when Perturabo realises you have lied to him? What then?’

Lucius searched for the source of the voice, and was shocked to find it was his own.

The words had sprung unbidden from his throat and the thrilling surge of blood around his body was like a powerful burst of adrenaline straight to the heart. He heard a savage intake of breath from the Legion warriors around him, and resisted the urge to draw his swords. It felt as though the words had been placed in his skull, and burst forth of their own volition.

‘Lucius,’ purred Fulgrim. ‘Always the spiteful remark and the barb that steals my thunder.’

‘My lord,’ said Lucius. ‘I don’t know–’

‘And I had such high hopes for you,’ said Fulgrim, descending the rubble slopes of the plinth. Lucius had already seen that to draw blades against Fulgrim would be to die, but the urge to bare his steel was almost irresistible.

‘I don’t know where those words came from, my lord,’ said Lucius.

‘Hush, Lucius, it’s all right. I know,’ said Fulgrim.

‘You do?’

‘There is nothing I do not know of my Legion, Lucius. Remember that, always. To forget is to risk grave consequences. Isn’t that right, Eidolon?’

At first Lucius thought he’d misheard. He couldn’t have heard the name his primarch had just said. Fulgrim must have bestowed the late Lord Commander’s name upon another.

‘Behold the Risen One!’ cried Fulgrim, pulling back the hood of the robed figure who had entered with Fabius. A collective gasp of astonishment swept around the Heliopolis at the sight of the warped features, the stretched-out jaw and the face of a warrior thought dead at the hands of the primarch himself.

Lord Commander Eidolon threw off his robes, revealing his armoured form, gleaming and painted in neon colours that offended the eye. Barbs of coiled wire trailed scraps of hessian from his shoulder guards, and his mighty hammer was slung in a looping series of bandoleer straps that buckled in a slash of leather across his chest. A raw suture ran the circumference of his neck in a perfectly even line.

His skin was the colour of faded parchment, his eyes black and glassy, dead like a doll’s. He limped towards Lucius, a lipless grin splitting his already too-wide mouth. Lucius felt his skin crawl at the sight of a dead man walking, repulsed and exhilarated at the same time.

‘Surprised to see me, swordsman?’ gurgled Eidolon.

‘I saw you die,’ he replied. ‘I drank wine mixed with your blood and spinal fluid.’

‘And yet I live.’

Lucius laughed. ‘That is life? You can barely walk and if I drew my sword, I’d cut you down before you’d get that stupidly big hammer free.’

‘I need no hammer to kill the likes of you,’ said Eidolon. ‘The things I can do now–’

Even before the last word was out of Eidolon’s mouth, Lucius had both swords drawn and the blades resting crossed on either side of the Lord Commander’s gorget.

‘I’ll cut that head off for good this time,’ said Lucius.

‘Hush, my sons,’ said Fulgrim, clearly enjoying this reunion of old enemies. ‘Eidolon yet lives because I desire it so. He has a part to play in ensuring the City of Mirrors is built to my exacting specifications. Now lower your blades.’

Lucius nodded and spun his swords, ramming them back into their thigh sheaths.

Fabius stepped forwards and said, ‘Thanks to my ministrations, the Lord Commander’s body will regain its former strength and more in time. Pray I might do the same for you one day, swordsman.’

Lucius laughed in the Apothecary’s face. ‘Save your breath, Fabius. No one’s going to kill me, not in this lifetime or any other. They wouldn’t dare.’

‘They will,’ said Fulgrim, with a knowing wink. ‘One day they will, but like Eidolon, you will rise again, my beloved son. Though your rebirth will be somewhat more enjoyable, I think. For you, at least.’

Emboldened by his continued survival and Fulgrim’s cryptic words of a future beyond this moment, Lucius ignored Eidolon’s baleful stare and said, ‘Then I ask again, my lord. What happens when Perturabo finds out you have lied to him?’

Fulgrim moved to stand in the centre of the Heliopolis until his body was limned by the poisonous light of the warp storm’s grotesque eye. He spread his arms wide, the draconic scale and raven feathers billowing around him like two almighty wings in a sourceless wind.

‘By the time my dull brother realises the truth it will be too late for him,’ said Fulgrim in the sickly light that sloughed from him like a serpent’s skin. ‘The maugetar stone will have done its work and I will have what I want. And the Angel Exterminatus will arise from the flames of his death.’

Theogonies – II

He was alive, and that stark fact alone surprised him. Cylindrical walls of buckled silver encircled him, a capsule of metal that he had no memory of being placed within. Light streamed through a large tear on one side of the tube, shimmering and inconstant, like sunlight reflected from the surface of a tidal lake. He had never seen a lake, but knew instinctively what one would look like, how the cold waters would feel on his skin and the sense of freedom that would come from swimming the blue-green depths.

He unsnapped a number of trailing cables from his body and turned himself around in the cramped confines of the tube. As he crawled along to the break in the walls, he caught sight of his reflection in the smooth walls of his…

His what?

His prison, his refuge or his home?

No, none of those words felt right.

His features were those of a powerful man – youthful, but one to whom others would willingly bend the knee. The jaw was square, the hair dark as midnight, his eyes a warm, gold-flecked green. It was the face of a man upon whose shoulders great burdens could be placed without fear of them being unseated.

He liked the face, pleased at how it had been wrought.

He was naked, but the absence of clothes did not trouble him. He knew nothing of modesty and took a moment to admire the perfection of his godlike physique. He laughed at the vanity of the thought, and with the grin of a man who knows the world is at his feet, pushed at the damaged section of the curved silver walls. The material was soft and pliant to his touch, and he easily bent the honeycombed structure open enough to allow him egress. He boosted himself up and climbed from the reflective interior like a newborn from a glittering chrysalis.

He dropped to the ground, and stared in wonder at his surroundings.

He stood within a vast crater – a hundred kilometres wide at least – deep in the belly of what had once been a colossal mountain of black rock and ice. The crater was a forest of spiral-fluted stalagmites, its floor webbed with cracks through which scalding vents of steam billowed and spurts of molten rock jetted. The heat was incredible, and warm rain misted the air; ice as it toppled into the crater, liquid as it fell, steam before it reached the bottom.

Towering cliffs soared a thousand metres above him, and cascades of ice-bearded rock fell into the crater from the splintered rim. Billowing clouds of dust and smoke obscured the sky and the mountain groaned and shook with seismic tremors.

His arrival had caused this; he was sure of it.

The walls of the cliffs were a curious mix of translucent ice, embedded metal and broken structural arches, all veined with millions of silver threads that trembled like imprisoned fireflies. Golden pulses of bioluminescence travelled the network, like misfiring synapses in a damaged brain. The glittering light shimmered all around him, like newborn suns in a crystal sky.

It was quite the most beautiful thing he could ever have imagined.

Tearing his eyes from the magnificent vista of the crater, he took a moment to inspect the capsule from which he had emerged. Exactly nine metres long and crumpled with its terrific impact upon the mountain, its surfaces were stencilled with symbols he did not yet understand and embedded with jewels that winked with their own internal light.

Where had the capsule come from?

Was its presence here deliberate or an accident?

Boxy devices on its upper surfaces trailed a profusion of wires and ribbed tubing. They drooled clear fluids that smelled of chemicals and exotic elements he could not name. His eyes were drawn to a brushed iron plate beneath a circular window ringed with heavy metal seals and thick rivets.

Upon the plate was a single letter: X.

No, not a letter. A representation of the number ten.

And with that recognition came thoughts of others. Were there more like him?

He had no recall of any such brotherhood, but knew on the deepest, most primal level, that he was part of something greater than himself. United in purpose, vying for primacy, he was strong.

Alone, he was nothing.

Shaking off a self-pitying sense of loneliness, he studied the crater once again, letting details he had previously glossed over come to the fore. One thing was immediately apparent: this was no chance formation of rock within the mountain, its shape too geometric and its arrangement too precisely symmetrical to have formed naturally. He watched the play of light through the walls, seeing a pattern in its ostensibly random movement, a pattern that was now disrupted.

The heart of that pattern led to the centre of the crater, where he saw hints of an angular structure nestled between the curling stalagmites. He set off towards it, his strides long and sure, confident to the point of arrogance. He closed the distance rapidly, weaving between cracks of superheated gases and bubbling streams of molten rock burping to the surface.

The closer he came to the centre, the more cracks split the ground and the more detours he had to take. As he paused atop a fallen spire, he surveyed the ground close to the structure, now seeing complex concentric patterns cut into the rock around it. He could make no sense of them, sweeping arcs with cursive runic forms between them. They were not language, that much he could tell, but what purpose they served was a mystery.

Many were split by the cracks, others still were being burned away by ribbons of liquid rock that hissed and steamed as they oozed from unseen magma vents below. Though he had no conscious knowledge of such things, he knew that this entire crater was in danger of collapsing into a seething caldera of lava, that its stability had rested on the mountaintop remaining intact.

The structure itself was a low, boxy thing, apparently solid with no visible means of gaining entry. It was clearly important; why else would someone go to the trouble of depositing it in such an inaccessible place?

He continued onwards, winding through the stalagmites that thronged the floor of the crater like silent sentinels. He brushed a hand across one as he passed, feeling a tingling charge coursing through it. An electro-conductive crystalline lattice, perhaps? He crossed the concentric lines of runic symbols, feeling a strange, prickling sensation as he did so. It invigorated him, as though a wellspring of vitality had opened up inside him.

The heat in the crater was rising steadily, and more and more rocky debris was falling from the rim above. The mountain’s flanks were collapsing inwards like a sculpture of sand being slowly eaten away by the tide. He would need to leave soon or risk being buried.

Eventually he reached the structure at the heart of the crater. As he had suspected, there was no visible means of entry, its walls glossy black and without any seams, joints or imperfections in its surface. For all intents and purposes, it was a solid block. A stone awaiting a sculptor, a dream waiting to be given form.

Or a nightmare…

A sudden crack echoed like a gunshot, and he backed away as a prescient sense of danger settled in his gut. He saw a forking tracery of silver light crack the featureless stone, moving like an upturned lightning bolt through the block. Another crazed the corner nearest to him, quickly followed by a third. A fourth and a fifth webbed the surface. He knew he should get as far from here as possible, but he had to know what had been hidden in this secret place.

More and more cracks were spreading over the structure, linking together and shining phosphor-bright. He shielded his eyes as the block radiated light like a supernova. With a final boom, it fell apart and what lay within was revealed.

Through the brilliant, mercurial haze of impossibly bright silver light, he saw a form cohering in the radiance. Segmented and coiled, it was a disassembled entity that was only now able to restore its original form. A swirling lattice of architecture and organism, construct and intelligence, it was at once a living thing and an artificially wrought monster.

A hideous steel clattering of bio-mechanical gears and liquid metal rattled through the cavern, an artificial heartbeat and birth-shout in one. He saw a huge worm-like creature uncoiling from its dissolving prison. Hearing that terrible mechanised shriek of release, there could be no doubt that this monster had been imprisoned within this impregnable mountain.

Reaching down, he scooped up a sharpened shard of mirror-smooth black rock. A crude weapon, but it would have to do. He stepped out to face the creature, a titanic wyrm with a ratcheting, segmented body that constantly rotated and reshaped itself with shifting liquid ease. Its bulbous, arachnid exo-skull was wreathed in metallic feelers, a trio of needle-toothed proboscises and multi-faceted eyes that reflected a million images of the naked figure before it. The great wyrm reared up, a towering monster of chromed steel, and loosed a howling bray of machine anger.

He leapt to the side as the creature slammed its bulk down, crushing the ruin of its former prison and cracking the ground beneath with its titanic weight. He rolled, burning his skin on the patches of molten rock bubbling up through the cracks. Scalding steam wreathed him and he bit back a shout of pain.

The towering wyrm slithered towards him, smashing stalagmites from its path and gouging a great furrow in the ground with its weight. With only his shard-blade to defend himself, he was under no illusion as to what the outcome of the fight could be.

He roared and leapt at the creature, stabbing his obsidian blade into its flanks, but the stone shattered on its glittering armour. It slammed into him, a flexing juggernaut of thunderous, unstoppable metal and power. Silver barbs pierced his skin as he was flung from its path, slicing his chest and shoulders to ruin. He hit the ground hard, the breath punched out of him, his body bruised to the bone. He pushed himself to one knee, ready to face the creature once more. Even weaponless, he would fight it.

But it seemed that killing him was of no concern to the wyrm. It continued over the floor of the cavern, bludgeoning a path through to the cliffs. Again it reared up and hundreds of grasping, clawed legs extruded from the underside of its body. With sinuous flexes, the wyrm creature tore its way up the disintegrating walls until it curled around and slithered over the lip of the crater.

He stood and watched it go, relieved to be alive, but angry he had failed to kill the beast. He knew nothing of his past, but the power of his body told him he was more than a mere man. He had failed in this first task, and swore to himself that he would not fail again. His arrival had destroyed this mountain prison, however unwittingly, and the responsibility of undoing the damage lay with him.

The trail of destruction left by the creature led to the base of the cliff. Its climb had left the rock gouged and torn with hand- and footholds, which would make the climb possible.

Possible, yet still incredibly dangerous and difficult.

With every second he delayed, the wyrm put ever more distance between them, and so he gripped the cliff face and began climbing. Hand over hand, with the relentless strokes of a machine, he climbed the cliff. It was not an easy climb; the rock had been greatly weakened by the wyrm’s passage. It took two gruelling hours, but finally he reached the lip of the crater and hauled himself out. His muscles burned with exertion and his chest heaved for breath. He dropped to his knees, resting his bloodied hands on the ground as he took in great gulps of icy, dust-clogged air.

Shards of the wyrm’s scales littered the edge of the crater and he lifted one, thinking to use it as a weapon. He turned it over in his hands, surprised at how light it was. The edge was razor sharp, and when he caught a glimpse of his reflection he let out a gasp of surprise.

Where once his eyes had been an inviting gold-flecked green, now they were a shimmering silver, like coins placed on the eyes of the dead. He lifted a hand to his face, seeing the web of veins and incandescent blood beneath the skin, the artistry that had gone into their construction and the miraculous bio-engineered wonders encoded within his flesh.

Was this a side effect of the wyrm’s attack or was he now perceiving the world as he had always been intended to see it? Strangely, the sight of his new eyes did not trouble him overmuch, and he rose to his feet with fresh purpose.

The wyrm’s passage was impossible to miss, a deep furrow in the mountainside that led north into a shadowy wasteland. Watery light glinted from the creature’s distant scales as it fled its former tomb. Beyond the wyrm, he saw the broken outlines of what looked like a collection of ruined towers, obviously ancient and perhaps belonging to a long-dead, long-vanished culture.

The sulphurous skies over the horizon were a striated mess of bruise yellow and infection red. Storm clouds wheeled and clashed, and distant lightning split the air with thunderclap booms. Only a weak, diffuse light broke through the clouds. A smear of light illuminated the southern haunches of the mountain directly below him, and he saw a number of primitive vehicles crossing the southern steppe in the far distance, a great caravan train pulled by mammoth grey-skinned beasts of burden. The landscape the caravan traversed was barren and hostile, black sands and rocky hinterlands swept by dust storms and freezing winds, a grim place to call home.

They were made tiny by distance, but he could make out bent-backed men swathed in furs and heavy leather cloaks driving the mighty beasts. To see other living beings sent a pang of longing through him, a surging relief that he was no longer alone.

He wanted to go to them, to learn where he was and who they were, but he had sworn to see the wyrm creature destroyed.

He would not make his first act upon reaching the surface one of oath-breaking.

He turned his back on the men of this world, and followed the trail of the wyrm into the cold black sands of the north.

NINE

La Fenice Reborn
Methodology
A God of the Battlefield

Wonder and light had returned to La Fenice after a lightless gloom of abandonment. Its doors were flung wide and the perfumed breath of the Pride of the Emperor allowed to sigh in once more, like air into collapsed lungs. It heaved with life and magic, a rapturous rebirth now that the III Legion was restored to its true purpose. Harsh lumens banished shadow and heat-belching flambeaux imparted warmth to the setting, pleasing Fulgrim mightily.

The Phoenician wandered through the industry filling the theatrical space, sculptors re-imagining the nymph statues worked into the columns as sinuous pleasure maidens. They carved from memory, conjuring the blissful horror of the handmaidens of profligacy with rasp and chisel. They were crude representations, and Fulgrim had to resist the urge to beat them aside and complete the work himself.

Clad in a flowing crimson robe lined with a constantly rearranging mixture of barbs, silks and puckered cephalopod flesh, Fulgrim toured the work being carried out like a master mason supervising the completion of his legacy. His sword hilt protruded from his robes, and though its blade no longer held the shard of the creature that had shown him the darkest secrets of the galaxy, it was still a touchstone bauble to him.

The sentimentality of the thought amused Fulgrim, and he craned his neck upwards.

Imprisoned within its elaborate frame of gold and cold iron, his mirror image stared back at him with undisguised hatred. Though it was impossible ever to see the expression on the painting change – automated pict viewers had tried and failed – all it took was the briefest glance away for the painted face to render some new emotion in the oils and acrylics and other… more exotic materials that had gone into its creation. Armoured in his distinctive violet and gold, the Fulgrim in the painting was a divine being, a warrior at the height of his strength and power. Charismatic and beloved, sure and certain of his purpose.

All of it a lie.

Fulgrim could barely remember a time when that had been him. He barely recognised the figure staring down at him. He could wear that selfsame armour, arrange his hair, his features and his body in exactly the same manner, and there would still be no likening the two.

‘It’s all in the eyes, you see,’ he said.

‘My lord?’

‘Thinking aloud, my Favoured Son,’ said Fulgrim, turning to address his companions: Julius Kaesoron, Marius Vairosean and Eidolon.

He looked up again. ‘Admiring the work of one of our former companions.’

‘The artist woman?’ asked Kaesoron, his words deliciously mangled by the disfigurements wrought on the battlefield and upon Fabius’s slab.

‘Serena D’Angelus,’ said Fulgrim, leaning down to whisper in Kaesoron’s ear. ‘She quite literally put her body and soul into this piece. Her fevered blood, her carnal sweat and all her anguished tears too. Many others contributed their excretions to her unique blend of pigments, though perhaps not as willingly as she herself.’

‘I don’t like it,’ said Marius Vairosean, picking through the ruins of the orchestra pit, where he had been reborn to his true calling. The halberd-like device strapped to his back growled with a throbbing bass hum, as though remembering its birth as a weapon in this place of vibrant madness.

‘You don’t like it?’ asked Fulgrim. ‘Why is that?’

Marius wouldn’t look up, and Fulgrim gripped his chin with spiteful strength and wrenched his distorted face to look up at the painting. The leader of the Kakophoni grunted in pain as Fulgrim’s sharpened nails cut his throat open. He gurgled phlegm and blood.

‘It isn’t you,’ growled Marius through his reshaped jaws. ‘I do not like any images of you. They can never be you, so they are all an insult to your radiance.’

‘A good answer,’ said Fulgrim, releasing him. ‘Though I fear an incomplete one. You torment yourself over your misguided attempt to exorcise the daemon from my flesh. You hate that you doubted me, Marius. Good, that is as it should be. Revel in that sensation. Feed it and feel it twist in the gut like a worm gnawing your innards. Trust me, Marius, good guilt should not be squandered.’

‘As you will it, my lord,’ said Marius, and his sonic weapon squalled and barked in dissonant screeches.

Fulgrim watched as Legion warriors daubed the walls with furious brushstrokes, colours and patterns that would be offensive and sickening to less evolved eyes. Though it looked random, there was a precise order to it all. Every colour, every pattern and every last facet of this rebirth had been orchestrated and designed by Fulgrim, and not one droplet of paint was left to dry that had not been carefully placed.

Its previous incarnation had been decorated and adorned by the remembrancers – a veritable horde of artists, poets and sculptors – but none now remained alive to continue that work. The imperatives of the Lords of Profligacy were harsh upon the flesh of the weak, breaking their bodies and minds after only the briefest dalliance on the path to sensation. Mortal frames were weak, but the Legions had been built for unending war and were engineered to endure all manner of punishments and pleasures.

The perfect devotees of the Dark Prince.

Shattered reflections bounced back and forth across the proscenium and the elevated boxes, where those who had gained the primarch’s favour would gather to watch the forthcoming performances. Thousands of glittering shards taken from the giant crystal forests of Prismatica had been brought to La Fenice, and set within the walls, ceiling and floor of the theatre.

‘And he shall build a glorious city of mirrors: a city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone,’ said Fulgrim.

‘The city of mirrors?’ said Eidolon, tapping a finger against the glass. ‘Is that what this is?’

Fulgrim shook his head in irritation. ‘Don’t be foolish, Eidolon. I brought you back to build it for me. Have you played any part in this work?’

‘No, my lord.’

‘Ah, but I forget,’ said Fulgrim, spinning and placing an arm around Eidolon’s shoulder. ‘You weren’t alive for my grand soliloquy upon the stage after Julius and Marius here tried to torture a supposed daemon from my body, little realising I had already cast it out.’

Fulgrim released Eidolon and his lip curled in distaste at the Lord Commander’s awkward gait. Though his limb control had improved markedly since his restoration, Eidolon’s body was still an unpleasant collection of jerky tics and awkward movements. Fulgrim was put in mind of a poor puppeteer’s performance.

‘Your walk is ugly and foolish,’ said Fulgrim. ‘You move like a greenskin. It offends me, and I do not wish to see it. Stay behind me until you can perambulate with some grace.’

‘Yes, my lord,’ rasped Eidolon, retreating in the face of Fulgrim’s ire.

‘Perhaps I left it too long to retrieve your shrivelled head from that emptied barrel of victory wine,’ said Fulgrim. He shook his head and smiled. ‘No, the fault lies with Fabius and his imperfect work. Remind me to punish him for making you stupid and ugly.’

‘If this is not to be the city of mirrors, then what is?’ asked Kaesoron.

Fulgrim rounded on his favoured son. ‘All in good time, Julius. I will not be rushed. This is to be my moment of greatest triumph, and you want me to just blurt out the awesome majesty of what I intend? You are an idiot child with no appreciation of true drama. I will reveal what is to come when it best suits me, my sons, not before. I want to savour the look on everyone’s face when they see what is to be wrought in the heart of the star maelstrom.’

‘Apologies, my lord,’ said Kaesoron, but Fulgrim waved away his contrition.

‘You are beginning to bore me,’ said Fulgrim, pausing to admire his reflection in a cracked pane of crystal. He smiled as he saw the painting above him in the depths of the glass, its expression murderous. Fulgrim licked his full lips, but the smile fell from his face as he saw something in the corner of the shard.

A towering figure in black armour, with eyes and hands of shimmer-steel silver.

He spun around, searching the far corners of La Fenice for any sign of this intruder.

Nothing – for there was nothing to see. Ferrus Manus was dead, and the daemon in the painting had no power over him.

‘Show yourself!’ bellowed Fulgrim, drawing his golden sword as all eyes turned towards him in shock. ‘I killed you once, and I can do it again, brother!’

He lurched drunkenly through the theatre, staring into each shard of glass and every polished surface. In each of them, he saw the hulking outline of the Gorgon, a silent figure watching from the shadows. He smashed them with thunderous punches, his fists red and bloody with splintered shards of crystal by the time he had finished.

Fulgrim halted in his rampage and let out a shuddering breath. His warriors watched him in shock and surprise, wary of being the first to break their silence. His hands ached, but the pulsing waves of pain were welcome sensation that helped focus his mind. Ferrus was not here. Ferrus was dead. This was just shadow play, the result of his exertions and the strain of dealing with a dullard like Perturabo. His head ached. It felt like it was being steadily crushed in an engineer’s vice. He needed diversion, he needed release from the dark thoughts building in his mind like toxic fluids.

‘I am leaving,’ he said. ‘Send a trepannixor to my chamber, I need my skull drilled.’

‘As you wish, my lord,’ said Marius. ‘Is there anything else we can do for you?’

Fulgrim blinked away a shimmering after-image of his dead brother and nodded.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Tell me, does the Brotherhood of the Phoenix still gather?’

Kaesoron shook his head. ‘The ashen order has not gathered since Isstvan.’

‘Re-establish it,’ said Fulgrim.

‘My lord?’

‘Alone, you are solitary voices in praise of the Dark Prince; together you shall be a mighty choir,’ said Fulgrim, in the grandiose tones of a heroic actor. ‘To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, to throw perfume on the violet, to smooth the ice, to add another hue unto the rainbow or with taper-light to seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish… these are the grandest arts, the sublime crafts that glorify all the manifold paths to perfect excess.’

Seeing their confusion, Fulgrim allowed them this one indulgence. ‘La Fenice is reborn, but it needs purpose. Fill it with debauches and prayers to self-gratification in all its forms. Leave no perversion, no bloodlust, no expression and no degradation untapped. Let blood and better run free and let the heavens shake with your devotions.’

‘As you wish,’ said Kaesoron. ‘I will see to it.’

‘As will I,’ said Marius.

Fulgrim let out a shuddering breath as he looked up at the painting once more.

‘If you are lurking here, brother, then spend your time learning of what we have become and weep…’ he hissed. ‘But make no mistake, I will have what I want.’

But you will forever lose what you once had, whispered a voice in his mind.

The Sisypheum was not a large ship, yet its armaments and warrior complement were easily capable of bringing truculent worlds to heel by its very presence. Compact and deadly, the Iron Hands vessel still bore the scars of its flight from Isstvan and its subsequent battles in the northern marches. The black, non-reflective hull was pitted with the impact shrapnel from explosive ordnance, launched to cripple her for the heavier traitor cruisers to finish off. Those wounds hadn’t slowed the Sisypheum, and damage that would have gutted a vessel of almost any other Legion had been shrugged off and its pursuers evaded as every Iron Hand aboard fought to keep it flying.

Every warrior bent his back to the task, and never was a crew more dedicated and devoted to its ship. Hull breaches were sealed in moments, deck fires extinguished the instant they began and shield generators repaired as soon as they overloaded. The Sisypheum was the ship that simply would not die.

Up-armoured and with a hull that had been repaired more times than any shipwright would dream, it was not a graceful vessel, nor even a handsome one. Its blunt form was that of an attack dog that had met one too many foes its equal, but which had yet managed to give as good as it got.

Death Guard, Sons of Horus, Word Bearers and Iron Warriors had all taken their best shot at destroying the Sisypheum, but it had eluded them all, or fought to keep the traitors at bay long enough to escape whatever net was closing in. A Night Lords vessel had come closest to ending its defiance of the odds stacked against it, but soon the hunted became the hunter, employing tactics no one would have expected from an Iron Hands captain.

A Raven Guard captain, perhaps, but the X Legion fought with brutal directness, not with subtlety and subterfuge. Hadn’t Isstvan V shown the forces loyal to Horus that simple, undeniable fact?

Yet the VIII Legion’s Tenebraxis suddenly found itself outmanoeuvred and its rear quarters raked by a vessel it should have reduced to a guttering, flame-blackened hulk in a matter of minutes. Left wallowing and defenceless, the Tenebraxis was boarded by kill teams of Iron Hands who took the fight to the enemy in their shadowed halls and darkened companionways, stripping the ship of anything potentially useful for refitting and repair work.

Leaving the stricken ship burning in the ice floes of the Isstvan cometary belt, the Sisypheum fled the system, finding the closest point to the gravipause and making an emergency warp jump to distant systems. With the supplies liberated from the enemy vessel, it was reinforced, upgraded and made even more lethal than before.

Like the warriors it carried, it proudly bore the scars of battle on its armour.

Like them, it was a weapon.

Frater Thamatica’s laboratorium, like every other space where dangerous machinery operated and high-energy experiments were undertaken, was situated on the upper levels of the Sisypheum. The modular nature of these compartments was such that each one could be vented into space, or even ejected whole, in the event of an emergency. In his time as an Iron Father, Frater Thamatica had ejected six compartments from various starships. A lot by some people’s reckoning; not as many as it could have been by his own.

This particular compartment ran fully a quarter of the length of the Sisypheum, a research space of arched buttresses angled up from the hull-side edge to a spinal mezzanine viewing area where observers could watch the employment of experimental weaponry and fissile reactor burns in relative safety. The space was filled with stacked crates taken from the Tenebraxis, a collection of materiel yet to be catalogued and put to better use. Heavy generator equipment was bolted to the ironwork deck, and coiled power couplings looped across the walls and hung from the ceiling like jungle creepers or lounging snakes.

A bitter electrical taste flavoured the air at a frequency that set teeth on edge and produced an insistent buzz like an insect trapped in glass. Servitors marched to and fro, bearing containers of heavy tools, machine components and artificer-crafted items that few beyond the Iron Fraternity would recognise.

Thamatica worked back and forth between two monstrous generator units, dragging heavy insulated cables behind him and arranging them in long spirals before hooking them up. Each cable was thick and heavy, and he grunted with the effort of hauling them into the desired position.

‘You know you could have servitors do that for you,’ said Wayland, descending the elevator from the mezzanine. Thamatica looked up at the sight of him, and his bearded face broke out in a grin of welcome.

‘True,’ said Thamatica. ‘But I find it therapeutic to get my hands dirty in the workshop now and again, don’t you? And if something were to go wrong, I’d not know which of the servitors to blame. This way, if something does go wrong, at least I’ll know it’s something I’ve done.’

‘You think it likely that something will go wrong?’

Thamatica shrugged. ‘Always possible. Adds a certain excitement to proceedings, I find.’

He finished connecting up the cable he held and wiped the back of his hand over his forehead, where two golden studs were embedded above a red one. Wayland also boasted a red stud above his right eye, a symbol of his tenure on Mars learning the credo of machines from the Mechanicum, yet he only boasted a single golden stud.

It was entirely possible that Frater Thamatica was now the longest-serving Iron Father left alive in the Legion.

‘I try to keep excitement out of my experiments,’ said Wayland.

Thamatica looked genuinely puzzled.

‘Frater Thamatica,’ said Wayland, extending his left hand. ‘Strength of Iron be yours.’

‘Frater Wayland,’ replied Thamatica, gripping Wayland’s polished gauntlet with his oil-stained one. ‘Fire of the Forge empower you.’

The mechanised fingers of their iron gauntlets wrapped around one another, intertwining and locking together in a complex Gordian knot of extruded probes and friction gears. Through that grip, their mechanised internal systems shared data freely, a meeting of minds as well as physical presence.

Thamatica freed his gauntlet and said, ‘So what brings you to my workshop today?’

‘Professional curiosity,’ said Wayland.

‘Another mission with our Raven Guard friend? I don’t know that I can work up any more stasis generators. Captain Branthan’s casket is intensive in its demands, and you already have my most reliable teleport homer.’

Wayland shook his head. ‘I’m not here to requisition. I wanted to see this thermic displacement beamer you were telling me about when we came to see Captain Branthan. If you have time?’

‘Time, young Sabik?’ boomed Thamatica. ‘I’m working on the thing right now. I could use your help too.’

‘I’d be honoured.’

Thamatica grinned and pointed to the other end of the cable he’d been hauling. ‘Plug that cable into the generator at the end of the row, and be careful not to bring it into contact with any of the collimated spirals, there’s enough charge in them to blow a hole in the side of the ship. In theory, at least.’

‘These are all live?’

‘Of course.’

‘Wouldn’t it be better to leave the generators off while you connect them all?’

‘And lose vital hours while I wait for them to power up? No, if I can get this to work, then we will have a powerful weapon to deploy against our enemies. Time and rebellion wait for no man, after all.’

Wayland sighed and dragged the dense cable along the floor towards the waiting generator, its magnetic whine of internal rotors and coil blades lifting micro-fragments of weapon impacts from his armour in a glittering mist. He hooked the cable into its socket with some effort – the interface was complex, with multiple connectors – and locked it in place with a satisfying crunch of engaging clamps.

‘It is ready,’ he called over to Thamatica, who nodded from the centre of his nest of control consoles.

Wayland made his way back to Thamatica, careful to avoid the buzzing cables and the crackling arcs of spitting electricity that waved like strobing neon fronds. He took station at a spot indicated by Thamatica, and studied the readings cascading down the many archaic-looking screens. Most were framed in wood or soft metals, like something from the palace reliquary or the Shadow Repository on Medusa.

‘How will this work?’ asked Wayland.

Thamatica gestured down the length of the workshop, to where a pair of spheres, each ten metres across, hung from the ceiling in a series of concentric gimbals that allowed them to move in three dimensions. Thirty metres separated them, though they were linked by a braided mass of slender cables. One was bronze, the other cold iron, and carved measurement data lines were the only thing to mar their perfect smoothness, and the only visible clue to the fact that both spheres were slowly rotating.

‘We’re going to attempt a matter transference, linking two exact points on the quantum level of potentiality. Given enough charge, the electrons of any given object can become excited enough to shift to another orbit, and if I can modulate the vibrational frequency of a portion of both objects at the same time, I can attempt to force them into the same place at the same time.’

‘Isn’t that incredibly dangerous?’

‘Monstrously so,’ agreed Thamatica with a gleeful grin. ‘If the two objects don’t behave as I believe they must, there could be an explosion that will utterly destroy the ship.’

Thamatica laughed at Wayland’s look of alarm and said, ‘Fear not, it should be impossible for the affected portions to coexist in the same nuclear sphere. With the right finesse, they should follow the path of least resistance and simply swap places. What was in one sphere should find itself inside the other.’

‘I can’t help but hear all the shoulds,’ said Wayland.

Thamatica grinned. ‘You sound like Ferrus did when he vetoed the geo-magnetic experiments I proposed to help fix Medusa’s landmasses in place.’

‘The same experiments that would have caused massive earthquakes all over the planet?’

‘It needed some fine tuning,’ admitted Thamatica, ‘but the principles were sound.’

Thamatica pulled a heavy brass lever, and the pulsing current from the generators flowed through the cabling with a rising hum of electrical current. The Iron Father adjusted a heavy dial and punched in a series of commands on a primitive physical keyboard.

Wayland watched him with wary admiration. Frater Thamatica’s experimental method was somewhat scattershot, but he had an intuitive gift for seeing the connections between disparate elements that allowed him to make leaps of logic that baffled his fellow Fraters. That some of his leaps carried him into dangerous waters was, Thamatica explained, a necessary evil and one the history books would probably not recall.

The current was building at a fearsome rate, and Wayland watched the jerking needles on each of the gauges flicker into the red across the board. The energy generated here could power the entire ship. Or blow half its superstructure into the void.

Both the bronze sphere and the iron sphere gathered speed, rotating on their confined orbits as the magnetic fields building around them increased in exponential steps. Wayland saw the field strength was building at a rate that would soon be too great for the concentric dampers to contain.

‘Frater?’ he said. ‘The magnetic fields are too strong.’

‘I see them, Sabik, but I need to take them right to the edge if this is going to work.’

Both spheres were spinning too fast to follow, the measurement lines etched into them blurred and meaningless. Whipping lines of electrical force burned themselves onto Wayland’s retinas and the whine of the generators was punctuated by booming discharge and coolant bursts. Every needle was jammed in the farthest extent of red, far beyond where any sane technician would wish them to rest for longer than a fraction of a second.

‘We have to shut this down,’ said Wayland.

‘Just a moment longer.’

‘No, shut off the power.’

‘Almost there.’

Wayland reached out to haul the power level back to the realms of sanity, but before he could pull it, a thunderclap of electromagnetic force exploded from the first generator and a sheet of flame erupted from where the heavy cables were slotted home. An explosive magnetic wave punched outwards from the spheres and Wayland was hurled back against the bulkhead below the mezzanine as though he’d been backhanded by a Contemptor. The magnetic force held him pinned to the wall like a specimen until its power finally bled away to a level where he slid down towards the deck. Tools and loose components fell in an iron rain as their weight overcame the rapidly diminishing magnetic field.

Every mechanised portion of his armour was inert, and the full weight of every plate bore down on his body now that the fibre-bundle muscles were not empowering him.

The workshop was in ruins; every electrical device dark and lifeless, every loose metallic object scattered in a radial pattern from the centre. Thamatica picked himself up and surveyed the devastation of his workshop as rogue magnetic waves bounced around the space, spinning loose metal around and transforming crackling electrical force into miniature whirlwinds of blue light.

Despite the damage to his workspace, the Iron Father looked absurdly pleased with himself, as though this had been the desired outcome of his experiment.

In the centre of the workshop, the two spheres had become one, a misshapen clot of iron and bronze in a lumpen mass of metal like a flattened figure of eight. Bronze ran into iron, iron into bronze, streaks of both metals spiralling into the other as though the two had been smelted and pressed into one another. Wayland had no doubt that had the generator not blown out, then the resultant explosion from the interface of the two spheres would have torn the ship apart.

‘I’m going to need bigger generators,’ said Thamatica.

He was stronger and more powerful than ever before, yet he could not feel the blood he spilled, nor relish the visceral force of the impacts. Berossus waded through a mass of bodies, striking left and right, bludgeoning a path through the combat servitors with every sweeping blow. Small-arms fire battered his armour, but he felt only a mass of indicators and icons that lit up his frontal carapace display.

He strode through the modular building shells like a savage metal god of war, bringing death and bloodletting to any who crossed his path. The training halls were mocked up into a recreation of a typical pre-compliance city, based on a conflation of architectural measurements taken by Iron Warriors expeditionary forces on conquered worlds.

Warriors from the 2nd Grand Battalion were spread through the false city, with orders to engage their warsmith and attempt to stop him from reaching its centre, a waypoint chosen by Galion Carron to best judge how Berossus was adapting to his new machine physiology.

Not well, was the warsmith’s first impression.

He felt no pain, but nor did he experience again the savage bloodlust he had felt upon the killing fields of Isstvan. A heavier impact rocked him back, but even that was simply a reaction and not a sensation. He spun on his waist gimbal to see a group of Iron Warriors emerge from cover, one carrying a smoking missile launcher he was reloading at speed. They moved with precision, as he would expect, but he swung his rotary autocannon up to kill them nonetheless. The heavy gun chugged out rapid-fire shots, punching three of his warriors from their feet. Blood misted the air as they fell, but the others kept coming.

Berossus snarled and stomped over the rubble of the training arena to meet them. His strides were short, his speed reduced and his charge robbed of the fury he had known in mortal flesh. Another missile slammed into his casket, but the armour dissipated the worst of the impact.

Then he was in amongst them.

A thundering blow from his hammer hurled two of them back, their armour cracked open. Another strike drove a third to his knees, but the fourth landed a blow that registered as causing damage, yet felt as meaningless as a readout on a data-slate. His threat perceptors detected more enemies closing behind him, and he rotated his upper body through one hundred and eighty degrees to bring his cannon to bear.

A heavy blow on his upper surfaces registered, but before he could do more than acknowledge it, a powerful impact crazed his internal display. A power fist or thunder hammer. Something incredibly dangerous and destructive. Berossus lurched to the side, spinning his body in an attempt to dislodge his attacker. More gunshots stitched across his flanks, but he ignored them. The booming clangs on his topside armour, each like the pealing of a sonorous bell, were all that mattered.

He could not bring his weapons to bear, and he slammed his metal body into the walls of the nearest structure. The force of the impact was tremendous, enough to cause numerous damage indicators to light up his display, but still his attacker held on, tenacious and determined. Berossus lurched like a drunk or one of the flesh-spare unfortunates whose neural pathways had degraded too far for them to survive the transfer from flesh to iron. Another impact, then another. Berossus roared, his augmitters howling in a dozen frequencies until he realised that he could use that energy to generate an electrical current through his body. With a thought he engaged his internal generators to spool up enough power, but a last blow to his topside registered terminal damage.

‘Cease hostilities,’ ordered Galion Carron on a vox channel heard by all members of the Second Grand Battalion.

The gunfire slackened and fell off altogether, and Berossus brought his body back around to its front facing as a warrior dropped from his upper carapace. His armour was dust-covered and battered, the yellow and black chevrons of his shoulder guards flaking and scuffed. A bolter was mag-locked to his thigh, and sure enough, he had a power fist, its upper faces still wreathed in a shimmering haze of disruptive energies.

Berossus leaned towards the warrior.

‘Who are you?’ he asked, hating the metallic rasp of his voice.

The warrior reached up and unclipped his helm, cradling it in the crook of his arm before answering.

‘Grendel,’ he said. ‘Cadaras Grendel, 16th Company.’

‘You are tenacious.’

‘I do what needs to be done,’ said Grendel, his face smooth and unremarkable, his black hair worn long and wound in elaborate braids across his scalp. ‘You’re vulnerable from above. The armour’s thinner there, and if an enemy can get up there, a Dreadnought’s helpless as a newborn.’

Even isolated from conventional mores of discourse, Berossus could hear the man’s arrogance and self-assuredness. He growled his displeasure at the comparison.

‘I am a warsmith of the Fourth Legion, I am anything but helpless.’

‘So you say, but I’d have torn what’s left of you out through your roof if Galion Carron hadn’t ended this.’

Berossus reached down and plucked Grendel from the ground on the end of his hammer, holding him up before him as though deciding how best to crush the life from him. He had expected the warrior to struggle, to fight back, but Cadaras Grendel just looked up at him with a blend of confidence and insouciance that appealed to Berossus.

‘He’s right, my lord,’ said Galion Carron. ‘You are vulnerable to attack from above.’

‘Perhaps so,’ said Berossus, dropping Grendel to the ground. ‘But only a madman would dare get close to me like that. I do not think it is a failing I need to be concerned with.’

Galion Carron approached Berossus, circling him and inspecting the damage done to his buckled plates of armour. His servo-arm tapped the metal, taking echo-readings of the internal structure and communing with the onboard systems of the incredibly complex mechanisms that allowed flesh and metal to merge and work as one.

‘You are still thinking and fighting like a mortal warrior,’ said Carron, coming round to stand before him. ‘But you are so much more than that now. You are a master of war, a god of iron and flesh that bestrides the battlefield like a colossus. All bow before your might, but still there are ways to bring down a god.’

‘Topside armour,’ said Grendel, making a clenched fist.

‘Is but one way,’ snapped Carron. ‘Crush infantry, tear their mortal flesh limb from limb. Despise them for the insects they are, but do not think yourself immune to their weapons. Kill them all, but always remember that they can hurt you.’

‘I will never let that happen,’ promised Berossus.

TEN

No Unkindness
The Most Complex Key
The Paths Below

He was a ghost. A black spectre moving through the silence. An enemy of light, he sought only to move through the sepulchral gloom of the ship, a friend to darkness and kin of shadows. His silence and invisibility should have been an impossibility, his body too large and his armour too cumbersome to move with such stealth, but Nykona Sharrowkyn had been trained by the very best shadow masters of the Ravenspire.

He wraith-slipped.

Sharrowkyn moved from darkness to darkness and the shadows opened up to him, welcoming him like a brother. He anticipated the sway of lights as they advanced and retreated, bending into the deeper black. Few could wraith-slip like Sharrowkyn, for only the most innately gifted of Deliverance’s children could evade the light for long enough to attract the attention of the shadow masters. Along the corridors of the Sisypheum, through its vaulted chambers of arming, past groups of training warriors, and into the guts of its engine spaces he moved without detection.

His armour was a composite thing, an amalgam of plates taken from the dead, and the dead are the quietest of all. Since his earliest days in the labyrinths of the Ravenspire he had learned how to muffle noise, first with rags and packed earth, then with acoustic dampers and skill. Though the armour’s construction was a matter of improvisation and need, it fitted him better than any he had worn in his time with the XIX Legion.

Sabik Wayland had helped with its construction, but he had performed the secret rites of silence alone, as every Corrivane should upon being elevated to the winged ranks. Each warrior moved silently in his own way, and it was each warrior’s understanding of the empty spaces between sounds that allowed him to occupy them.

The interior of a starship was an easy place to become a ghost. Its sounds were manifold, loud and predictable; the creak and groan of its structure as it flexed in transit, the regular heartbeat of its engines, the chatter of its crew and the half-heard, half-imagined sounds of the hot neutron flow along the outer hull. Many sounds, many places to hide.

Almost too easy.

Every warrior of the shadows needed to be tested, for without true tests the ability to wraith-slip began to erode. Only by becoming the shadows could a warrior move through them without revealing himself. Only by being truly hunted could he reach that place inside himself that allowed the wraith-slip to become perfect camouflage. Such protection was not infallible, of course, no warrior was ever invisible, but such was Sharrowkyn’s affinity with the dark that he might as well have been.

Few on the Sisypheum had skill enough as trackers to hunt a warrior of the Raven Guard, so he took risks and chose the routes with the fewest places in which to hide. He paused in his travels through the ship, clinging to the upper reaches of an access corridor, fingertips wrapped around a flexing duct pipe. Sharrowkyn watched two warriors of the Iron Hands pass beneath him. Morlock veterans.

Tough, hard, brave survivors.

Survivors like him.

No, not like him, the Iron Hands had one thing denied to him.

They had the confraternity of their brotherhood. Nykona Sharrowkyn was alone.

Pulled from the hellstorm of betrayal on the brink of death by Sabik Wayland, Sharrowkyn had escaped the slaughter of Isstvan V by the narrowest of margins. Wounded nigh unto death and with no way off-world, there had been little choice but to escape with the shell-shocked survivors of the X Legion. The Iron Hands had wanted to fight, to die alongside their fallen primarch, but Ulrach Branthan’s last order had been to escape, to regroup, to survive.

To fight back.

Sharrowkyn remembered little of those early days, his wounds too grievous, his body too broken. His abiding memory was of a gravel-voiced form looming over him in the apothecarion of the ship he had been taken aboard.

‘You will not die, Raven Guard,’ the voice had said. ‘Do not let the weakness of flesh betray you, not when you have survived so much. I took a blow from the Phoenician, yet I live. You will live too.’

The authority in that voice was absolute, and Sharrowkyn had obeyed. He had lived, and he had healed, but he was alone, cut off from his Legion and ignorant of what had become of his gene-father.

The Iron Hands knew their primarch was dead, and this had annealed their flint hearts into something unbreakable. Sharrowkyn knew nothing of Corax’s fate. Had he escaped the massacre or was he some bloodied trophy pinned to a banner pole, a totem like the head of Ferrus Manus?

Comfort and strength could be taken from certainty, a measure of closure to allow the healing of scars on the heart, but with his primarch’s fate a mystery, Sharrowkyn could only exist in a twilight limbo, caught between hope and despair, steadily diminishing as his imagination conjured ever more terrible fates for his lost father.

Was it better to be ignorant of Corax’s fate, or would it be kinder to know he was dead?

It was a question he had spent many months considering, but was no closer to answering. Only certainty could provide respite, but amongst the shattered remains of their Legions, certainty was in short supply.

The Morlocks moved on, oblivious to his presence, and Sharrowkyn swung silently down to the deck. A gladius slid from its frictionless sheath without a sound as Sharrowkyn moved down the corridor, finding patches of shadow where mortal eyes would not notice the deeper darkness within, exploring every nook and cranny of the proud starship.

Sharrowkyn felt the air grow chill, and knew he was near the apothecarion. With senses attuned to the micro-sounds that preceded motion and presence, he heard the whisper of something approaching the other side of the door. He leapt for the opposite wall, springboarding up and onto the suspended tangle of twisting, collimated pipes and ducts of hissing iron and sagging rubber. He eased into its concealing darkness, making himself one with the shadows and scaling down the power outputs of his armour, a ghost of blackness amid the gloom. The door slid open, letting out a sigh of frozen air and the creak and scrape of abutting plates. The sounds of armour at the other end of the corridor beyond the door told Sharrowkyn that Septus Thoic stood guard at Branthan’s stasis chamber. Footsteps clanged on the grilled floor, and even before Atesh Tarsa emerged, looking haggard and marrow-tired, Sharrowkyn had known it would be him.

The Salamanders Apothecary took a moment to rub the heels of his palms against his eyes, those crimson orbs that made him so hard to read. Without pupil or imperfection to give them a measure of character, Tarsa’s eyes were as blank as the lenses of a Legion battle-helm. He let out a breath of pure exhaustion as the door slid closed behind him, and Sharrowkyn felt a stab of sympathy for the Salamander.

Charged with keeping a dead man alive, it was his task to prolong the agonies of a warrior who deserved peace and an end to his suffering.

Tarsa looked up and smiled. ‘Is there something wrong with the floor?’

Sharrowkyn was so surprised he almost let go of his handholds.

There could be no doubt about it, Tarsa was looking right at him. The gladius shivered in his hand, ingrained instincts screaming at Sharrowkyn to drop on his discoverer and end him, but Tarsa was not the enemy. Instead, he sheathed the short-bladed sword and dropped to the deck. He rose from a crouch and cocked his head to one side.

‘You saw me,’ he said.

‘Of course,’ replied Tarsa. ‘Who else would I have been speaking to?’

Sharrowkyn looked into Tarsa’s red eyes, blank as polished garnet, but could see no augmetics, which would have gone some way to explaining Tarsa’s sighting of him. Sharrowkyn was more interested than annoyed, though it irked his professional pride to have been detected so casually.

‘I’m not normally so easily discovered,’ he said.

‘I’m sure,’ agreed Tarsa, ‘but when you see as the Fire-born do, there is little that escapes our notice. Especially in the darkness.’

‘Every legionary sees well in the darkness,’ said Sharrowkyn.

‘Not like we do,’ said Tarsa, turning to move on down the corridor. ‘Walk with me a while?’

Sharrowkyn nodded and matched step with the Apothecary, unconsciously mimicking the timing of Tarsa’s stride to mask his own.

‘It must be hard for you,’ said Tarsa. ‘Being here, I mean. On a ship not of your Legion.’

‘It’s not your Legion either,’ pointed out Sharrowkyn.

‘I know. It is hard for me, so I assume it’s hard for you,’ said Tarsa, and Sharrowkyn saw their route was taking them to the Sisypheum’s refectory.

‘It is difficult,’ he admitted, grateful for the understanding. ‘I am alone and know nothing beyond these walls. It is… not easy to be apart from the Unkindness.’

‘The Unkindness?’

Sharrowkyn touched the white-winged raptor on his shoulder guard. ‘A colloquial term my Legion sometimes uses when we gather in any numbers.’

‘Ah, I see,’ nodded Tarsa with a tight-lipped smile. ‘Legion argot. We have similar terms, based on the customs of the seven sanctuary-cities.’

‘Tell me one,’ asked Sharrowkyn.

‘Very well,’ said Tarsa, pausing to think of one he could tell. ‘The folk of Hesiod once used the term Hell-dawn to refer to a time when the ash banks broke and the sun burned.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘The Hell-dawn heralded the coming of the dusk-wraiths.’

‘Dusk-wraiths?’

‘The gloaming kin of the eldar,’ explained Tarsa. ‘Every time at that inauspicious hour they would come to reave and enslave. They took men, women and children as spoils for their torture ships, but in the end they were crushed by Vulkan in a great battle at Hesiod’s gates and cast from our world forever. The Hell-dawn was ever a time to be feared, but with the end of their raids, we took the term back and made it our own. It is now a Salamanders deployment tactic, a sudden terror assault into the heart of an enemy formation.’

‘I like it,’ said Sharrowkyn.

Tarsa nodded at the appreciation as they reached the refectory. He held out his hand to Sharrowkyn, who took it gratefully.

‘You are not alone, brother,’ said Tarsa. ‘The Iron Hands saw their gene-father die and it gave them fresh purpose. But you and I? All we have is scorched earth and uncertainty.’

Felix Cassander squeezed his eyes closed and tried to shut out the wet, animal sounds coming from Navarra. He had thought a legionary could endure any pain, but his time in Apothecary Fabius’s vivisectorium had shown him the naïvety of that belief. He found he could no longer measure the passage of time, for there was never any change in the forlorn gloom in this abode of the damned. Drugs and pain kept him quiescent, wrapped in a swaddling fog of distorted perceptions. He existed in a netherworld of screams, laughter, weeping and the butcher’s sound of blades hewing flesh. Sometimes he saw what was happening, and wished he hadn’t. Sometimes his imagination painted a more vivid picture.

The vivisectorium was a place of diabolical surgery, where Fabius and his flesh-hooded servitors removed and replaced limbs and organs with wet meat parts from other organisms that bore no relation to their new host. Navarra had become a test bed for all manner of limbs: hindquarters covered in russet fur, spring-loaded insect legs, bladed arms with chitinous exoskeletons amputated from some towering arachnid creature or whipping tentacular appendages with needle-toothed mouths that dripped acidic bile.

With every physiological rejection, Fabius would hiss in frustration and remove the offending appendage for incineration. The loathsome contraption that hung from the ceiling seemed to watch Cassander as Navarra struggled against his bonds, dripping its vile black fluids to the floor where they writhed like slippery eels of inky sentience before drooling down the blood-clogged drain.

Nor had Cassander been spared Fabius’s attentions.

Where Navarra’s broken frame was a perfect chassis on which to suture new and exotic body parts, Cassander’s healing body was a fully-functioning biological factory in which to test Fabius’s creations at cellular depths. Pathogens, retroviruses, gene-splices and pluripotent bacterial cultures were introduced to his metabolism via piston-driven injections directly to the heart and the results observed and recorded.

Molten rivers of infected blood raced around Cassander’s body, each polluted branch and venous highway carrying microscopic invaders that attempted to dismantle him at the genetic level. But each attempt met with failure, for the Emperor’s great techno-biological work was too cunning and too subtle to be undone by synthetic diseases of mere men, no matter how inventive their attack. Though Cassander’s genhanced body recovered from each assault, the pain of being the battleground for such a hard-fought viral war was almost beyond endurance. He lost any sense of time in hallucinogenic deliriums, wracked with agonising spasms and burning with raging fevers that left his skin too hot to touch.

With each successful resistance, Cassander’s body was left purged and hollow, a shell of its former glory, yet still able to rebuild itself with the nutrient-rich fluids pumped into his system, readying him for the next round of attack. His body could repair almost indefinitely, but his mind was suffering the trauma of constant pain and anguish. Yet each time Cassander felt the flayed ruin of his sanity slipping closer to the abyssal plunge into madness, he pulled himself back with hate for the nightmare surgeon inflicting these horrors upon him.

Fabius took great relish in the suffering he caused, asking after the precise nature of his pain and the exact details of each area of localised infection. Cassander told him nothing, and his only solace in this place of torment was the look of bitter frustration on Fabius’s face.

‘You will break eventually,’ said Fabius. ‘Everyone who comes here always does, even the ones who come willingly. Though, it has to be said, you have resisted longer than most.’

That gave Cassander a moment of pride.

‘I wonder why that might be so,’ mused Fabius.

Cassander had slipped away at that point, awakening an unknown time later to hear Navarra screaming as Fabius stripped out his secondary heart and replaced it with a glistening, pulsating thing that looked more organism than organ. Navarra had no limbs to thrash in pain, but his screams spoke of the unimaginable agonies he suffered.

At length Navarra quietened, his breathing ragged and raspy with mucus as he slipped into unconsciousness. Beneath the splint cage, Cassander saw his brother legionary’s chest was a mass of uneven sutures, each one raw and infected. The skin at his ribs rose and fell with undulant motion, as though questing tendrils slithered beneath his flesh. Cassander fought to hold his bile at bay at the idea of some alien parasite sealed within his brother’s body.

Fabius straightened from his labours, his back to Cassander, but a number of the waving appendages of his spine-mounted device were aimed in his direction. Cassander had no doubt they could alert the lunatic surgeon if he so much as made a move against him.

And in the unknown quantity of time since he had been brought here, throughout the screaming misery of his infections, he found that the idea of making a move against Fabius had become less of an abstraction and more of a potential plan. Cassander’s convulsions and lunatic thrashing had stretched and loosened his bonds to the point where, given a window of opportunity, he might be able to break them.

Just thinking about snapping his tormentor’s neck gave him a sense of warm contentment. All he needed was one arm free and he could loose the rest of his bonds without difficulty. He flexed one arm fractionally, feeling some give in the previously immovable strap securing him to the slab.

Fabius turned towards him with his skull-stamped rictus grin, and spoke as though no time at all had passed since their last discourse, scratching idly at his tapered chin with a black, claw-like fingernail.

‘Perhaps your resistance is something to do with your Legion’s unique genome. Is your dour dependability woven into your very gene-seed? Something deliberately bred into you, a personality trait embedded at conception… Might that be it? What do you think, Felix?’

Cassander could not remember revealing his name to the surgeon, but supposed he might have screamed it to him in a fugue state of contagion.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I have no training as an Apothecary.’

‘Oh, I am aware of that,’ said Fabius, slapping a comradely hand on his shoulder, eliciting a gasp of agony. Every pain receptor hovered just below the surface, alive to the prospect of awful, overloaded sensation, a side effect of Fabius’s ‘medicines’.

‘Why?’ said Cassander. ‘Why do this…?’

‘Why would I not?’ countered Fabius. ‘Especially now that Horus has forced Alpharius to furnish me with the secrets hidden away for centuries in the Emperor’s deepest vaults. I have all the pieces I need to open a door to treasures undreamed. And you will be my key. Think of it, together we will be at the forefront of the creation of a new breed of genetic post-humans, beyond the paltry things the Emperor made of us. We will be gods, divine beings, invincible and immortal.’

‘You are a madman,’ hissed Cassander. ‘How could you ever have been of the Legions?’

‘A madman?’ sneered Fabius, leaning in. ‘I will create a race of gods and you dare to call me mad? I will be the father of a new race of hyper-men, new beings of numinous perfection against whom the Emperor’s warriors will be adjudged no better than primitive apes.’

‘No,’ said Cassander, bunching a fist. ‘You won’t.’

Fabius laughed, a thin, reedy wheeze channelled through dusty pipes that had long ago lost any need for such a sound.

‘And what is to stop me, Felix Cassander? You?’

‘Yes,’ said Cassander, ripping his arm from the slab with a roaring surge of hate.

His bicep swelled with simmering power, and he slammed his fist into Fabius’s jaw. The impact sent Fabius sprawling across the floor of the vivisectorium. The Apothecary landed badly, striking his temple against a mortuary slab, his legs twisted beneath him and the weight of his Chirurgeon parasite bearing down on him. Cassander wasted no time in applying his strength to his other arm, quickly freeing it with a burst of adrenaline and raw power.

His head pounded with the sudden activity and his heart burned with white heat in his chest at the exertion. The suspended creatures of the ceiling-mounted surgical device shrieked in their gestalt amalgam voices, a blind wail of panic and fury. Fabius shook off the effects of the blow and shouted for his servitors, but Cassander had already freed his legs and swung them from the slab.

His body was weak, but still strong enough to do what needed to be done.

Fabius rose to his feet, backing away from Cassander’s unsteady advance, his pale skin a mask of blood, his black eyes glittering like shards of coal on snow. Incongruously, he was smiling. A shadow darted to Cassander’s right and something stabbed into his side, a needle-quick injection from a whipping, tentacle arm.

Cassander snatched at the arm and ripped it from the creature in a wash of brackish blood and chemical effluent. It wailed and he spun on his heel, driving his fist into the heart of the thing. Slippery cables or arteries writhed beneath his hands, warm and pulsating with sickeningly organic motion. Cassander pulled a handful of glistening ropes of intestine from the creature and a wash of stinking fluids flooded from its ruptured body. The suspended monster’s screams fell silent as the conjoined internal structure of its hideous body died.

Fabius backed away from Cassander, but he followed the demented Apothecary on unsteady legs. Hate was giving him strength, but exhaustion and banked pain were draining him with every second that passed. Cassander lurched after Fabius, feeling toxins coursing through his body. Strangely, the effect was already diminishing, and he felt a moment of small victory.

‘Your poisons don’t work any more,’ he hissed. ‘You made me immune to them.’

Fabius had backed into the farthest corner of the room, a shadowed region the firelight did not illuminate.

‘Nowhere left to run, Apothecary,’ said Cassander.

Fabius didn’t answer and reached into the shadow to lift something hung on the wall.

It was a sword – a primitive thing with a blade of knapped flint and a fashioned hilt of gold. It caught the light strangely, as though dusted with powdered diamond, the blade chipped and looking far too short for the handle.

‘You know what this is?’ asked the Apothecary, and Cassander did not like the sudden confidence in his voice.

‘I don’t care,’ said Cassander. ‘I can still kill you, sword or no sword.’

‘This is the anathame,’ said Fabius, turning the blade and lifting it close to his lips. ‘The kinebrach blade that brought down the great Horus.’

‘It’s just a sword,’ said Cassander, throwing himself at Fabius.

The Apothecary whispered something he didn’t hear and swung the blade at him. It was a poor cut, one Cassander was easily able to deflect with his forearm. The blade caught the edge of his shoulder, nicking the skin. A tiny bead of blood welled in the cut, but then Cassander was past the blade and had his hands wrapped around Fabius’s throat.

He slammed Fabius against the wall and the sword fell to the floor as the Chirurgeon machine jerked to life, its multi-jointed arms stabbing down into his shoulders with blades, snapping pincers and invasive drills. Blood sprayed from the wounds, but the pain only drove Cassander on. Fabius grinned, the tendons in his neck bulging like steel hawsers as blood-flecked spittle gathered in the corners of his mouth and his black eyes bulged in his cadaverous features. He seemed to be enjoying the sensation of being choked to death.

Cassander spat in his face, but an instant later he was on his knees and screaming.

A supernova of unimaginable agony enveloped his entire body, spreading from the insignificant cut on his shoulder to wrap his flesh in the worst pain he had ever known. His blood was afire, his organs imploding and his bones cracking to powder. Every pain that could be conceived poured into Cassander’s body, the very worst agonies and the most inhuman tortures. They multiplied and combined, tearing his body into pieces, breaking him into his constituent parts and inflicting the same procession of agonies on each portion.

Cassander rolled onto his back, retching and shaking and sweating and screaming.

‘It’s exquisite, isn’t it?’ said Fabius. ‘At first I thought the sentience of the blade was entirely mad, that all it could do was kill. But I have discovered that it enjoys suffering too, that its effects can be tailored if you know how to ask.’

‘Kill me,’ hissed Cassander through bloodied, gritted teeth.

Fabius shook his head. ‘No, this was just a lesson. You are far too precious to kill, but not so valuable that I can’t let you suffer.’

Cassander felt the pain begin to ebb, but he still couldn’t move. So far was he beyond his pain threshold that he could not have risen even had the Emperor himself commanded it. He shivered, mewling like a newborn as shadows loomed above him. Flesh-cloaked servitors with static-hissing mouths, sutured eyes, patchwork bodies and limbs not their own lifted him from the ground as Fabius replaced the flint-bladed sword on the wall.

‘Put him with the terata,’ ordered Fabius.

Wayland had travelled close to regions of space where the strange realm of the warp bled into realspace before, but there was something about this storm that felt wholly different. It filled the viewing bay of the bridge, casting a pall of unnatural violet light throughout the vaulted compartment. Like most ships of the X Legion, the Sisypheum was as functional in its design as any engineering space. Fewer than half of the servitor stations were occupied, and the empty ones were scorched and black.

Frater Thamatica stood at the podium normally occupied by the vessel’s Master of Engines. The Master had been immolated by secondary damage inflicted by an Alpha Legion broadside. Likewise, the Master of Ordnance was dead, and the half-machine Vermanus Cybus – the senior surviving Morlock veteran – manned weapons control.

Never a place of irrelevant chatter at the best of times, the Sisypheum’s bridge was sombre under the warp storm’s relentless gaze. Too many had died here in the escape from Isstvan for it to be any other way, and even Thamatica kept his mordant humour under lock and key when serving on the bridge.

Wayland probed the outer front of the bleeding storm from the surveying station as Cadmus Tyro, standing at the captain’s control lectern, guided them towards the blistering edge of unlight that frothed from the outermost regions.

Most such spatial anomalies waxed and waned over time, like the tempests that raged over the seismotropic continental plates of Medusa. Such storms were fierce in their wrath, devastating settlements and wiping out entire clan branches, yet they were transient things that could be endured or avoided with enough warning.

But something of this storm spoke of permanence, as though it were only ever going to get bigger. If it had a history, no one aboard the Sisypheum knew it, and none of their surviving cartographical data accorded it more than a wholly unremarkable name that utterly failed to convey its dreadful permanence. Yet the more Wayland looked at it, the more it seemed as though it looked back, like a malignant presence set in the flesh of space to look down endlessly on the realms of men.

Something as dreadful as this would soon earn a name of note, but Wayland shied away from thinking of one, knowing that to name a thing was to give it power.

The golden-sheened eagle dropped from the upper vaults of the bridge and swooped down to land on the shoulder of Cadmus Tyro. It flexed its wings with a rustle of metal feathers, and shifted its bulk from foot to foot. Even this mechanised creature with no autonomous consciousness seemed to sense something grotesque from this storm front. Wayland checked himself. He was framing his points of reference in emotional superstition and attributing anthropomorphic behaviours to a soulless creature. That was a poor mode of thought for an Iron Father.

‘Any sign of a clear route through?’ asked Tyro, reaching up to stroke the bird.

Wayland shook his head. ‘Not that I can see,’ he said. ‘It’s a solid storm front.’

‘Frater Wayland, I hope for your sake you’re not telling me that we’ve pushed the engines to breaking point to get here ahead of the traitors for nothing.’

‘I don’t know yet,’ said Wayland, understanding Tyro’s frustration, but wishing he could better clamp down on his emotional response to it.

‘When will you know?’

‘I won’t until the guide gets to the bridge.’

‘Thoic, Numen and Bombastus are bringing him up now,’ said Thamatica, speaking to head off further confrontation. ‘We’ll know more when they arrive. Either way, we should be able to collect some fascinating immeteorological data in there. Assuming we survive, of course.’

‘This isn’t a fact-finding mission, Thamatica,’ said Tyro.

Thamatica’s reply was cut off as the main access doors to the bridge opened and the booming footfalls of a Dreadnought broke the solemn silence of the bridge. Septus Thoic and Ignatius Numen walked either side of a slender figure in a shimmering robe of fuliginous hues of black. His hood was drawn up over his face, but there was no mistaking the alien poise of his race. Though he was counted as an ally, the Morlocks still had their guns drawn and held across their chests.

Behind the guide came a thunderously proportioned warrior, towering and armoured in heavy plating that had once been black, but which was now almost entirely stripped of paint by gunfire and flames. Brother Bombastus marched with mechanical weight, his Dreadnought body wheezing and leaking from the numerous patch-jobs and repairs done to his enormous frame. A retro-fitted missile rack was rotated down over the rear plates of his armour, but the storm bolter slung beneath his enormous powered fist and the perforated nozzles of the monstrous flame cannons on his other arm were aimed squarely at the guide.

The guide was not a prisoner of the Iron Hands, but nor was he entirely trusted.

Trust was in short supply in the galaxy, and alien species were yet to earn humanity’s.

‘Here he is,’ growled Bombastus, the tearing fingers of his fist snapping and rotating in their housing. Dubbed ‘Karaashi’ after the peak into which Ferrus Manus had crashed in Medusan legend, Bombastus had been a warrior of great passions and furious charges. With a temper to match the bellicose temperament of the volcano and a love of fiery destruction, the name had stuck, even after his interment in a Dreadnought sarcophagus. If anything, the transition from mortal flesh to iron had only increased his aggression in battle.

Escorted by the Morlocks, the guide walked to stand before the captain.

‘Captain Tyro,’ he said, his voice soft and empty of emotion. ‘It is an honour.’

‘Remove your hood,’ said Tyro. ‘I don’t like it when people conceal their faces. It means they have something to hide.’

‘As you wish,’ said the guide, reaching up to pull back the velvet of his cloak.

Their guide was eldar, with sharply defined features, generous lips, and shimmering eyes of glacial blue. Wayland moved from the surveyor station to stand alongside him.

‘What’s it called?’ asked Tyro.

‘He is called Varuchi Vohra,’ said Wayland. ‘And your tongue will not shrivel up if you talk to him directly.’

‘I’m aware of that,’ snapped Tyro. ‘But I have met his kind on the battlefield before and seen Medusan lives ended on their blades. I don’t trust him.’

‘Then why are we here?’ demanded Wayland. ‘There is no way into the storm without him.’

Varuchi Vohra spoke again. ‘I assure you, Captain Tyro, I mean you and your warriors no harm. Quite the contrary. It is in my interests to stop your enemies as much as it is yours.’

‘Convince me,’ said Tyro. ‘Wayland’s told me why, but I want to hear it from you.’

‘As Sabik Wayland has said, I am a scholar, a poet and an explorer amongst other things. I belong to an academic order of my people known as the Ebonite Archymsts. We study the stars and the matter of the universe from which we are all derived. I know this region of space intimately, for I was the first of my kind to sing of its currents and its tempests.’

‘Sing them?’ asked Tyro.

‘It is the closest approximation I can give for how we communicate and store information,’ said Vohra. ‘It takes decades of training in our order’s shrine to master the technique, but I suspect you have neither the time nor inclination to learn of it.’

‘At least we agree on that,’ said Tyro. ‘I’m still not clear on why you’re helping us.’

‘The warriors you call “traitors” are dangerous beyond imagining. Not just to your race and your empire, but to all life. They serve the Primordial Annihilator, though only a handful of them truly appreciate what that means. Your goal and mine are in harmony, but we must not hesitate or our enemies will reach the citadel of Amon ny-shak Kaelis before us.’

‘Amon ny-shak Kaelis? What does that mean?’

‘In an extinct dialect of my people, it means the Forge of Sun and Stars.’

‘And you say they have a guide like you?’ asked Tyro.

‘They do,’ agreed Vohra. ‘A renegade who was cast from our order. My brother.’

‘What do you have to do to be exiled from a bunch of scholars?’ asked Vermanus Cybus with his grating, mechanised tones.

‘Oh, that’s easy,’ said Thamatica. ‘Both the Mechanicum and the Iron Fraternity have threatened me with expulsion many times. Dangerous experiments, radical thinking, untested weaponry, that sort of thing.’

‘The amount of times you’ve almost blown us up, I almost wish they had,’ said Cybus.

A ghost of a smile hovered on the lips of the eldar as he continued. ‘Frater Thamatica is correct – my brother developed an unhealthy interest in the darker aspects of knowledge, the things that are kept hidden for good reason.’

‘Things like what?’ asked Thamatica. ‘Give me an example.’

‘You know I cannot do that, Frater Thamatica,’ said Varuchi Vohra. ‘Suffice to say that there are things in this galaxy that should forever remain shrouded in the past. What lies in the heart of the citadel is but one of them.’

‘And this renegade can guide the traitors to this citadel?’ asked Cybus, the red optics of his eyes unwavering in their scrutiny.

‘He can, but he does not know the paths I know,’ said Vohra. ‘The Paths Above are safer, but the Paths Below are quicker. With my help, you would steal a march on your foes through the spaces that are not warp-touched and arrive at Amon ny-shak Kaelis long before they could hope to reach it.’

‘Our instruments aren’t detecting any break in the storm front,’ said Tyro. ‘We’re not seeing a way in at all, let alone a safe one.’

‘Your instruments are incapable of seeing the Paths Below,’ said Vohra, ‘but they are there.’

‘Captain,’ said Wayland. ‘We don’t have a choice. We have to let Varuchi Vohra guide us.’

‘You said yourself there was no clear way in,’ snapped Tyro and the mech-eagle shivered its wings at his sudden outburst. ‘He could fly us straight into a warp squall and destroy us.’

‘He could, but why would he?’ countered Wayland. ‘He would die too, and I don’t think he sought us out to kill us in such an elaborate way. The Iron Warriors and the Emperor’s Children will be here soon, so we have two options: trust him or give up.’

It was an obvious gambit, and Tyro saw through it in a heartbeat.

‘You think you can goad me into giving the order you want?’

‘No, but it’s that stark a choice,’ said Wayland. ‘And we don’t have time for a debate.’

Tyro glowered, but Wayland already knew the captain would agree to letting the eldar scholar guide them. To give up was anathema to the Iron Hands. A task once begun was never abandoned, even in the face of insurmountable odds. That mindset had kept them fighting in the face of their grief, in the wake of their loss and against the pall of desperation that sought to engulf the remnants of the Legion.

Even so, for long moments, Cadmus Tyro stared at the billowing clouds raging at the edge of the storm surges and thunderheads of malignant light. He too was well aware of the dangers inherent in attempting to navigate such a dangerous region of space. Ships avoided such anomalies, especially when they bled through from the unknown alternate universe in which they existed. To entrust his ship and everyone on it to a xenos species known for their treacherous wiles and unpredictable nature went against every warning voice in his skull.

But what choice did he have?

‘Take us in, Varuchi Vohra,’ said Tyro. ‘But know this. If I think, even for an instant, that you are betraying us, I will have Bombastus here burn you to ashes. If you are leading us to our deaths within this warp storm, you will die first. Am I being clear?’

‘The warning is entirely clear, but it is unnecessary,’ said Vohra.

‘Not to me,’ said Tyro.

ELEVEN

A Heavy Burden
The Dodekatheon
A Memory of Flesh

Nearly two thousand Iron Warriors stood in unmoving ranks before Kroeger, and the idea that they were his to command staggered him. Since leaving Hydra Cordatus, a moment that had given him an unaccountable sense of relief, he had wrestled with the idea that he was a warsmith of the IV Legion. Orders were his to give, and lives his to command. Until now his only power of life and death had been that which rested on the edge of his chainblade or in the magazine of his bolter.

Now his very words would decide whether men would live or die.

Part of him relished that power, but the bulk of him resisted the inevitable distance that would put between him and the bloody edge of war. His weapons were as much a part of him as his hands and heart. Only in a swirling, bloody melee could a warrior ever feel truly alive. Life was at its most distilled in the spaces between the blades and bullets.

Behind the ranked-up warriors were squadrons of armoured vehicles: Rhinos, Land Raiders, Mastodons and hybrid machines fashioned by the Pneumachina from the wreckage of damaged vehicles and the strange machinery torn from the heart of the dismantled Cadmean Citadel. Since reaching the edge of the warp anomaly, the Pneumachina had worked with feverish intensity in their sealed forges, crafting ever more lethal-looking machines, as if just being in the shadow of this mysterious region had somehow empowered their labours. Some of their creations were blatant in their purpose, little more than towering gun-carriages or infantry crushers, but others were less obvious, festooned with caged machinery and dangerous-looking devices that seemed to serve no clear purpose.

Kroeger marched down the length of the ranked warriors, a vision of burnished iron with gold and jet chevroning. These warriors had brought countless worlds to ruin, toppled the fortresses of the mightiest empires, both human and alien, but who among the Imperium of Man knew any of their names?

At Kroeger’s insistence, none of his warriors wore their battle helms, each man’s stoic face staring straight ahead in iron unity. For the most part they had dark hair, close-cropped to the skull, but here and there he saw a warrior with the long scalp locks common amongst those from Lochos, the tattooed whorls of the Delchonians, the blood-tinted hair of his own folk from the Ithearak Mountains and the forked beards favoured by the Vedric Tyrpechs. He would know the men who fought for him, he would learn their names and tell them that he knew their deeds, for how else would they fight and die for him?

He looked closely at their faces as he passed.

Hard features, worn smooth by genetics, enhancement and war-won knowledge. The Iron Warriors knew the craft of death like few other Legions, and they had made uncounted sacrifices in service to the ideals of the Imperium. These men were mighty, they had fought to bring the galaxy to compliance. Their reward was to be cast aside in favour of those Legions with greater rolls of honour, Legions that had prospered on the broken backs of the Iron Warriors.

Heroes of the Ultramarines, the Blood Angels and the Imperial Fists were lauded and immortalised in art and verse, but where were the parades for the Iron Warriors?

Where was their glory?

The answer was quickly forthcoming: in ashes on Olympia. Blown to the wind from a billion worldwide pyres. Those who should have clamoured for tales of its crusading sons were all dead: the Legion had burned them all, and the despair of that day was etched into their skin, like ashes smeared on the cheeks of grieving widows and faithless sons.

But Kroeger felt no guilt for what they had done on Olympia. What did it matter that it had been the world that the Lord of Iron had called home? His world or another, it was irrelevant. Any other planet would have burned and been razed to the ground and no one would have cared.

Only the name gave it significance, and names were just noise.

Like grief, guilt was rust that ate the iron in a warrior’s soul, and Perturabo had spoken to the entire Legion in the ashen rains of their home world, telling them that guilt had no place in his Legion.

Guilt was for lesser men who looked to the past for validation.

The Iron Warriors would never allow the crippling taint of guilt into their ranks, for only the future would give them validation.

Kroeger’s thoughts were interrupted as he saw a familiar face in the front rank of his Grand Battalion. He knew he should walk on, that there was no point in drawing attention to a wound in the pride of the warriors he now commanded. But the spiteful part of him couldn’t resist the chance to rub a little salt in one particular wound.

He paused before Harkor, pleased to see his former warsmith’s stature now much reduced.

‘Harkor,’ he said, only just stopping himself from calling him Warsmith.

‘Kroeger,’ said Harkor.

‘That’s Warsmith Kroeger,’ he said.

Harkor nodded, and swallowed the bile that must surely be rising in his throat.

‘You have found a place in the Grand Battalion?’

‘Yes, warsmith,’ replied Harkor. ‘Battle-brother, 55th Storm squad.’

Kroeger knew it: mediocre earth grubbers and breach fodder.

‘You will fit right in there,’ said Kroeger. ‘Sergeant Ghasta is competent.’

‘Competent was never enough for me… warsmith,’ said Harkor, and the bitterness in his voice was so rich that Kroeger had to force himself not to laugh in the man’s face.

‘No, and look where that attitude got you.’

‘Permission to speak freely, warsmith,’ asked Harkor.

Kroeger hesitated, but nodded eventually. ‘Speak, but do not waste my time.’

‘It is a heavy burden being a warsmith, I know this all too well. There are a thousand responsibilities that rest on your shoulders alone. And broad as they are, Warsmith Kroeger, you do not have the experience to carry them all yet. I could help you.’

This time he did laugh in Harkor’s face.

‘You would help me? I replaced you after the primarch stripped you of your rank. I can almost feel your blade between my shoulders now.’

Harkor shook his head and said, ‘No, warsmith.’

‘Why would I ever trust you, Harkor?’

‘Because what else have I to lose? The Lord of Iron will never grant me rank as a warsmith again, so what advantage would I gain in betraying you?’

‘Personal satisfaction?’

‘I won’t deny the truth of that,’ said Harkor, ‘but I can help you make this Grand Battalion something legendary. You have the primarch’s ear, you have fire and force. Ally that to my experience and you would be Perturabo’s most trusted triarch by the time Horus sits upon the throne of Terra.’

‘You only aid me to gain standing and prestige,’ sneered Kroeger.

Harkor shrugged. ‘There is no shame in that.’

‘I suppose not,’ agreed Kroeger. ‘But I would take a snake to my bed were I to trust you.’

‘I did not say you should trust me,’ said Harkor. ‘Just that you should listen to me.’

‘I’ll think about it,’ said Kroeger.

Bare girders columned the bridge of the Iron Blood, and bolted gantries stacked above one another ran the length of it, each filled with augmented servitors to man the more mundane elements of the ship’s operation. A handful of Iron Warriors manned the stations requiring post-human input, though only a few were known to Perturabo.

He stood with his arms folded across his chest, staring impassively at the billowing flares, strange tides and curling bursts of ejected warp matter displayed on the viewscreen. The combined fleets of the Iron Warriors and Emperor’s Children held station at the very edge of the star maelstrom, its firebright core seething like a star in its death throes as the rippling haze of its storm-wracked corona expanded to swallow everything around it. Umber light from the storm’s heart bathed his features, making them ruddy and hale. The warp-born illumination played over Perturabo, dancing in his cold eyes like firelight.

For once in his life, Perturabo looked at the star maelstrom and knew that others could see it too. They did not see it quite as he saw it, but they could at least acknowledge its existence. He saw beyond its dark light to the engulfed worlds within: phantom images that ghosted in and out of perception and fleeting moments of solidity in a realm where such things were anathema.

He saw planets where all reason and Euclidian certainty had been abandoned, where the physical laws that underpinned the galaxy were playthings of lunatic forces beyond mortal comprehension.

Worlds of fire; worlds that were somehow crafted into geometric shapes; worlds wreathed in unending lightning storms; islands of ephemera that were vomited into existence and destroyed an instant later to sink back into the roiling chaos from which they had been birthed. Madness held sway in the nightmarish confluences of this storm, a reign of inconstancy that would break even the hardiest sanity.

Yet amid the endless cycle of creation and destruction, one of the half-glimpsed worlds retained a sickening solidity – a bleak world of lifeless rock and crooked spires, where an impenetrable sun, like the pupil of an impossible eye, held sway in a sky of unchanging emptiness. Perturabo blinked and the dead world and its black sun sank back into the malignant hues of the star maelstrom.

For as long as he could remember, since coming to awareness on that rain-slick cliff, he had felt the gaze of the star maelstrom upon him. It had always looked down upon him; judging him, measuring his worth and spying on his every moment. A life lived beneath its cold scrutiny had made him brooding and loath to offer his trust, ever-watchful and aware of its baleful glare.

It had always been with him and always would be.

And now he was to venture into its depths, following the guidance of an alien seer. What would he find in there and, more to the point, what might find him?

Somehow he had always known he would one day enter the star maelstrom. Its call had been gentle, but insistent. A reeling-in that had been as invisible as it had been impossible to ignore.

Part of him resisted the idea of summons. He could give the order to turn his Legion around and take its hundreds of ships to where he could more readily contribute to Horus Lupercal’s war effort, but every time the thought surfaced in his mind it was obliterated like a timber palisade before a melta ram.

Perturabo had lived his life under the gaze of the star maelstrom, yet this was the first time his ships had ventured near it. Why should that be so? He had been a primarch in the Emperor’s armies; hundreds of starfaring vessels were his to command and no one would have questioned him had he chosen to lead his expeditionary forces here.

The answer was obvious.

Until now, he had had no need to venture within.

Fulgrim may have given him superficial cause with his tall tales of imprisoned war-deities and weapons of the apocalypse, but Perturabo knew that wasn’t the real reason. He had come because now was the time to see what lay within the star maelstrom.

Star maelstrom?

How long had he known it by that description without ever learning its true name?

Perturabo called up the astrogation charts for this region of space stored in the Iron Blood’s data engines. The viewscreen shimmered as it was overlaid with a neon-bright grid, curving arcs and flickering key labels for those few stellar objects in this region worthy of a name. At the heart of the screen, a vertical black label bisected the fiery orange heart of the star maelstrom like the eye of a great cat. Imposed upon the bar was a name.

Cygnus X-1.

Perturabo knew the star maelstrom was not the first spatial anomaly to bear that name, and whichever lowly scribe had assigned it again was a fool. Something this powerful and terrible deserved a name to strike fear into the hearts of all who saw it, a name that would resonate down the millennia until the end of time, when the stars went out and the only light in the universe was the nightmare glow of the star maelstrom’s ever-devouring borders.

Perturabo’s fingers danced over the slate from which the charts had been brought forth, and his thin lips curled in an approximation of a smile as the name in the vertical black bar changed. It would change throughout the fleets, spreading to any data engine that called up maps of the galactic north-west.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘A name to lodge in the hearts of all who hear it.’

The Iron Blood’s engines flared at Perturabo’s command, taking it into the star maelstrom.

No, not the star maelstrom.

The Eye of Terror.

They called it the Dodekatheon, after the twelve tyrants of Olympia, and the masons’ order of the IV Legion had met aboard Iron Warriors starships before Perturabo had even been reunited with his gene-sons. There was nothing secret in its formation or gatherings, nothing hidden at its core, and no secrets worthy of keeping in its activities. It was a true meeting place of builders and warriors, where new structural designs were unveiled, past battles refought and new theorems of war given voice.

Every warrior of the Legion was welcome, but in practice only those of rank had the opportunity to attend any of the lodge meetings. Kroeger had known of it, as had every Iron Warrior, but he had never found the time to seek out a meeting. On the approach to the anomaly in which lay the weapons of the Angel Exterminatus, Barban Falk and Forrix had arrived at his arming chamber as he was replacing the blunted teeth of his chainblade.

‘You have bond-serfs to do that,’ said Forrix.

‘I prefer to do it myself,’ said Kroeger, sitting cross-legged in a steeldust habit of hessian and mail links over his bodyglove. A hundred or more razor teeth were spread on an oiled cloth before him, like trophies taken from the jawbone of some mechanised shark. Each one was polished and fresh, oiled and ready to rend.

‘You have better things to do with your time,’ said Falk, as though irritated by a fellow triarch performing such a menial task.

‘Such as?’

‘Coming with us,’ said Forrix, reaching to lift the sword from Kroeger’s grasp.

Kroeger snatched the weapon away before Forrix could touch it.

‘Don’t touch my blade,’ said Kroeger, fingers curling around its hilt. ‘Where are we going?’

‘To the Dodekatheon,’ said Forrix. ‘It’s time you were known there.’

Kroeger eased his grip on his sword and laid it on a sword rack against the wall, amid a host of blades, bludgeons and firearms.

‘The masons’ order?’

Forrix nodded and they led him into the gleaming, oil-scented hallways of the Iron Blood, through corridors he travelled regularly and chambers he had never known. They crossed vaulted processionals of ranked artillery pieces, with hundreds of heavy armoured vehicles suspended on massive chains from the strengthened roof trusses. They climbed great spiral stairs that wound around thunderous columns of magma-hot power, and super-hardened magazines packed tightly with shell casings, entrenching gear and millions of rounds of volatile ammunition. More than any other Legion, the interiors of the Iron Warriors vessels were given over to supply and logistics, for their way of war depended on a steady supply of high-explosive warheads.

Though it was easy to become lost while travelling through the guts of a starship, Kroeger knew they were heading toward the Iron Blood’s frontal sections. The high-walled chambers of hot iron and sweating pipework through which they passed became ever more cramped as more and more space was given over to the prow weapon systems: the vast tubes of the forward torpedo arrays and power relays serving the heavy gun batteries mounted to either side of the carved ram of the bow.

‘You’ve really never been to a gathering of the Dodekatheon?’ said Falk.

‘Never,’ said Kroeger.

‘Why not?’

Kroeger shrugged. ‘Always seemed like there were more important things to do with my time than talking about war. I prefer to be ready for fighting.’

‘You are a triarch,’ said Forrix. ‘Talking about war is part of being ready for it now.’

The curving ramp they were descending opened out into a long, lancet-vaulted triumphal way, along which numerous groups of Iron Warriors were gathered in tight knots. Some pored over sheaves of architectural plans, while others clustered around hololithic displays projecting schematics of wall details, projected bombardment patterns and fire schedules. Perhaps a hundred or so warriors had assembled, some in armour, some in their mesh and mail robes.

‘It looks very… informal,’ said Kroeger.

‘Don’t let appearances fool you,’ said Forrix. ‘This is as much of a vipers’ den as ever you might imagine. Alliances are made and broken here, pacts and oaths sworn and forgotten before the night’s end. It’s all very useful.’

‘Doesn’t sound useful at all.’

Forrix grinned. ‘On the contrary, to see who favours whom and where plots are formed is knowledge that will stand you in good stead when it comes to deciding upon your order of battle. Pitch any three warsmiths into battle alongside each other and it’s always good to have some healthy rivalry between them. Judging the right level of rivalry can spur each warsmith to greater heights of endeavour, just as getting it wrong can cause your army to fight itself as much as the enemy.’

‘I see,’ said Kroeger, though the idea of engineering rivalry between warsmiths seemed needlessly antagonistic. ‘Do other Legions have orders like this?’

‘Other Legions have since established similar orders, but the Dodekatheon was in place long before Lorgar’s errand boy thought to supplant it with a lodge of his own making.’

‘Aye, we soon sent that worm packing,’ laughed Falk. ‘We have our order, and we don’t need any other.’

Heads began turning as word of the Trident’s arrival spread through the assembled warriors. Though rank and title were left at the door in the Dodekatheon, some were too important to be entirely left behind. Nods of respect followed the three warriors as they made their way through the press of bodies. Kroeger saw faces he recognised, faces he had never seen before and faces that didn’t look like they belonged in the IV Legion.

One such face belonged to the scarred Emperor’s Children swordsman who had accompanied Fulgrim into the Cavea Ferrum. The same warrior who had put him on his back. Lucius, Fulgrim had called him, and with his twin sword sheaths empty at his waist. Kroeger’s hand flashed to his own scabbard before he remembered that he too was unarmed. Lucius grinned as he read the anger in him and sketched a casual salute.

‘Why is that slippery bastard here?’ he asked.

‘A gesture of cooperation between Legions,’ said Falk, practically spitting the answer. ‘We invite one of Fulgrim’s warriors to our order, we send one of ours to theirs.’

‘A spy?’

‘An emissary,’ said Forrix. ‘An ambassador.’

‘Who did we send to them?’

Forrix shrugged. ‘The Stonewrought and one of Berossus’s men. I don’t know his name.’

Lucius moved from sight and Kroeger saw the silver-white hair of Warsmith Toramino as he conversed with a shaven-headed warrior with his back to Kroeger. The two warriors slipped into the side cloisters of the chamber, but not before the warrior turned his head and Kroeger recognised Harkor. He had warily accepted Harkor’s offer of help, all the while knowing the man would eventually betray him for position, but it still surprised Kroeger how quickly his new equerry had run to Toramino to boast of his influence with the newest triarch.

Perhaps there was something to the notion of attending such meetings to gauge the ebb and flow of treachery and infamy after all.

‘The Trident,’ said a grating voice with all the warmth of a glacier. ‘You do not often grace us together. The coming fight must be serious indeed.’

An Iron Warrior in full armour emerged from the crowds and came towards them. He wore the burnished iron of the Legion, his gold and jet polished to a brilliant finish, but the bulk of his armour was the cold ivory of an Apothecary. One gauntlet was enlarged with the tools of the healer and custodian of the dead, the other bearing a jade sceptre in the shape of an elongated lightning bolt. One end was topped by a sapphire sphere filled with vapour, the other by a jade sphere of rippling liquid contained within an invisible energy field.

‘Iron within, Honourable,’ said Forrix, inclining his head in a gesture of respect.

Falk also gave a nod of respect. ‘Honourable Soulaka,’ he said. ‘Iron within.’

‘Iron without,’ said the Apothecary, with a curt bow.

Kroeger did not know this Soulaka, but instinctively disliked him. His features were roguish and handsome, dark-haired with pale blue eyes that might once have been attractive in a mortal face. His smile was that of a bad iterator, sincere and empathetic, but utterly lacking in real conviction.

‘So this is Warsmith Kroeger?’ said Soulaka, holding out his free hand.

Kroeger shook the hand, wrist to wrist, feeling a strength in the man he hadn’t expected.

‘Greetings, Soulaka,’ said Kroeger.

‘My title here is “Honourable”,’ said Soulaka. ‘It is the one rank that endures amongst the equals who come here. But as you are new to the order, I take no offence.’

Kroeger nodded stiffly at the bland rebuke.

‘Be at ease in our company,’ continued Soulaka, leading them deeper into the chamber. ‘There is much in which to take part.’

‘Like what?’ asked Kroeger.

‘I’ll show you.’

Long chains hanging from the distant ceiling bore flaming brands that created a low fug of dark smoke, making the space feel claustrophobic. The hubbub of voices was pleasantly soothing, but there was an undercurrent of fierce pride that coloured every mention of casualties, breaches, escalades and lines of advance.

Soulaka led them past a table heaped with rubble that Kroeger at first mistook for debris come loose from the walls until he saw the grey-coloured blocks being used to represent companies of warriors and artillery.

‘We refight battles from the past,’ said Soulaka. ‘Ours and those of our brothers, to learn from their mistakes and improve our tactical protocols.’

Through the broad shoulders of the legionaries gathered around the table Kroeger saw a lovingly fashioned representation of a great tower, surrounded by more numbered blocks of units, this time coloured black.

‘Here, the warsmiths of the 34th and 88th Grand Battalions are refighting the siege of Dulan,’ said Soulaka with a grin, ‘though I hope they will not come to blows like their historical counterparts. There is the Iron Citadel of the Auretian Technocracy, where we have found that by committing Angron much earlier to the fight, the butcher’s bill would have been much reduced. For the Sons of Horus, at any rate.’

He gestured to a third table. ‘And there we have a recent acquisition – the battle at the Perfect Fortress, a defeat suffered by our brothers of the Third Legion despite aid from the Lord of Iron in the planning of its architecture.’

Kroeger stopped to admire the representation of the Perfect Fortress laid out on the great stone-rimmed hololith. Civil structures and fortifications were one and the same, with each portion of architecture a bastion of defence, a strongpoint and habitation in equal measure. While the walls and buildings were built with what looked like aesthetic considerations uppermost in the warmason’s mind, the roads and infrastructure were clearly the work of a more pragmatic individual.

‘The population are shields,’ said Kroeger, scanning the city for weakness.

‘Or civil defence forces, depending on your point of view,’ said Soulaka.

‘They’re meat shields,’ said Kroeger. ‘But whoever designed it that way is an idiot.’

A ghost of movement, and Kroeger felt perfumed breath at his ear.

‘The Phoenician himself designed it,’ said Lucius, with a too-intimate hand brushing Kroeger’s neck as he slid around him. ‘Are you saying my primarch is an idiot?’

Kroeger threw off Lucius’s hand, and fought the urge to rip the smug bastard’s head off. He felt the solid presence of Barban Falk at one shoulder and Forrix at the other, taking a measure of pride that they stood with him. To attack Lucius would be a mistake, for numerous reasons, and the swordsman knew it. Kroeger swallowed his anger and nodded towards the Perfect Fortress.

‘It’s a flawed strategy to rely on the compassion of your enemies,’ he said. ‘This city depends on the attackers being afraid to target the populace. That wouldn’t be a consideration if I was leading the attack.’

‘Imperial forces don’t think like you do,’ said Lucius, and Kroeger watched the play of scar tissue on the swordsman’s face. Many of his wounds were poorly sealed or deliberately kept from healing properly. The effect must have been painful.

‘They will,’ said Kroeger. ‘Sooner than you think. And anyway, this “Perfect Fortress” fell, didn’t it? Wasn’t so perfect after all, eh?’

‘It fell, yes, but not through any failing of the design,’ said Lucius.

‘Then why did it fall?’ demanded Falk.

‘Because we had tired of it, and letting Corax and his monsters have it was more agreeable,’ said Lucius. ‘My Legion are warriors, not gaolers. We are not suited to be the custodians of conquered worlds, we leave that to other, less… vigorous Legions.’

Kroeger laughed at the pettiness of the insult, and pushed past Lucius towards a vast topographical arena that was part physical representation, part holographic construction. It occupied the entire end of the chamber, a rendering of the mightiest fortress Kroeger had ever seen. It wasn’t a defence raised by mortal hands, it was the greatest landmass of a world, shaped by a mighty being to become the strongest, most revered and most implacable fastness in the galaxy. A masterwork of immense proportions, its complexity and functional beauty took Kroeger’s breath away.

Though he had never once set eyes on this place, he knew it exactly for what it was.

‘The Imperial Palace,’ he said.

‘Ah, yes,’ said Soulaka. ‘A permanent fixture of the Dodekatheon.’

A score of warriors surrounded the table, each one commanding some aspect of its defence or undoing. By their orders were holographic representations of grand armies sent into battle, numerically tagged divisions of tens of thousands advancing and retreating like blood-red surge tides as they laid siege to the Palace. Hecklers shouted advice to the combatants, yelling to indicate sudden assaults from hidden sally ports, portions of rampart left weakly defended, breaches to be exploited and gateways left broken by relentless artillery barrages.

Yet for all the millions of Legion warriors and Army auxiliaries laying siege to the Imperial Palace, Kroeger already saw it was hopeless. The defenders were too entrenched, the walls too high, the defences too coordinated and the cunning of their construction too ingenious to overcome. Few of the attacking armies had a hope of getting over the walls, and most never would. Suggestions bombarded the attacking generals, ranging from the obvious – ‘More guns, more assaults!’ – to the ridiculous – ‘Fight harder!’

Every suggestion that was acted upon was met and countered with ease, the warriors taking the role of defenders parrying and repulsing each attack with the bare minimum of effort. Watching their moves and countermoves, Kroeger recognised a pattern in their efforts that was entirely different from those in which he had trained.

The warsmiths were defending the Palace with the tactics of another Legion.

‘They’re using Imperial Fists doctrines,’ said Kroeger.

‘Of course,’ said Soulaka, appearing at his side. ‘Dorn and his labourer Legion are the ones fortifying the Palace, so it makes sense to play by his rules.’

‘That’s not particularly inspiring,’ he said as yet another attack was swept from the Kathmandu precincts and an assault over the Dhawalagiri elevation was repulsed with terrifying losses. Casualties were in the hundreds of thousands.

‘I agree,’ said Soulaka. ‘But our armies outnumber the defenders ten to one. Eventually they will get in.’

Kroeger shook his head. ‘Perhaps, but whoever is left standing in the Palace will be master of the largest ruin on Terra,’ he said.

‘You think you could do better?’ said a voice behind him.

All conversation ceased as the Lord of Iron emerged from the shadows, resplendent in his full battle armour and with Forgebreaker harnessed across his back. The cybernetic interfaces across his scalp shimmered in the torchlight and his melancholic features were hooded and dark. Fulgrim’s ermine cloak hung from his shoulders, the fastening skull gleaming and the inset gemstone streaked with numerous golden lines.

‘My lord,’ said Forrix. ‘We did not know you were here.’

‘Clearly,’ said Perturabo as the Iron Circle emerged from the shadows behind him. Forrix was amazed that the primarch’s shield bearers had been able to infiltrate the prow space without anyone hearing the heavy footfalls of their approach. The bulky armoured battle robots flanked the primarch as he made a slow circuit of the Palace table. He shook his head as though disappointed at his warriors’ lack of ambition and vision. His cold blue eyes scanned the frozen positions of the armies laying siege to the Palace and his lips pressed into a thin line at what he saw.

Kroeger watched the primarch’s displeasure, and remembered why he had been brought into the Trident.

‘Yes, I think I could do better,’ he said.

Perturabo looked up, and said, ‘You think you could take what your fellow warsmiths have so spectacularly failed to capture?’

‘I do,’ said Kroeger.

‘Then you are either a fool or extremely gifted.’

‘Perhaps a little of both.’

‘We’ll see,’ said Perturabo. ‘Restore the battle simulation to baseline. Begin again, and this time Warsmith Kroeger will assume the mantle of assault command. All other parameters to be the same. Begin.’

Perturabo stepped back from the holographically enhanced model as the dead returned to life, and the fictive armies withdrew. Kroeger shook his head and pointed a mailed fist at him.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not all parameters will be the same.’

‘What would you change, my bold triarch?’ asked Perturabo, leaning on the edge of the table and letting the green shimmer from the table’s hard-light projectors illuminate his face with a spectral glow.

‘I don’t want to fight warriors following another primarch’s stratagems.’

‘Then who would you fight?’

‘I want to fight you,’ said Kroeger. ‘I want to see what happens when Perturabo defends the Emperor’s Palace.’

The apothecarion was silent, and Cadmus Tyro was reluctant to break that silence with his words, but who else could he talk to? In truth, the chamber had long since ceased to be a place of healing. Now it was a tomb, wreathed in the chill of the grave and used only to inter a brave man whose wounds should have seen him dead thrice over.

He sat beside Ulrach Branthan’s casket, with his hand resting on the frosted glass surface. Haptic sensors registered the cold and measured the contained energies of the stasis field within, but there was no sensation beyond what the augmetics were telling him. His bionic replacement was more sensitive, more receptive and stronger than the limb that had been cut from him so long ago, but he found he now missed the reassuringly organic feel of his hands.

Strange that a memory of flesh should come to him here, where flesh was by far the most redundant material present. His own body was over sixty per cent mechanised: his legs, one arm, his lungs and a significant portion of his cardiovascular system. A phage-cell infection received from a leucotoxic bio-pathogen while clearing out the Galieanic Cluster had seen to that. Not that he had minded at the time, of course, only the truly favoured were able to leave the weaknesses of the body behind so swiftly and so completely. Only Vermanus Cybus matched Tyro in chimeric bio-modifications, but Cybus had long been viewed as pathological in his reverence for the machine and loathing for flesh.

In truth, Cybus was a warrior not even his battle-brothers could be around for any length of time, for his adherence to the doctrines of augmetic superiority had already spread through the Legion even before the death of Ferrus Manus and his warning against such beliefs to the Iron Fraternity.

Garuda felt Tyro’s disquiet and rubbed its metallic head against the rasped skin of his neck as if to comfort him. Where the steel of Tyro’s augmetic arm joined with his shoulder was a flexing mass of integrated tissue that webbed in a fine mesh with the base of his neck. It itched abominably, but the analgesics that normally soothed the irritation of the skin had all been requisitioned for the operation of Branthan’s casket.

‘Easy, the captain will be restored to us,’ said Tyro, aware he was addressing his words to a bird that could not answer him. He corrected himself. A bird that chose not to answer him. Garuda and Ulrach Branthan were boon companions, and it had often seemed as though they had spoken via some invisible communion.

‘Ah, Ulrach, you’ve got me talking to this damn machine of yours,’ he said, tapping his fingers on the glass in a rhythmic tattoo. ‘It’s been as loyal as any of us, I’ll give it that.’

No answer was forthcoming from his captain, nor had he expected one. Apothecary Tarsa had suggested that it might help Branthan if he were to hear familiar voices around him, providing a link between the frozen world he now occupied and the world of warmth above. They had taken it in turns since Isstvan to come to the apothecarion to speak to their former captain and give voice to the trivialities of the day, the operations they had planned and the fears they had for the coming war.

Tyro suspected the Salamander’s suggestion was more for the living than the living dead.

Since breaching the outer regions of the great warp storm, Varuchi Vohra had been as good as his word, guiding the Sisypheum between its squalls and immaterial thunderheads with a deft and subtle hand. Breaching so dangerous a storm would normally have made for a juddering, nightmare-filled voyage, but the eldar Paths Below had kept them from the worst side effects of so dangerous a journey. Even the Geller fields were unnecessary, though Tyro had kept them raised anyway.

Vohra assured him they were making good time, but it was impossible to know for sure. Every auspex reading was garbled nonsense that registered only impossible spikes of tortured physical reality and every chronometer aboard the ship had either ceased functioning or skittered randomly forwards and back in time.

Truly, this was a realm of impossibility.

And they were flying straight into the heart of it.

‘I’ll be honest, Ulrach, I don’t know what I’m doing,’ said Tyro, shaking his head. ‘They look to me to have the answers, but I don’t have any to give them. You were always the captain who saw the bigger picture; I was just a line warrior with a title. I don’t know if you have any connection to the ship now, but we’re about as far from anywhere sane as I could ever imagine. If you can believe it, we’re taking an eldar at his word and letting him guide the Sisypheum into the largest warp rift I’ve ever known, chasing down some wild story of ancient gods and doomsday weapons. You’d have put a bolt through that eldar’s head as soon as look at him, and we’d be back doing something useful.’

Tyro paused as Garuda hopped from his shoulders to land on the edge of the casket. The bird preened as it walked the length of the icy container, and Tyro wondered if it knew why its former master wasn’t coming out.

‘It’s all gone to hell, Ulrach. We’re fighting the bastards, I swear we’re all fighting them, and we’re doing some good too. And we’re not alone any more; we’ve made contact with twenty-five other fighting cells. We’re cutting enemy supply lines, denying them easy passage. We’ve broken their communications and killed thousands of traitors. Our kill ratio is higher than ever, but I just don’t know if it’s enough. I don’t know what the primarch would do, and that… that… scares me.’

The admission shocked Cadmus Tyro, for he had long since imagined himself purged of that crippling emotion. Fear was what lesser mortals endured. Decades of training, psycho-conditioning and iron discipline had made his psyche impervious to the mind-killer. Tyro had faced monstrous alien beings, hordes of greenskins intent on carving him up with motorised cleavers and shrieking aethereal horrors that pushed through the barrier between warp space and reality.

He had faced all these and more without fear, yet the yawning uncertainty of their future had all but unmanned him.

‘Should we go back to Terra, regroup with the rest of the Legions? Or should we stay out here, because we’re actually fighting, actually killing the enemy? We’re the Shattered Legions, and we’re hurting them, but are we hurting them enough to matter? I don’t know, and I don’t know how to fight without certainty. You and the primarch gave us that certainty, but where do we go from here?’

His iron fingers curled into a fist.

‘Asirnoth’s blood – we need you, Ulrach,’ said Tyro, opening his fingers and slamming his palm down onto the glass. The stasis field shimmered and buzzed as the casket registered the impact. A warning chime sounded, and a red light winked to life on the thermostatic controls.

Garuda took to the air with an angry blurt of binary that sent a spike of pain lancing into his skull. Tyro sat back, suddenly nervous. Had he disrupted some vital system? He didn’t know. Should he send for Atesh Tarsa?

The red light winked out, and Tyro exhaled a sigh of relief. The very idea of something changing within a stasis field was patently ludicrous.

‘You see? Emotion. We’re all at breaking point, Ulrach,’ said Tyro, getting up and pacing the length and breadth of the chamber. ‘Ever since Ferrus… since Isstvan, we’ve been fraying at the edges, unravelling, and I don’t know how to stop it. We’re losing what made us great, Ulrach. The iron will at the heart of us, it’s, I don’t know, it’s rusting or coming apart.’

Cadmus Tyro stopped at the end of Branthan’s casket and leaned forwards, resting his elbows on the bevelled edges, letting the frustration of months of isolated warfare in the north bleed out of him in a juddering sigh.

‘This isn’t the kind of war I was made for,’ he said. ‘I’ll fight it, and we’ll bloody the foe, but can we win it? I’m not sure.’

Only the hum of machinery and the skitter of claws on the casket’s lid disturbed the silence. Tyro stared at the blurred outline of the man he had followed into battle a hundred times and more, an effigy of life instead of life itself. A corpse frozen in time, just waiting for some distant archaeotechnician to dig him from an exposed glacier.

‘You know, I think these are the longest conversations we’ve ever had,’ he said. ‘If you weren’t in that casket, I don’t think you’d have listened to half of what I’m saying. You’d have slammed me into that wall and told me to get a grip of myself. You’d have said that I was a fool to let the weakness of flesh rule my thinking. And you’d be right to do it.’

Garuda tapped its silver beak against the glass, and Tyro straightened with a soft chuckle that utterly belied his grim mood.

‘You’re right,’ said Tyro. ‘Let’s go, the captain needs his rest.’

He hammered his fist against the battle-scored metal of his plastron and held out his arm for the mechanised eagle to hop on. The bird backed away from him, and tapped its beak on the glass again. He beckoned to the eagle, but the bird steadfastly refused to come to him. Its moods – if mechanised confections could be said to have moods – were often inexplicable, but this was obstinate even for it.

‘Come here,’ he said. ‘Now.’

The bird didn’t move.

Tyro reached for it, but Garuda pecked at him, and its beak crackled with electrical discharge as it made contact, cutting the iron of Tyro’s gauntlet like an energised blade. He snatched his hand back, but before he could give voice to an angry curse, he saw what had drawn the bird’s attention.

It wasn’t at first apparent what he was seeing, because his mind refused to accept it.

But the more he looked, the more it became impossible to deny.

Branthan lay as he always had, cold and unmoving, with the Heart of Iron wrapped around his body like a squatting mechanical parasite. His limbs were still wrecked and broken, his chest ruined by the four mass-reactive craters punched through his torso.

No, not four.

Tyro saw only three bolter wounds.

TWELVE

The Palace Besieged
A Taste for Profligacy
Bigger Generators

Impervious and impregnable were words spoken by tyrants since the first earthworks of antiquity had been thrown up around their great halls. History told grim tales of how such words were no more than empty boasts, that time and firepower could bring down any wall. No fastness was ever impregnable, no wall impervious, and there was no artifice of man that could not be torn down.

Or so Forrix had always thought.

As Kroeger laid siege to the Emperor’s Palace, he watched with grim amusement as Perturabo fended off his first attacks. For all his initial bluster that he was no warsmith, Kroeger was holding his own, making cautious moves to test his enemy and bold offensives in an attempt to catch him off balance. Perturabo was falling for none of it, and each time it appeared Kroeger might have made some significant gain, a later gambit of the primarch’s would reveal it for the trap it was.

Over-extended thrusts were decapitated and the proxy warriors caught in the pockets quickly surrounded and destroyed. The siege was played out at speed, days passing in minutes as Kroeger’s armies crashed against the walls of the Palace like bloody breakers. The earthworks at Haldwani, long regarded as fundamentally flawed by the Iron Warriors, took every punishment Kroeger could hurl at them, and the Legion warriors manning them even mounted a number of devastating sorties through their fire-blackened gates.

Divisions of men and swaggering mobs of Titans were removed almost as soon as they took to the field of battle. Orbital plates saturated the battlefield with earth-shaking bombardments and emplaced guns swept the Gangetic Plain with hellish pyrostorms in the wake of repeated strafing runs and incendiary barrages.

Kroeger was controlling a continent’s worth of armies single-handedly, and the strain of such a complex command was starting to show. He began to make mistakes. Like a gifted amateur playing a host of regicide grandmasters at once, he could not hope to see every angle and every riposte to his attacks. Every warsmith in the hall gathered round, their own battle simulations now meaningless in the face of this titanic conflict.

The Petitioners’ City fell to Kroeger’s armies, flattened to a rocky desert as it became a battleground of titanic war engines. Its dispossessed inhabitants fought alongside the Legions of the Emperor, rising up in a great ragtag host to defend their demolished homes and ruined lives. The Navigators’ Quarter vanished in a seething cauldron of flame, a sudden drop assault contained within its boundaries and incinerated under a relentless barrage of Imperial shells and counter-attacking battle robots. It had been a baited trap, and now the foremost shock troops of Kroeger’s army had been slaughtered for nothing.

Where the gathered warsmiths had shouted encouragement and heckled in previous iterations of this battle, they now watched in silence, awed at the performance of their primarch as he conducted the music of battle like a virtuoso. Where Kroeger struggled to keep up with his available forces, the avenues of attack opening or denied him, Perturabo had no such trouble. His forces came smoothly to him, his every opportunity seized, his every setback transformed from a potential disaster to a superlative counter-strike.

It was an unequal struggle, but Kroeger wasn’t about to give in.

Brahmaputra, the great avenue into the heart of the Palace, was held by a golden army of Custodians, and Kroeger contented himself with pinning them in place, while launching attacks across the canyons of the Karnali and the bleak precincts of the City of Sight. Far from being an easy route through a benighted region of the Palace, the pyskers’ enclave was held by the Black Sentinels, reinforced by mysterious regiments that went unlabelled on the hololithic projectors.

Falk leaned over and whispered, ‘He’s not doing too well, is he?’

‘Better than I thought he would.’

‘True,’ admitted Falk. ‘You think he could use some help?’

‘Almost certainly,’ said Forrix, nodding towards the Dhawalagiri prospect. ‘But let’s see how he takes on the Custodians’ assault.’

‘What Custodians’ assault? The only ones deployed are the ones at Brahmaputra, and they’re not going anywhere.’

‘Wait and see.’

An unstoppable charge of hundreds of Battle Titans strode up the statue-lined prospects of the Dhawalagiri. To group so many of his mightiest war machines in one assault was risky, but looking at the disposition of forces, Forrix couldn’t blame Kroeger for taking the potentially battle-ending gambit. But Kroeger hadn’t seen what Forrix had.

The ‘Custodes’ pinned in place at Brahmaputra were not Custodes at all, merely a decoy to mask the presence of the Emperor’s praetorians elsewhere. In a sweeping pincer, two golden sickle-bladed sorties swept out from the sunken bartizan towers of the outer precincts of the Dhawalagiri. The artillery that had pounded the great avenue to splintered ruin fell to the vengeful Imperials, and the guns turned on the Titans crashing up the Dhawalagiri like mindless savages sacking the capital of a dying empire.

No sooner had the guns staggered the battle engines than Perturabo launched his iron fist.

Lion’s Gate burst open and a reserve of Titans emerged to do battle, riding out like knights of old with their lances lowered. The Custodians fell on the scrums of infantry supporting the Titans and within moments the Dhawalagiri was a corpse-choked wasteland of dead attackers.

And with the fall of the last war engine the battle was over and the Palace saved.

Kroeger had nothing left to carry the day and he threw his hands up in defeat, angry and elated in the same moment. He looked like he’d fought the Iron Circle in a sparring session.

Once again time unwound and the scene before them reverted to its original setting, but this time there was remarkably little of the Palace to be rebuilt. The previous engagement had seen it reduced to rubble, a gothic ruin of shattered marble, burning glass and molten gold. Perturabo’s defence had preserved all but the most functional of walls.

‘You won, my lord,’ said Kroeger.

‘Of course I won,’ said Perturabo. ‘Dorn is a fool, and wastes time and effort with the idea that everything he has done to the Palace can be undone. He builds a fortress with one hand tied behind his back, thinking that he can put everything back the way it was. Once a thing is broken, it will always be broken, but my brother cannot accept that.’

‘It was an honour to face you, my lord,’ said Kroeger.

Perturabo looked at him strangely, and Forrix saw what was coming a heartbeat before the primarch waved him and Falk forwards.

The primarch shook his head. ‘You think we’re done here?’

‘My lord?’

‘Now it’s my turn to attack,’ said Perturabo.

It was over in moments.

Perturabo’s armies blew their way through the massive earthwork defences at Haldwani and Xigaze. The sky at the top of the world was on fire. Despite the bombardments of the orbital plates and the constant sorties of Stormbirds and the Hawkwings, the Lord of Iron’s Legions advanced, up through the Brahmaputra, along the delta of the Karnali.

Continental firestorms raged across the Gangetic Plain once again.

As they entered the rampart outworks of the Palace, his streaming, screaming multitudes and the striding war machines were greeted by monsoons of firepower. Every emplacement along the Dhawalagiri prospect committed its weapons. Las-fire reached out in neon slashes, annihilating everything it touched. Shells fell like sleet. Titans exploded, caught fire, collapsed on their faces and crushed the warriors swarming around their heels. Still they came. Lancing beams struck the armour-reinforced walls like lightning. The walls fell. They collapsed like slumping glaciers. Gold-cased bodies spilled out, tumbling down in the deluge.

The Palace began to burn.

Primus Gate fell; Lion’s Gate, subjected to attack from the north; Annapurna Gate. At the Ultimate Gate, Perturabo’s divisions finally sliced into the Palace, slaughtering everyone they found inside. Around every broken gate, the corpses of Titans piled up in vast, jumbled heaps where they had fallen over each other in their desire to breach the walls. The victorious host clambered across their carcasses, pouring into the Palace to fall upon its master and tear him from his golden throne in readiness for the galaxy’s new ruler.

The combined tactical ability of three of the greatest Iron Warriors had singularly failed to keep Perturabo out. A salutory reminder that the master of defence was also the master of attack. Under his command the Palace would be an ironclad fortress, but as his target it was a fragile thing just waiting to be broken open.

Before the attacking red divisions swarmed over the inner precincts of the Palace, Perturabo ended the simulation. The holographic elements of the battle faded, leaving only the broad sweep of the sculpted table in its wake. Perturabo leaned over the ruins of the Ultimate Gate and shook his head with a wry grin.

‘I am better than you, brother,’ he said, as much to himself as to those around him. ‘I will always be better than you. I know that’s what you’re really afraid of.’

The Stonewrought’s title was well deserved, for while it was said that he was fashioned from the very substance of worlds, Soltarn Vull Bronn knew that it was literally true for all of them, but refrained from pointing out what should have been obvious. They were all made from the leavings of stars, ejected matter compressed and reshaped by billions of years of stellar engineering and biochemical and electrical reactions.

Whether his understanding of this gave him insight into the heart of the stone was a mystery he did not examine too closely. That the stone spoke to him and unveiled its secrets and strengths was enough for him. To know its structure and composition came as naturally to him as breathing, and amongst a Legion like the Iron Warriors that made him special.

Though not, apparently, special enough to avoid this onerous duty.

Accompanied by a brutish warrior named Cadaras Grendel from the Grand Battalion of Warsmith Berossus, Vull Bronn made his way through the fetish-hung corridors of the Pride of the Emperor. They followed a limping warrior named Lord Commander Eidolon, who wore a razor-hooked cloak over his garishly coloured armour and bore a monstrously heavy hammer not unlike that of the Lord of Iron.

Eidolon had greeted them cordially on the embarkation deck, accompanied by an honour guard of warriors whose armour was a riot of clashing colours and horned spikes. The gorgets of their armour extended beyond their shoulders, fitted with all manner of vox pick-ups and augmitter enhancers. Their helms bulged with aural implants and instead of bolters they carried bizarre weaponry that pulsed like generators on the verge of an overload.

Eidolon had named them Kakophoni, but had declined to explain their nature.

Vull Bronn tried to conceal his shock at the sight of the Emperor’s Children’s flagship, but he was sure that Eidolon had seen his reaction and grinned. The Lord Commander’s manner put Vull Bronn on edge. His skin was ashen and lifeless, his eyes sunken in their sockets like those of a cadaver.

The Pride of the Emperor was a place of light and noise, of spectacle and grotesqueries. At every turn, Vull Bronn’s eyes beheld some new and terrible sight. His senses reeled at the sensory overload, but the journey to La Fenice was just the beginning.

Rumours had spread amongst the Warmaster’s allies of the great debauch that had taken place here, an opera of such staggering excess that it had driven the Emperor’s Children to madness. No one had really believed it, but as the warped doors of the grand theatre swung open before him, Vull Bronn suddenly believed every wild rumour and knew them to have entirely failed to capture the horror of what had truly happened.

‘Throne…’ he hissed, before remembering the inappropriateness of that oath.

No one appeared to notice.

Cadaras Grendel let out a breath of astonishment.

‘Welcome to La Fenice,’ said Eidolon.

Vull Bronn had seen picts of Fulgrim’s grand theatrical ballroom, some reportedly taken by the renowned Euphrati Keeler, but this place bore only a fleeting resemblance to that once magnificent playhouse. Vull Bronn squinted through the dazzling beams of intense light strobing down from the arched roof, barely able to make out shadowy forms moving through the clouds of musky incense that boiled from hanging censers like an alchemical experiment gone wrong.

The stench was sickly sweet, hot and fragrant, but with a lingering hint of something rotten beneath. It caught at the back of Vull Bronn’s throat and he wanted to spit to rid his mouth of the taste, feeling some lingering after-effect worming its way into his system. Garlands of faces and stretched canvases of human skin hung from the royal boxes above, and bouquets of bones sprouted from dripping iron sconces. Unseen drums boomed in a discordant thunder like an arrhythmic heartbeat that wove in and out of a roaring, squealing morass of sounds from swaying vox-casters.

The Thaliakron had majesty and grandeur, but La Fenice had none of that.

‘What have you done to this place?’ asked Vull Bronn.

‘Raised it to the level of wonder,’ said Eidolon, his voice little more than a rasping growl, as though his throat and vocal chords were no longer working in sync.

Mindful of his status as a guest, Vull Bronn said, ‘It is like nothing I have ever seen.’

‘Few have,’ agreed Eidolon. ‘It must be a welcome change from the tedious formality of the Dodekatheon. Here we celebrate what we have become, rather than dwelling on the past or things that might have been, but never will be.’

‘The Dodekatheon is a gathering of warriors,’ said Vull Bronn, masking his irritation at Eidolon’s casual insult. ‘We gather to better ourselves.’

‘As do we,’ said Eidolon, leading him deeper into La Fenice.

Their path wound through a cavalcade of nightmares made real, a corruption of everything for which the Legions had once stood. Vull Bronn saw flesh opened up and the glistening insides brought forth for sport, for interest and for pleasure. Mortals and Legion warriors made play with their bodies, cutting them with symbols and designs that were beyond comprehension or belief.

Great casks of wine were siphoned with intestinal pipes, like giant organs being drained of their vital fluids. Heaped piles of reclining bodies drew smoke from drooling hookahs, their eyes glassy and limbs slack. Grendel paused to snatch a fleshy tube from a supine legionary with blood-frothed saliva drooling from the corner of his mouth. He sucked hard and grimaced at the taste of whatever was coming through the tube.

He spat a mouthful of viscous ooze that looked like the scrapings from a cancerous lung.

‘It’s not Olympian vintage, but it’s got a kick to it,’ said Grendel.

‘Touch nothing,’ ordered Vull Bronn, but Grendel ignored him and took another swig.

Creatures that might once have been human stalked the theatre like numinous observers, beings so far removed from their original physical template that they were an entirely new species. Bodies of patchwork torsos from a dozen different individuals moved with reptilian locomotion on limbs that were a mix of arms and legs taken apart, broken and remade in dozens of unique and terrible ways, like the aborted failures of some diseased creation myth. Lunatic eyes stared at him, and he recoiled from the repugnant mix of joy and terror, ecstasy and insanity in the faces grafted to the bellies and spines of the unnatural creatures.

‘From iron cometh strength,’ said Vull Bronn, girding himself against the abomination, but the words sounded hollow, as though drained of their power in this place of dark raptures.

‘The Unbreakable Litany,’ laughed Eidolon. ‘In time you will learn nothing is unbreakable.’

‘What are they?’ said Vull Bronn as the nearest gestalt creature moved away, followed by capering, hunched figures chained to it like offspring wailing to be suckled.

‘Fabius calls them his terata,’ spat Eidolon, his hand unconsciously going to his neck.

‘Terata?’

Eidolon waved a dismissive hand at the departing monstrosity, relishing Vull Bronn’s discomfort. ‘It’s what he calls the deformed monsters he makes aboard the Andronius with gene-seed torn from the dead. He treats them like children.’

‘Some children,’ said Grendel. ‘Wouldn’t want to meet the mother.’

Vull Bronn asked nothing more of the hideous terata, hearing the disgust and hatred in Eidolon’s voice. Whatever this twisted Apothecary Fabius was to Eidolon, clearly there was no love lost between them.

The smoke parted for a moment, like a curtain being drawn in readiness for a performance. A baying crowd of legionaries and mortals watched a warrior with a tattooed cheek leaping and spinning across the stage with a pair of silver-bladed swords. His skill was breathtaking, his movements like a dancer.

‘Who’s the swordsman?’ asked Grendel, wiping black residue from his chin with the back of his hand and a grimace of distaste.

‘Bastarnae Abranxe,’ said Eidolon. ‘A captain of what was once the 85th Company.’

‘He is supremely skilled,’ said Vull Bronn, still observing the correct protocol in the face of what he now understood was its utter inconsequence.

Eidolon’s shoulders lurched awkwardly, and Vull Bronn realised it was a shrug. ‘He fancies himself a great bladesman, but he is no more than competent.’

‘He’s not bad,’ said Grendel, sizing Abranxe up, as though they might one day be enemies.

‘We have better,’ admitted Eidolon with some reluctance. ‘Cross us and you’ll find out how much better.’

Part boast, part threat, Eidolon’s attempt at superiority was clumsy. Vull Bronn ignored the jibe. In a place like this, what did petty rivalries matter? Vull Bronn swallowed back a strange nausea, gritting his teeth and blinking away the irritation of the drifting fog of seductive musks.

‘I’m finding it hard to believe,’ said Grendel, watching as a host of black-clad warriors invaded the stage with screaming blades, but were taken apart in a blistering series of dazzling thrusts, ripostes and decapitating cuts.

‘There is one of the Legion known as Lucius who makes Abranxe look like a crippled child,’ said Eidolon, looking as if he was choking on the words.

‘I’ve heard of him,’ said Grendel. ‘He’s supposed to be good.’

Grendel vanished into the perfumed smoke to witness more of the swordsman’s display, leaving Vull Bronn with Eidolon. Berossus’s man had come armed, so perhaps he fancied his chances against Abranxe. Vull Bronn hoped not, but he was already growing less and less concerned with what happened to Cadaras Grendel.

Or to himself, truth be told.

Eidolon led him to a booth that felt like an island of normality in this kaleidoscope of marvels and wondrous new sensation. Vull Bronn had never known such an array of sensory bombardment, and though he had resisted the gamut of the unknown and the fearsome at first, he was now beginning to enjoy what he was experiencing.

The booth was cushioned with soft fabrics: velveteen, silk, variegated damask and rough textures like shark skin or squid hide. The sensation of reclining on them was unusual, but not unpleasant, and Vull Bronn found that he was, despite his earlier reticence, finding much to his liking in La Fenice. He wondered what the Emperor’s Children’s representative to the Iron Blood would make of their staid Legion practices.

Naked slaves, surgically modified with extra limbs like ancient, blue-skinned goddesses, slipped into the booth. They carried elaborate hookahs, with snaking pipes sheathed in serpentine scales and filled with bubbling smoke that coiled into deliberate, cursive shapes.

‘What is that?’ asked Vull Bronn as a hookah was set before him.

‘A concoction of the Phoenician,’ said Eidolon. ‘A key to the doors of perception and a means of finding the answers to all the questions you never even knew you were asking.’

‘Sounds potent,’ said Vull Bronn, already anticipating his first taste.

‘It is,’ agreed Eidolon, unhooking the pipe and holding it out to Vull Bronn. ‘Especially the first time you try it. Especially in the Eye of Terror.’

‘Eye of Terror?’

Eidolon looked confused, as though he had no idea where that name had come from.

‘This warp storm,’ said Eidolon, hesitantly. ‘That’s what it’s called.’

Vull Bronn nodded. He knew that. How he knew it, he couldn’t recall, but it felt as though he had always known it. He had no memory of being told the name, but there was no doubting its appropriateness.

He shook his head and took the pipe, its surface texture wet and organic. ‘Skin?’ he asked.

‘Laer,’ nodded Eidolon, pulling in a great lungful of shimmering smoke. His corpse eyes lost their emptiness for a moment, and his jaw stretched wider than any mouth should ever stretch. Tendrils of smoke gusted from his enlarged throat. Vull Bronn knew he should be horrified at the sight, but the sheer incongruity of it all was strangely fascinating.

He took a breath from the hookah, and a liquid grin spread across his face as the world around him appeared to sharpen, as though each edge and line were etched with greater force on the fabric of reality. He saw echoes in movement, sound as ripples in the air and darting shapes that danced on the edges of his vision. Everything suddenly seemed to be more real, as though what he had thought was reality was now revealed to be little more than a veneer over the true face of the world.

More of the adapted slaves appeared, each more outrageously mutilated than the last, and where they had shocked him before, he found himself revelling in each new disfigurement. They came bearing silver ewers, and a slave whose gender was impossible to fix held out a goblet that threw dazzling refractions of light in all directions from the complex lattice of its cut crystal. Vull Bronn tried to follow the myriad beams of light, reaching up to touch them, but gave up as another slave, one with what looked like two halves of separate faces alloyed together, poured a clear, viscous fluid into the goblet he wasn’t even aware he’d taken.

A heady aroma of salt swam in his senses and he raised the goblet cautiously to his face.

‘Ah, this you will like,’ promised Eidolon.

‘What is it?’

‘We call it Lacrimosa,’ said Eidolon. ‘An exquisite wine bled from the tears of slaves.’

Vull Bronn took a tentative sip. His eyes widened. The taste was, as Eidolon had promised, exquisite. The suffering of a thousand mortals distilled into a single mouthful. The flavour was pain and pleasure combined, a heady symphony of aromas from the erotic to the repugnant. It was heights and depths of emotion in liquid form. He tilted his face back to drain his goblet, and his eyes widened as he saw the portrait hanging high above their booth.

He gasped as he recognised the image of Fulgrim, clad as Vull Bronn remembered him, what seemed like a lifetime ago. The plates of his armour were brilliantly illuminated, each curve and sweep of a golden wing or the palatine aquila upon his heroic form brilliantly rendered, as though Fulgrim himself looked down upon him. As heroic as any portrait hung in the palaces of the Delchonian tyrant, this was Fulgrim as he had imagined himself to be.

Vull Bronn met the eyes of the portrait and the Lacrimosa curdled in his mouth.

A jolt of sublime pleasure punched into his system and he felt himself being pulled deeper into a morass of pure sensation. He had come to this place revolted, and a diminishing portion of his consciousness still cried out at the terrible things he was seeing. But the part of him that felt disgust was being compressed within him like the core of a dying star.

‘I should not be here,’ he said, feeling as though the words were coming from someone else’s throat. ‘This is not the way of the Iron Warriors.’

‘It could be,’ suggested Eidolon.

‘The Lord of Iron would never agree to it,’ he said, fighting to keep his thoughts coherent.

‘He would have no choice were the pleasures of the Lords of Profligacy to be brought to the Dodekatheon in secret. Spread through the Fourth Legion thanks to its masons’ lodge, Perturabo would have no choice but to accept the flesh profundities of the Dark Prince.’

‘Dark Prince…?’ asked Vull Bronn, already feeling the question squirming away from him.

‘Isn’t there a delicious frisson to be had in violating the mores of what most would call civilised, in revelling in that which others call debauched?’ said Eidolon, blowing a mouthful of potent hookah smoke in his face. ‘We have all broken our most treasured oath, so what does one more violation matter? Or ten more…?’

Vull Bronn nodded, the sense of what Eidolon was saying now obvious to him.

‘You’re right,’ he said, the words coming from his mouth despite the screaming warning in his skull. ‘I understand now.’

‘Drink,’ said Eidolon, refilling his goblet. ‘Seal your pact with the Dark Prince.’

Vull Bronn smiled and raised the goblet to his lips. ‘Yes, I think I will.’

Before he could drink, a figure loomed from the smoke before him and knocked the goblet from his hand with a backhanded slap. Enraged, he sprang to his feet, finding himself face to face with Cadaras Grendel.

‘Iron within, Stonewrought,’ said Grendel, and the words were a cold knife in his heart. ‘I think it’s time we departed, don’t you?’

‘I will kill you for that,’ snapped Vull Bronn.

‘No,’ said Grendel, casting a poisonous glance at Eidolon. ‘You’ll thank me.’

Grendel’s sledgehammer fist slammed into his face.

And all the light and pleasure went out of the world.

Frater Thamatica’s earlier failure to make the thermic displacement beamer functional had not discouraged him from a second attempt. In fact, it had made him more determined than ever to rectify what had gone wrong before. He paced before the control mechanisms, watching the needles monitoring the power levels being fed into the magnetic gimbals as they sat at the farthest extreme of measurement.

‘That’s better,’ he said, tapping an iron finger on one dial that fluctuated more than most.

Down the laboratorium, two new spheres – reconstituted from the amalgamated remains of the first pair – spun in their concentric rings. The magnetic fields surrounding them were orders of magnitude more powerful than the ones he had employed when Wayland had come to observe, hence the greater distance between them and his control station.

Thirty chattering calculus-logi sat on three long benches arranged behind him, like worshippers at a heathen fane. Each blank-faced, shaven-headed autept was linked in parallel to his neighbour by a sheaf of coloured ribbon-cables, and their already phenomenal computational power was enhanced still further by the shared mindspace he had created in his most powerful data engine. Working as one linked brain, their eyes closed to keep all non-essential sensory inputs to a minimum, they crunched the vast array of arithmetical data and hexamathic geometries he needed to keep control of the building power.

Thamatica was certain he had the variables worked out of the experiment; it was all a matter of managing colossal power inputs and balancing them against the titanic energy requirements. His theory was sound, but Thamatica knew that theory had a perverse way of not matching up to practice.

A dozen servitors stripped of their mechanised parts – as far as was practical – maintained the machinery of the experiment in close proximity to the two rapidly rotating spheres. Thamatica didn’t dare approach too close to the machine; he was far too augmented to survive such conflicting magnetic fields. The energy would literally tear him limb from limb.

He checked the cascades of data on the numerous panels, giving each one a cursory inspection, but enough to satisfy himself that everything was as it should be. This was a highly dangerous experiment, but Thamatica’s sense for such things had diminished in the wake of every mechanical augmentation he had undergone. Ferrus Manus himself had often spoken with the Iron Fraternity of that reduced humanity, of its dangers and its potential to erode their human compassion, but any thoughts of acting upon that warning had been swept aside in the wake of his death.

The thought of his primarch’s murder left Thamatica strangely cold, and in his darker moments he had begun to question the wisdom of his Legion’s chosen path to enhanced augmentation. He had seen a direct correlation between the lack of human empathy in a warrior and the level of bionic enhancements he had undergone. It could be a fascinating avenue of research, but now was not the time for such indulgences.

In times of war, the Iron Fraternity were more concerned with the construction of weapons than with matters of philosophy. Such things were the purview of the Librarius, or at least they would have been had the Iron Hands ever possessed such an institution.

He shook off such tangential thoughts and returned to the matter in hand. The power levels were all approaching the regions the calculus-logi had extrapolated that he would require and the magnetic field strength was stable. As he had said to Wayland, he required bigger generators, and had linked his experimental machinery to the plasma drives, diverting their power to his laboratorium. On some level he knew he should have sought permission from Cadmus Tyro for that, but the irascible captain would only have refused.

Where was the sense in asking for what would almost certainly be denied?

‘Yes,’ he said to himself. ‘Yes, this will work. And even if it doesn’t, it’s always easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.’

Thamatica pushed the activation button on his console, coupling the engine outputs to the machinery empowering his device. The readouts all began to climb, and Thamatica recorded them all through the data-capture optics in his bionic eye.

Lightning arced between the two spheres, a dancing web of eye-watering brightness. Three of the servitors were immolated by backwashing electrical discharge before self-preservation protocols made the others back away. The power contained there could vaporise the entire ship, and Thamatica began to channel that power into the experimental machinery that would begin the quantum swapping between the two spheres.

All he had to do was throw the two switches that would complete the circuit.

His hands hovered over the switches as a moment of doubt nested in the back of his mind.

‘What if this goes wrong?’ he said, turning to the gibbering calculus-logi autepts.

They had no answer for him, only waste numbers and remainders.

The flow of hexamathical calculus was reassuring in its simplicity, and Thamatica let out a relieved breath. He nodded and waved a hand as if silencing their admonition.

‘Of course, yes, you’re right,’ he said. ‘What purpose is served by timidity?’

He closed the switches and a thunderous bang echoed as the power levels spiked vertiginously. Relays blew out in an instant and lightning strikes whipped out in streaks of blazing energy and seismic detonation.

‘You bloody fool, Thamatica!’ he shouted as the calculus-logi shrieked with one voice and their shared mindspace blew out in a surge of feedback. All thirty slumped over, blood streaming from their fried brain cavities and smoke boiling from their skulls. It was impossible to know how far overloaded the system was: every needle and readout had melted.

Thamatica looked towards the two spheres. Blinding light flowed between them and the servitors were gone, immolated by the expanding ball of electromagnetic fire. How this version of his experiment could have gone wrong was a question for another day, and Thamatica slammed his palm down on the emergency shutdown.

The power to the devices surrounding the spheres was cut off in an instant, and a billow of electrically charged air was all that remained of the potentially catastrophic power surge. Thamatica let out a sigh of relief and frustration, scanning the ruined console before him to see what, if anything, could be salvaged from this latest setback.

Almost nothing remained of his data recorders, but the one surviving gauge told him exactly where the vast quantities of power vented from the experiment had gone and what it would look like to any other ship in the vicinity.

‘Ah, electromagnetic venting,’ he said. ‘That’s not good. That’s not good at all.’

THIRTEEN

Back from the Brink
Unmasked
Attack Orders

It felt like waking from a nightmare, then realising the nightmare had followed him from sleep. Soltarn Vull Bronn’s skull throbbed as though it had been filled with boiling vapour, a pressurised container with no way to vent. He groaned. His mouth felt sticky, like he’d been force-fed gallons of syrupy food paste. His eyes were gummed shut, his throat raw and constricted.

What had happened to him?

He felt hollow, as though the most potent purgatives had flushed his system and left him drained of energy and shivering. Bright light was spearing through his eyelids, straight into his brain, which felt like a Dreadnought was crushing it in its motorised fist. Every nerve felt as though it were pushing out through his skin, such that every contact was painful.

‘He’s waking up,’ said a voice, gravelly and coarse.

‘I wasn’t sure he would,’ said another.

‘Didn’t hit him that hard,’ growled yet another.

He tried to make sense of what he was hearing. The cold, echoing hum of machinery and the bite of counterseptic and formaldehyde suggested an apothecarion, but the rough voices and scrape of armour plates and gun oil suggested a legionary’s arming chamber.

‘Where am I?’ he said, his voice a strangled, dry wheeze.

‘Aboard the Iron Blood,’ said the first voice. ‘In the apothecarion.’

At least he’d got that right.

‘Why am I here? What happened?’

He opened his eyes, squinting against the glare of stark lumen strips and reflected light from brushed-steel cabinets and glass tubes of suspended flesh and replacement organs.

‘We were hoping you could tell us.’

The owner of the voice leaned over him, and he recognised Soulaka. The Apothecary was a warrior of Warsmith Toramino’s Grand Battalion and the current Honourable of the Dodekatheon, an honorific he actually deserved if rumour were to be believed.

Vull Bronn sat up, his body as weak as the day he had woken after the implantation of the black carapace. His limbs shivered and his muscles felt abused and stretched beyond their ability to endure. Hands reached out to steady him.

Warsmith Forrix stood to one side of the reinforced gurney upon which he sat, one arm holding tightly to his bicep. The grip was light but painful, and Vull Bronn pulled away.

By the wide doors of the apothecarion stood a bland-faced legionary with long hair worn in an elaborate braid over the right side of his skull. His face was familiar, but Vull Bronn couldn’t place it until he reached up to rub the tender skin at his jawline.

‘You struck me,’ he said, remembering the piledriver blow that had put him down.

‘You’re welcome,’ said Cadaras Grendel.

‘What?’ snapped Vull Bronn, wincing as the hammering in his skull intensified. ‘I should kill you for that.’

‘I think in this case we can forgo a disciplinary,’ said Forrix.

‘He struck a superior officer!’ protested Vull Bronn.

‘You really don’t remember what happened, do you?’ grinned the insufferable Grendel, his louche grin spreading wider. ‘That stuff Eidolon gave you must have been hellish strong.’

‘Eidolon?’ said Vull Bronn as a memory surfaced like a bloated body in water. ‘I remember smoking something. There was drink too, I think. Something made from tears, he said.’

‘It is likely that Legionary Grendel saved your life,’ said Soulaka, extruding a hypo-syringe from his gauntlet narthecium. Vull Bronn felt the prick of the needle in his shoulder and a warmth spread from the insertion point. Almost immediately, his thoughts cleared and the pain in his skull began to recede as his body’s healing mechanisms were chemically kicked into high gear. His skin felt hot and beads of oily toxins sweated from his pores.

‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

‘I’m not sure any of us do,’ said Forrix, circling the gurney and studying him as though unsure whether to welcome him back to the Legion or clap him in irons. ‘I don’t know what they were doing to you, Stonewrought, but I think Grendel stopped you from becoming like them.’

Vull Bronn could barely remember anything of the meeting in La Fenice, but just the thought of being part of it revolted him. His gorge rose and he fought down a wave of sickness, gripping the edge of the gurney to keep his stomach contents where they belonged.

‘Something vile has taken root in the Emperor’s Children,’ said Forrix. ‘We all knew it the minute we saw Fulgrim’s carnivalia on Hydra Cordatus, but it’s worse than any of us feared.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Soulaka.

‘He means that the rumours we’ve been hearing are more than just rumours,’ said Perturabo, ducking his head as he entered the apothecarion, followed by three of the Iron Circle. The chamber had felt cramped before, but with the primarch and his shield-bearing bodyguards it felt positively claustrophobic.

‘Rumours, my lord?’ said Vull Bronn. ‘What rumours?’

‘The ones that circulated after Isstvan V,’ said Perturabo. ‘Wild stories of orgiastic worship of old gods and daemons. Of sorcery and sacrifice.’

‘But surely rumour is all they were?’ said Forrix, offended by the notion. ‘We’re not actually thinking there are ancient powers in the warp? Whatever’s going on with the Emperor’s Children, it’s madness, some new obsession with perfection on the Phoenician’s part. But that’s all it is.’

Perturabo hesitated. ‘I tried to deny it, to rationalise it as a sickness of the mind, but having seen what has become of the Third Legion and hearing what Cadaras Grendel had to say about events on the Pride of the Emperor, it’s clear Fulgrim believes he serves these daemon gods.’

‘Gods?’ said Vull Bronn, not wanting to accept this, but feeling a dreadful sense of the truth of it by saying the words aloud. ‘Sorcery and daemonic powers?’

‘I agree, it sounds like insanity, but if Fulgrim and his Legion have embraced this belief, then we have to take it seriously.’

‘I remember… monsters,’ he said. ‘Eidolon called them terata. He said they were the bastard by-blows of Apothecary Fabius.’

‘Fabius is creating new life-forms?’ said Soulaka. ‘What were they?’

‘Diabolical things, hybrid melds of surgical mutilation and genetic nightmare.’

Vull Bronn swallowed, the taste bilious and repellent as the memory of deformed slaves and their wanton disfigurements arose in his mind. The horror of the III Legion’s revels lodged like a knife in the guts and he fell back on the first tenets of the Iron Warriors.

‘From iron cometh strength. From strength cometh will,’ he said, as a wave of nausea threatened to overcome him. ‘From will cometh faith. From faith cometh honour. From honour cometh iron.’

‘May it ever be so,’ said Soulaka, completing the catechism and leaning in close to Vull Bronn. ‘But tell me more of these new life-forms, they sound fascinating.’

‘Forget them, Soulaka,’ said Perturabo, lifting Vull Bronn’s head and turning it from side to side. ‘Nothing good can come of such tampering, but Fabius’s alchemy is potent if his drugs can fell an Iron Warrior.’ His face hardened to granite. ‘I don’t pretend to understand what’s happening to my brother’s Legion, but we’ll send no more of our warriors to their depraved meetings. Whatever corruption has taken Fulgrim’s warriors will not take mine.’

‘So what do we do now?’ asked Forrix.

‘I will have words with my brother,’ said Perturabo.

Barban Falk paced the length of the Iron Blood’s bridge, clad in his Mark IV plate, his hands laced behind his back. He paused to watch the maddening swirl of nameless colours and the play of tempestuous thunderheads that boomed and clashed beyond the viewscreen. The Eye of Terror – as it now appeared on the astrogation charts – was a raging holocaust of immaterial energies, but the course plots being fed from the Andronius and its alien navigator were following realspace veins that threaded its turbulent depths with aplomb.

Though it went against his every instinct to trust an eldar guide, Falk was forced to admit that the Paths Above were as calm as any inter-system flight path he had plied, and they had not lost one of the hundreds of ships in their fleet. As best they could, the data engines of the Iron Blood were recording their course, though Falk suspected that this pathway would only remain viable for as long as their mission took to complete.

It irked Falk to be alone on the bridge, but while Kroeger established his presence with his Grand Battalion and Forrix inveigled himself with the primarch, at least one of the Trident needed to be here. The Iron Blood’s captain, a mechanised hybrid named Bahdet Vort, kept them on course, his body largely subsumed into the devotional altar from which the vessel was steered. Falk ignored the steady stream of correctional data from the captain and resumed his pacing, feeling his gaze again drawn to the boiling miasma of swirling light and undying energies that seethed beyond the fragile protection of the ship’s protective fields.

Here and there patterns formed and dissolved, patterns that looked like faces, eyes and a thousand other elements of human features. All random and all illusory, for the warp was a realm of fantasy, a little understood realm of shifting and treacherous space where nothing was as it seemed and little could be taken at face value.

Standard practice while traversing warp currents was to keep the oculus sealed off from the immaterial currents raging outside, but given the safety of their route Falk had kept the bridge shutters open. The interior of a starship was such a drab, functional place, and the shimmering oil-slick colours bathing the bridge space in wondrous spirals of light and hues to which he could give no name were a pleasing diversion.

Falk halted in the centre of the bridge, letting servitor cant, binaric mumblings and the clatter of data-engine coils wash over him as he peered into the depths of the storm. As if reacting to his scrutiny, the currents before the ship slithered and spun into new and ever more elaborate forms. Lines and curves intersected, a haphazard collection of randomly assembled angles. Meaningless in themselves, but as Falk stared harder, they began to cohere into something tangible.

Beyond the apparent chaos of the whorls of light and dark, Falk saw the fleeting impression of a grinning face. A skull, like that worn on both the shoulder guards of his warplate. He blinked and the image was gone. His mouth was suddenly dry, but he wasn’t even sure what he’d seen.

If he’d seen anything at all.

He stared at the churning warp pocket where he thought he’d seen the skull, but the lines and curves and angles refused to come together. He looked away from the viewscreen, staring at the beaten iron wall of the bridge. Patterns of fabrication striations and micro-cracks in the metal seemed to writhe beneath his gaze, the fractal crazing of the metal leaping into clarity and displaying the same skull he had seen in the depths of the warp.

Falk gritted his teeth and looked away.

In the intersecting lines of latticed girders he saw it again. In the scores creased into the leather of his gauntlets, its hollow eye sockets regarded him strangely, like a stranger refusing to break eye contact. Once seen, the skull could not be unseen, and Falk felt a mounting panic as the scuff marks on the iron deck plates and the chevroning of gold and black eased into the shape of the leering skull. He fought to calm his breathing, knowing that the warp could play tricks on the brain, that its ill-understood physics were capable of twisting the mind’s perceptions of reality.

‘Seal the bridge,’ he said. ‘Shutters down.’

The grinding shutters concertinaed over the viewing bay but as they drew closed Falk’s eyes narrowed and he held up his hand as he saw a brilliant flare of energised light bloom from ahead of the Iron Blood like a newborn star.

‘Hold. Reopen shutters.’

The shutters pulled back with a groan of protest, and Falk marched down to the surveyor station as a chime of detection sounded. He scanned the readings on the forward auspex and felt a mounting exhilaration seize him. He pressed a finger to his gorget.

‘Lord Perturabo?’ he said. ‘We’re not alone here.’

‘What in the name of the primarch just happened?’ demanded Cadmus Tyro, striding towards the station normally occupied by Frater Thamatica, but which was now manned by Sabik Wayland.

Wayland wished he had an answer. Red light after red light appeared on the steel-panelled display before him, each one a vital ship system going offline.

‘I’m not sure, captain,’ said Wayland. ‘The engine cores registered a critical reactor spike and automatically triggered the venting protocols. They’ve shut down almost every onboard system until the energy levels have bled off enough to restore them safely.’

‘Where did that reactor spike come from?’

Wayland scrolled through the last fifteen minutes of engine data, seeing output readings that were far in excess of what the Sisypheum’s current speed would suggest. Each engine core was operating well below its capability during the delicate manoeuvres through the Paths Below, but they were still generating colossal amounts of energy. With a sinking feeling, Wayland suspected he knew full well where that power had been diverted to.

‘Thamatica, you damn fool,’ he said.

‘What?’ demanded Tyro, and his eagle took wing at his fury. ‘What’s that bloody maniac gone and done now?’

‘I think the Frater has made a second attempt to get his thermic displacement beamer operational. He said he needed bigger generators and I believe he’s been bleeding engine power to his laboratorium.’

‘Thamatica!’ yelled Tyro over the ship’s vox. ‘What have you done to my ship? Get up here now so I can beat you to death!’

No answer was forthcoming, and Tyro again rounded on Wayland as emergency lights fired up with a thrum of engaging circuits, bathing the bridge in a red glow. Wayland bent to his terminal, culling every last shred of diagnostic data he could still bring up. He saw the subtlety with which Thamatica had concealed his siphoning of reactor energy, how he had generated an exponentially vast build-up of power, and the catastrophic diversion of feedback at his experiment’s conclusion.

‘What’s he done to us?’ demanded Vermanus Cybus, already trying to restore the ship’s weapon systems. ‘I can’t get any power to the gun batteries.’

‘The venting protocols have taken everything out,’ said Wayland, looking at zeroed output levels across the board. ‘We’re dead in the void.’

‘Damn him, I’ll have his head for this,’ said Tyro.

‘There’s more,’ said Wayland. ‘And you’re not going to like it.’

‘What?’

‘Venting that much electromagnetic energy into space is like lighting a clan’s beacon fire,’ said Wayland. ‘Any ship within a hundred light years will probably have seen it.’

‘The traitors? They’ll know we’re here?’

‘Almost certainly.’

Tyro spun away from him and shouted over to the navigational pod where Varuchi Vohra sat. The eldar scholar rose from the reclined couch and gracefully made his way towards the incensed captain of the Sisypheum.

‘The Paths Above and the Paths Below, how distant are they?’

Vohra spread his hands and then spiralled them around one another.

‘The question is not easy to answer,’ he said. ‘In a tempest such as this, distance is a relative term. One might as well ask how distant is a dream from wakefulness.’

‘I don’t need bloody poetry,’ snapped Tyro. ‘Give me a straight answer or I’ll put a bolt through your skull right now. Will they be close enough to have seen our engine flare?’

‘If they have eyes in the void, then they will have seen it, yes,’ said Varuchi Vohra.

Tyro ran over to the surveyor station, one of the few systems spared the blackout of the reactor spike. The display was cascading gibberish, a flickering, static-laced nightmare of meaningless returns and confused imagery the surveyors could not interpret. In the midst of a warp storm, conventional auspex readings were all but useless, and only the unique mutation of a Navigator could hope to steer a ship through its immaterial currents.

Right now, Tyro needed something, anything, to tell him where the enemy were.

Waves of white noise and distortion washed through the auspex, but just for an instant the slate cleared and Tyro had a fleeting glimpse of the local spatial environment. The threat board lit up as it took a snapshot of the returns it was getting from its passive sensors.

Tyro’s blood chilled, as if he were standing next to the stasis casket of Ulrach Branthan.

Over three hundred capital-class contacts, dead astern on a low parallel vector.

Two forward picket ships, strike cruisers at least, closing on surging intercept vectors.

And the Sisypheum drifting without power, helpless as an infant shard-wyrm in a snare.

‘Battle stations!’ shouted Cadmus Tyro. ‘Enemy ships inbound.’

Perturabo watched the replay of what the prow auspex had recorded at the farthest extent of its range, a distorted inload of aberrant data and meaningless warp interference. Then, at precisely the same moment each time, the sudden brightness of an electromagnetic pulse. Frequencies, radiance and nuclear spectra cascaded from the brightness, and Perturabo let the data lodge in the deep seams of his cognitive strata.

‘It’s an enemy ship,’ said Forrix, his surprise evident.

‘Do we know whose?’ asked Kroeger.

‘It’s an Iron Hands vessel,’ said Perturabo, tracing a finger down the streams of data as the recording looped once more.

‘Tenth Legion?’ said Forrix. ‘The assassins on Hydra Cordatus were Iron Hands.’

‘One of them was,’ corrected Perturabo. ‘But this is the ship they came from, I know it.’

The primarch paused the expanding halo of energy flaring from the Iron Hands ship, wondering how the Medusan warriors could have been so careless as to allow such a visible sign of their presence.

‘Not like the Tenth to make a mistake like that,’ noted Kroeger.

‘My thoughts exactly,’ said Perturabo. ‘Under normal operational circumstances I might say it was too convenient for them to reveal themselves so blatantly, but I don’t think this is a trap, I think we’ve just been handed a golden opportunity.’

‘I have a fix on their last position,’ said Falk, standing beside Vort’s command altar. ‘We’re at the forefront of the fleet and we’ll be within range in a few minutes.’

Perturabo nodded, then bent to the console with the frozen image of the expanding electromagnetic pulse. His eyes narrowed as he parsed the data and tapped the screen thoughtfully. He looked up into the maddening squalls and tempests raging outside, seeing a cold logic and order in the seething nuclear heart of the storm, idiot sentience given rudimentary form by the very flecks of insignificance that plied its immaterial currents.

Voyaging within the Eye of Terror had only increased his feeling of being studied, as though the eternal chaos of the storm had folded in on itself to regard the interlopers within its forbidden heart.

None of his gene-sons could know the warp as he did: they had not heard its siren song since their earliest days. To them, the Eye of Terror was an impenetrable hellstorm, a strange and mysterious phenomenon. A spatial hazard to be avoided.

To Perturabo it was a remnant of the galaxy’s ancient symphony, the background noise to existence itself and the fading echoes of creation music from the dawn of time.

‘My lord?’ said Forrix. ‘Is something wrong?’

‘Something’s awry,’ said Perturabo, a fresh suspicion forming in his mind like a coy secret that would only reveal itself if properly coaxed. ‘What am I seeing here? There’s something… something that shouldn’t be…’

He looked past the obvious signs of a ship in distress and let his burgeoning suspicion grow and develop without conscious direction. The solution would come, this thought that tugged at his subconscious, but only when it was ready.

An ascending tritone from behind announced an incoming communication from the Emperor’s Children fleet. Perturabo knew who it would be before Barban Falk confirmed it.

‘Vox-hail from the Pride of the Emperor. Lord Fulgrim wishes to speak to you, my lord.’

Perturabo nodded and a pellucid green form appeared above the hard-light projector embedded in the deck before the viewscreen. The Phoenician was clad in his voluminous robes, with fire-wreathed cherubim bearing his trailing cloak and winged battle helm.

‘You have seen it?’ breathed Fulgrim, his voice hoarse with excitement.

‘We have, brother,’ replied Perturabo. ‘We will be in firing range in moments.’

‘Firing range? Surely you can’t mean to simply destroy this ship?’

‘Of course, what else would I do?’

‘The Andronius is preparing boarding craft to capture it,’ said Fulgrim, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. ‘You must have seen that this is one of the Gorgon’s ships?’

‘Tenth Legion, yes. What of it?’

‘I would not pass up this chance to humble poor dead Ferrus’s men again,’ said Fulgrim.

‘No,’ said Perturabo. ‘As soon as we have a firing solution, the Iron Blood will blow that ship out of the void.’

Fulgrim’s image managed to look suitably disappointed. ‘Aren’t you the least bit curious as to how they came to be ahead of us? Who they are and why they are here?’

‘No.’

‘Really? Karuchi Vohra says they may have a guide like him aboard.’

‘All the more reason to destroy it immediately.’

‘Permit me this one indulgence,’ pouted Fulgrim’s shimmering form. ‘If it were an Imperial Fists vessel, I doubt you would be so quick to arm the bombardment cannons. You would be aboard that lumbering Stormbird of yours and already looking for a breaching point.’

Perturabo cut the link between the Iron Blood and the Pride of the Emperor. He turned to Barban Falk and said, ‘As soon as you have a firing solution, destroy the enemy ships.’

‘My lord?’ said Falk. ‘Ships?’

Perturabo nodded, now understanding the substance of his suspicion, returning his gaze to the looping pict recording of the electromagnetic pulse. Yes, a shadow in the flare of light, a hint of darkness where no darkness ought to be.

A reflection in the mirror of the maelstrom where nothing should exist to be reflected.

‘One of them’s running,’ said Perturabo, ‘but there are two ships out there.’

The attack order went out and the Emperor’s Children responded with perfect speed.

The embarkation deck of the Andronius was chaotic with warbands fighting to get to the Stormbirds and boarding torpedoes. The caged raptors of attack craft were loaded on their guide rails, freshly-daubed in their new colours – shocking pinks, electric blues and neon yellows. Great banners of skin and silk billowed from the iron rafters in roasting thermals as engines thundered to life.

Lucius sprinted through the throng, heading for the nearest Stormbird.

A helpless enemy ship – the best kind of enemy ship – drifted in the void within reach of the picket and its crew were just waiting to be plucked. His swords practically danced in their scabbards, and though he told himself that their eagerness was just his imagination, he could no longer quite convince himself. His armour glistened with flesh-grease, and the blood from his fresh facial scars was still sticky on the defaced eagle at the centre of his breastplate.

Lucius vaulted onto the assault ramp of the Stormbird and, certain he had secured his place in the initial wave of boarding craft, turned to see who else would be joining him. The Legion’s warriors scrambled and fought to be the first to get to grips with the enemy. Their devotions had been turned inwards since Prismatica, and the chance to bathe in the screams of the enemy was too delicious to pass up.

Marius Vairosean blared a path to a waiting Stormbird, his Kakophoni roaring behind him with their madly skirling sonic cannons screaming and wailing like a chorus of the damned. Bastarnae Abranxe had fought his way to a craft, together with his consort Lonomia Ruen. Abranxe saw him and raised a sword. A challenge or a salute, Lucius didn’t care.

Lucius’s gaze was drawn to a boarding torpedo at the far end of the deck, isolated from the others like a plague victim. No one fought to reach this craft, for the solitary figure of Apothecary Fabius stood before it, calmly directing the motion of a heavy lifter rig as it manoeuvred a gigantic container from the depths of the ship. Labelled with all manner of biohazard symbols, even the sensation-seeking Emperor’s Children knew to keep away from the dreadful things birthed in Fabius’s bedlam chambers.

Flesh-hooded servitors guided the biological container forwards like the slaves of some ancient monument builder. They secured it within the torpedo’s interior and Fabius climbed in after it, sealing the blast shutters behind him.

‘What are you up to, you old necromancer?’ wondered Lucius, his interest piqued.

He heard the percussive booms of hatches sealing behind fully laden boarding torpedoes, and grinned as he ducked back into the red-lit interior of the crew compartment. Dozens of Emperor’s Children were lashing themselves to the gravity harnesses, cutting their palms with the teeth of their chainblades, rocking back and forth in pent-up excitement or howling like maddened wolves in the fold. The assault ramp swung up and Lucius felt the Stormbird strain against the clamps of its launch rail. Quickly he found an empty seat, and strapped himself in as the growling, vibrating attack craft was finally unleashed.

Powerful engines spat the Stormbird into the calm void between the Andronius and its victim. G-forces pinned Lucius to his seat and he licked blood from his lips.

His swords were drawn, though he had no memory of unsheathing them.

He spat onto the blades, laughing as pleasure sang through his body.

Perturabo cursed as he saw the Andronius swing around with a surge of corrective burn to put itself between the Iron Blood and the drifting vessel of the X Legion.

‘Damn you, brother,’ hissed Perturabo.

‘I have a firing solution,’ said Barban Falk.

Perturabo shook his head. ‘You’d hit the Andronius,’ he said.

‘Fulgrim ordered his ship to block our shot,’ growled Forrix.

‘Almost certainly,’ agreed Perturabo.

‘He knew we were going to open fire,’ said Kroeger. ‘I say we shoot anyway. It’s their own damn fault if their ship gets hit.’

Perturabo chewed the proposition over, the greater part of him wanting to give the order and damn the consequences. Fulgrim had descended into terrifying depths of egomania, and who knew what his newfound beliefs in daemons and gods might compel him to do if he felt he was being attacked. Such narcissists could twist any accidental or imagined slight into the grossest insult, and lighting the spark of a void war between two whole Legions in the Eye of Terror probably wasn’t wise.

‘No,’ said Perturabo. ‘Such an act will break our fragile alliance for certain, and I’ve still to learn what my brother is really after.’

‘He defied you!’ snarled Forrix. ‘He has earned retribution.’

‘Enough,’ said Perturabo, drawing Forgebreaker from its shoulder harness. ‘If Fulgrim wants to capture this vessel, then we will not let him have all the glory.’

Kroeger was the first to grasp the implication of his words.

‘I will ready the Stormbirds,’ he said, heading for the armoured doors to the bridge. ‘We’ll be ready to launch within ten minutes.’

‘No,’ said Perturabo. ‘This will be over by then.’

‘What about that second ship?’ said Forrix.

‘It’s already gone,’ said Perturabo. ‘Whoever it was, they don’t want any part of this fight yet. If we want to take the iron to the stone, we have to do it now.’

‘My lord,’ said Forrix, a note of warning in his voice as he realised what Perturabo intended. ‘So close to the edges of warp interference? Without fixed lock points? The risks are too great.’

‘Fulgrim may have started this, but we’ll damn well finish it,’ said Perturabo, turning to Barban Falk. ‘Bring us in above the enemy ship and power up the teleport chambers.’

FOURTEEN

Here be Monsters
You Wounded Me
The Circle is Complete

The impacts were deafening, filling the superstructure of the Sisypheum with ringing echoes of metal on metal. Interior bulkheads crumpled like sheet foil with the force of the boarding torpedoes slamming into the wallowing ship’s flank. Layered steel and ceramite broke apart as the blunt snouts of the torpedoes tore into the greatest void within the Iron Hands ship: its embarkation deck.

Magna-melta blasts exploded from the torpedoes’ frontal sections, and assault launchers scattered cones of red-hot shrapnel before them. Little additional damage was caused, as Cadmus Tyro had ordered the deck emptied of trans-atmospheric craft in anticipation of such an attack. The rotating razor-cogs of the boarding torpedoes ground to a halt and their locking bolts blew off in sequence.

Vermanus Cybus issued the attack order with a synapse pulse through the MIU implant in his skull. No sooner had his orders been received than the blast shutters at the edge of the embarkation deck slammed up into their housings, and two dozen Rhinos of ebony and iron raced towards the boarding torpedoes. Cybus would mount no static defence of his ship, but a stinging counter-attack.

He rode atop his heavily modified command Rhino, secured in the cupola by the magnetic clamps on his mechanised lower body. He mashed the firing triggers of the pintle-mounted storm bolters, sending chugging streams of contrails playing over the worm-like maws of the torpedoes. Streams of bolter shells blistered the scorched outer armour of the torpedoes as shielded storm-turrets rotated clear of their housings and returned fire.

Up-armoured and driven over the debris of the torpedoes’ entry at engine-shredding speed, none of the racing vehicles were stopped. Internal blast shutters blew out from the torpedoes and a roar of animalistic hatred echoed from within, like the hideous, cave-dwelling ferro-drakes of Karaashi. Cybus slewed his Rhino to a halt as the snouts of the torpedoes fell away and assault ramps slammed down onto the blasted deck plates.

‘Incoming!’ he yelled across a variety of wavelengths. ‘The iron endures!’

The crew doors of the Rhinos slammed back and black-armoured warriors disembarked from their vehicles, nearly two hundred battle-brothers moving forwards to occupy positions of cover amid fallen stanchions, ruptured deck plates and toppled bulkheads.

A howling mass of twisted flesh and sutured armour vomited from the interior of the torpedo that had impacted first, a hundred or more… things that were unlike anything Cybus had ever seen. His artificial eyes were capable of rendering visual information in multiple spectra and with incredible clarity, but right now he wished they were not.

No two of the monsters were alike, hybrid things of glistening flesh, distorted anatomies and swollen muscle. Their limbs were elongated, bladed and chained with whirling hooks. They moved with astounding speed, some on limbs like organic piston springs, others with the ruddy haunches of powerful beasts of burden. Like wax effigies left too close to a heat lamp, their plasticised bodies were molten amalgams of a hundred conjoined anatomies, genetically manipulated abominations that should never have been given life.

But worse than all their deformities and abnormalities was the stark fact that their bodies had clearly once been Space Marines. No mortal flesh could have borne such torturous cellular mutilation and survived. The gunfire from the Iron Hands slackened as that awful truth slammed home, and the monsters seized that momentary lapse in discipline to close the distance between the two forces with terrifying speed.

Perhaps a score were cut down in a stuttered volley of fire as the Iron Hands recovered from their shock. Explosive fire and close-range missile blasts reduced the dead to component organs, but it was nowhere near enough to stop the tide of aberrant flesh.

The monsters struck the Iron Hands in knots of stone-hard muscle and bone.

Cassander had been gene-crafted to dismiss the debilitating effects of fear. His physiology was engineered to block the chemical and neurological responses to the emotion and his mind had been trained to resist its touch. He had waged the Emperor’s wars for hundreds of years and had never let the many terrors of the galaxy keep him from his mission.

But nothing had prepared him for this.

This was fighting against the warriors he still called brothers.

In the wake of his failed vengeance on Fabius, the demented slave servitors had hurled him into one of the sepulchral, iron-walled chambers with a host of snuffling, stinking beasts. He expected them to attack, to fall upon him with their anatomically impossible weapon-limbs and tear him apart.

Instead they had accepted him as one of their own.

Only then had Cassander understood that these abominations had once been Legion warriors like him. Whatever Legion they had once been, they were now appalling monsters with drooling, fang-filled mouths and ragged talons. Surgical and genetic deviants, monsters with only the last vestiges of their humanity remaining.

Only then had he seen how ravaged and distorted his own body had become.

Bloated beyond recognition and discoloured from the poisonous filth and biological agents injected into his body, his flesh was now a mockery of its once proud perfection. He saw the swelling in his muscles, the hardness of his skin and the distended protrusion of his bones at every joint.

The monsters didn’t attack him, because he was one of them.

Kept like exotic beasts in a menagerie, they were fed a nutrient-rich gruel that Cassander alone seemed to understand was laced with growth hormones and gene-triggers that enhanced their aggression and strength. Fights and bloodshed were endemic after each serving, and numerous times Cassander was forced to defend the portion of the chamber’s floor upon which he curled up to sleep.

He had ignored the gruel, though his stomach rebelled at his fasting. His reforged physiology demanded feeding, and he could feel its hothoused metabolism beginning to devour itself. This was a good thing. It meant an end to his suffering.

He would die and this nightmare would end.

Then he remembered his words to Navarra and the credo of the Fists, each of Rogal Dorn’s tenets hammered through his skull as though driven by the fist of the Emperor himself.

Determination, self-reliance and steadfastness.

Honour, duty and the ability to endure anything.

Cassander ate sparingly, digesting only enough to keep his strength up and fighting to control the sudden urges to do harm to those around him. His moods swung violently, and it took every last scrap of his mental fortitude to hold onto the things that made him who he was – a warrior of the Legiones Astartes and a proud son of Rogal Dorn.

Time held even less meaning for him in this twilight world of savagery, and then came the moment when the bulkhead doors had been thrown open and they had been herded into an electrified channel that led to a hot tube of iron that boomed and shook as though being shot from the barrel of an artillery piece.

Thunderous impact, an ultra-rapid deceleration. Sequenced blasts of superheated air forced them to the front of the tube in a crammed mass of howling rage. Ceiling-mounted atomisers filled the air with chem-stimms that made Cassander’s eyes bleed and his blood pulse in time with a booming thunder in his chest. Both his hearts were now beating. He felt light-headed and the oxygen-rich soup of his altered bloodwork was making him dizzy with fear and anger. The potent mix of shrieking emotions swelled his already fearsomely proportioned musculature with adrenal boosters and rage-inducing stimulants.

The bulkhead wall that penned them in rose up, and bright light flooded the iron tube in which they had been confined. A stampede of howling monsters charged from the interior, mindless and fuelled by alchemical rage. Ahead, warriors in black warplate fired heavy guns that tore through the first monsters to escape their captivity. The smell of their blood and their bodies’ interior cavities filled Cassander’s newly awakened senses with a need to tear the flesh from their bones.

He fought against the sensation, but was carried into the warriors in black despite his reluctance to approach them. He knew he should recognise them. He knew they were not his enemy, that they were brothers, yet what his brain was telling him and what his body demanded were two very different things. Cassander watched his fellow monsters kill with sweeps of taloned paws or with a toxic vomit of bilious fluids.

This was not warfare as waged by the Legions, it was degenerate slaughter. All around Cassander, bolter fire was wreaking a bloody toll on the monsters, blowing out plugs of flesh or mushrooming from spines in gouts of stinking blood. He fought to keep clear of the swirling melee, but inevitably he found himself face to face with a warrior in gleaming black plate and a fist of purest silver steel. Cassander threw up his arms, fighting down the urge to rip this warrior’s head off.

‘Iron Hand!’ he yelled. ‘I am of the Legions!’

His words were mangled by the genetic reshaping of his jawbone, and if the warrior understood him, he gave no sign. The legionary’s bolter erupted with flame, and Cassander buckled as the shot struck him square in the centre of his chest. The pain was incredible, but instead of blowing him apart from the inside, the shell deflected from his freshly ossified bone carapace.

Cassander roared and plucked the bolter from the iron grip of the Space Marine. He snapped the weapon in two and hurled away the broken halves before leaping at the unarmed warrior. One blow broke his helmet open, another ripped it from the gorget. Pneumatic gases hissed around the revealed features, part augmetic, part flesh.

Cassander’s rage faltered in the face of his opponent’s hatred.

The Space Marine suddenly had a long combat blade in his hand and drove it into Cassander’s flank. The tip scraped along the bone shield before finding a weak spot and punching into one of Cassander’s lungs. Bloody spittle sprayed the Iron Hands legionary’s face. Cassander reached down and took hold of the warrior’s throat, pulling it out in a welter of glistening tubes and squirting arterial blood. With the last of his life the Space Marine stabbed Cassander twice more, but there was no strength behind the blows. The blade slipped from his fingers as the life went out of him.

Cassander rose to his feet, watching the coagulating blood fall from the ruin of tracheal tissue in his grip. He hurled it away, disgusted and horrified at what he had done. A servant of the Imperium was dead by his hands, and the enormity of the deed struggled to find a place in his mind where it could be understood.

Felix Cassander, captain of the Imperial Fists, had murdered a warrior of the Iron Hands. Oily tears streamed down his face, and his stomach lurched with revulsion. He threw back his head and howled as the battle swirled around him in bloodshed and violence.

Alone in the midst of the rampaging monsters, Cassander knew the true horror of what Apothecary Fabius had done to them.

The sudden shock of deceleration. The boom of locking bolts slamming back and the heat wash from a magna-melta. Stark light poured into the Stormbird as the ramp pistoned down, and Lucius waited until a good dozen of his fellow warriors had stormed into the teeth of the Iron Hands guns before launching himself into the fray. No sense in being the chaff cut down in the first withering hails of gunfire, after all.

Thudding impacts spanked from the hull of the Stormbird, suppressing fire from Rhinos and static defences. The embarkation deck of a starship made an easy target from the point of view of getting assault craft on board, but they were well served by guns and defenders. Lucius scanned the placement of the Iron Hands in a heartbeat, a dispiriting lack of imagination in their arrangement. He saw Guilliman’s prescriptive influence in the defences, and sneered at the Iron Hands, desperate urge to follow someone new.

A shot clipped his shoulder, sending a burst of pain through him. More and more, it felt as though his armour were becoming part of him, like a hardened skin with receptors for pain and pleasure in equal measure. It was a welcome idea. He jumped aside as a vicious burst of autocannon fire sawed the length of the assault ramp. Sheeting sparks poured down like neon rain as explosive shells detonated in the midst of the charging Emperor’s Children. A score of warriors were blown to shredded meat, another handful cut up with mechanical thoroughness. Blood sloshed from the ramp, but Lucius didn’t spare a thought for the dead.

Four Stormbirds had breached the embarkation deck alongside a number of boarding torpedoes, and a fuzzed overlay on his visor told him another three had broken through in other areas of the enemy ship. This vessel was doomed, and all that remained was to make sport of its crew. More Emperor’s Children were gaining the decks, but it was the tide of bestial monstrosities attacking the Iron Hands that demanded Lucius’s attention.

He grinned as he saw Fabius at the top of the torpedo’s ramp, like a proud parent watching his offspring. And what offspring! A wondrous menagerie of beautiful terata clearly crafted from the Legion gene-template: a tide of grotesquerie to match any carnivalia the Phoenician had yet mounted. They were terrible and incredible, and the scope of what Fabius had done was breathtaking.

A hulking brute whose smoking flesh was bright red and furnace hot slammed aside a Rhino like a paper toy, the vehicle’s entire flank caved in. Its muscles were enormous, and a swinging fist hurled the armoured vehicle through the air to land thirty metres away in a smashed heap. Bolter fire tore its flesh, cutting grooves through the solid meat of its body. It roared. Its eyes were swollen with blood, its muscles lathered in stinking excretions that reeked of boiled fat.

The Iron Hands scrambled to get away from the giant as it smashed another Rhino to wreckage, wrenching the still-spinning driveshaft clear to wield as a giant club. Warriors worked in concerted groups to keep their distance while hammering it with explosive rounds from all sides.

Lucius sprinted into their midst, his swords cutting them to pieces with fluid, economical strokes. They turned to face him, all pistols and blades, but none were a match for him. He ducked a clumsy sweep of a chainblade, slashing his sword up through the warrior’s elbow and spinning around to drive a second blade through the back of his neck and out through the faceplate of his helm.

More Emperor’s Children joined the fight, a whooping, screeching band of maniacal killers led by Bastarnae Abranxe and Lonomia Ruen. Abranxe’s two swords were darting blurs of steel, but Lucius wasn’t impressed. Speed wasn’t skill, and more often than not, his blows inflicted clumsy wounds with no finesse. Ruen fought with his hollow daggers, slender-bladed poniards that drooled hissing tears of venom. Those he wounded were left spasming in toxic convulsions, but few of his victims were killed. Perhaps that was the point.

Lucius left them to it, slipping through the fighting with an assassin’s grace, his blades instruments of flamboyant murder. Bodies pressed in all around, but Lucius moved like smoke through the midst of struggling Iron Hands and Fabius’s monstrous killers. The Iron Hands fought with a kind of mechanistic doggedness and took a good deal of killing. Lucius felt a giddy excitement when a warrior who should have died from the high cut to his neck and a simultaneous thrust up into the chest cavity clubbed him to the ground with an iron fist like a piledriving hammer.

He reeled from the blow, but recovered quickly as the warrior closed to finish him. Viscous fluid poured from his terrible wounds, but its shimmering petrochemical sheen told Lucius the blades had only split some mechanised component.

‘There’s barely enough flesh on you to kill,’ he said, swaying aside from a clumsy chainsword sweep. Lucius spun on his heel and drove his elbow into the side of the warrior’s helm. He staggered, but still didn’t fall, even when Lucius rammed two swords into the warrior’s gut. The Iron Hand bellowed something, but the words were little more than an unintelligible gargle. A bubbling, red-flecked froth sprayed from the grille of his faceplate and Lucius tasted the oil-rich texture of the blood.

Already bored of this fight, Lucius wrenched out his blades and brought them together in a scissoring movement that cut the Iron Hand’s head from his shoulders. Lucius turned and ducked through the scrum of fighting, hoping for even one warrior aboard this ship who might at least give him a moment’s distraction.

A nightmarish beast with the hooked arms of a gigantic mantis bounded into the midst of a scratch squad of Iron Hands and cut three down in as many sweeps of its powerful limbs. It howled as it killed, a plaintive cry that was part hatred, part anguish. Cybus swung the weapon-mount of his Rhino around and kept the floating reticule in his augmetic eyes married to its skull. A stream of guided bolter shells shredded its upper half in a confetti of rich red tissue.

Warriors encased in battle-plate the colours of fever dreams charged from smoke-wreathed assault craft. They bore the distinctive aquila upon their chests – albeit disfigured – which marked them as the Emperor’s Children, but no other sign remained to identify them as that once proud Legion. Their armour was bedecked with skin fetishes and bloody trophies of war, crawling with obscene symbols and welded hooks.

Though his body had long ago eschewed the weakness of flesh for the purity of iron, hate flared in his heart at the sight of the Emperor’s Children. These degenerate scum had murdered his primarch, and in that one moment, Vermanus Cybus had never felt more alive or been more human.

Before the betrayal at Isstvan, Cybus had fought beside the Phoenician’s warriors on numerous occasions. He had always respected their devotion to the attainment of perfection, finding much to admire in their martial ethos. Many years ago, he had argued long into the night with a young officer named Rylanor on the merits of organic strength against augmented power, mocking the legionary’s faith in his flesh while extolling the virtue of iron.

Was young Rylanor now among these degenerates? Would Cybus now have to kill a warrior he had once admired? The thought did not trouble him, and only served to vindicate his belief in the superiority of iron over blood and bone. The Emperor’s Children spread out through the deck, firing wildly and howling a strange battle cant that tore at Cybus’s augmetics and filled his skull with piercing static like a thousand screams.

Howls, shrieking blades and strobing flares of gunfire filled the embarkation deck as the Iron Hands fought the boarders in bloody close quarters. Mutant limbs and gene-spliced claws tore at war-forged battle-plate, and in return, chainswords and point-blank bolter fire ripped through the monsters’ hideous bodies. Cybus played the fire of his storm bolters over them, seeing that some were falling without wounds caused by his own men. He saw one distorted legionary collapse as his overwrought anatomy finally rebelled and combusted from within. Another simply exploded as rampant cellular mutation ripped him apart and transformed him into a writhing mass of jellied growths like a fleshy coral reef.

Cybus paused in his slaughter as he saw a figure in the midst of the beasts, an armoured warrior with a hideous contraption of blades, drills and clattering dissection tools at his shoulders like a surgical version of a servo-harness. He swung the cupola around, but the figure was obscured by his monstrous cohorts before he could fire.

Cybus dismissed the solitary figure and scanned the fighting with the calm awareness of a tactical planner in the barracks room. The monsters were contained for now, his warriors’ resilience and their own biological instability keeping them from significant breakthroughs, but the Emperor’s Children were in danger of overrunning the deck.

‘First echelon, contain the right flank!’ ordered Cybus as warriors in purple and gold and stretched skin moved to surround them. ‘Reserve one, deploy now.’

The Rhinos swung around like a closing gate, moving in smooth support of their infantry while keeping punishing bursts of rounds chewing the Emperor’s Children. Static guns and emplaced turrets flensed the open areas of the deck, pinning the flanking force in place while the Iron Hands redeployed.

Cybus allowed himself a moment of grim satisfaction.

The Emperor’s Children would pay for their folly.

The battle ebbed and flowed below him, a swirling, heaving mass of rampaging fury, clinical tactical nous and theatrical flamboyance. As an exercise in different modes of fighting, it would have made a fascinating study, but Sharrowkyn was more interested in locating the nodal points of the enemy attack where a sudden strike would cause the most discord. He swung through the upper trusses and service gantries of the embarkation deck, always in motion and pausing only to assess the tactical situation.

Vermanus Cybus was an uncompromising man of little personal charisma, but he had a secutor’s grasp of the methodology of combat. His warriors were reacting to every thrust of the Emperor’s Children with alacrity and swift logic – even if the attackers were not fighting with logic as their guide.

If the architects of this assault had hoped to break the defenders in one punishing blow, they were to be sorely disappointed.

The monstrous things were being slowly beaten back, hot animalistic fury no match for the icy calm and unbending nature of the Iron Hands. Sharrowkyn saw a number of Emperor’s Children in the thick of the hardest fighting, and a brutish killer with two blades who bludgeoned a path through the defenders. A warrior in armour bedecked with spikes followed in his wake, fighting with a pair of daggers that were clearly envenomed.

But there was one warrior Sharrowkyn saw again and again who drew his attention the most, a swordsman of sublime skill. This warrior knew the gaps between life and death like no other, passing between blades and bullets as if he was wraith-slipping, as easily as another man might cross a room. His blades wove in and out of the spaces occupied by the living and in so doing, ended them.

This was the man he needed to kill.

Lucius saw the shadow bearing down on him an instant before it struck.

He twisted to avoid whatever was coming at him, but even he wasn’t fast enough.

The impact was like being hit by a siege hammer and the air was driven from his lungs as the swooping warrior slammed him into the deck. He rolled as a black-bladed sword sliced down, and he blocked another with instinctual speed. Lucius saw a figure in black lunge at him, and rolled his wrists to bring his blades together in a blocking cross. He twisted his grip and spun on his heel to deliver a killing strike to his opponent’s throat.

His blade struck razor-edged steel, and only a desperate parry kept his own head on his shoulders as a silent blade came at him. Lucius was impressed, pleased to have found a warrior who knew which end of a sword to use. Most other opponents would have lost their weapons in his first block.

‘You have some skill,’ he said as they circled one another.

The warrior didn’t reply, and only then did Lucius notice that this was no Iron Hand.

‘Raven Guard,’ he said, recognising the grip, stance and angle of blades favoured by Corax’s shadow warriors. ‘That explains why you’re still alive.’

The Raven Guard attacked in a darting series of blinding feints, high cuts and dazzlingly fast thrusts that Lucius parried, dodged and backed away from in an increasingly swift-paced duel. The warrior wasn’t just skilled, he was talented too. Gifted, even.

‘I haven’t killed any little black birds in a while,’ giggled Lucius. ‘Since Isstvan, at least.’

The warrior didn’t react to Lucius’s goading, which marked him as even more skilled than he’d thought. Realising he would not easily get a rise out of the Raven Guard, Lucius put aside his need to humiliate his opponent as well as defeat him. Time and time again they came at each other, spinning like dancers locked in a routine that could only end in the death of one of the performers.

Lucius studied the warrior as they fought. His movements were like oil in the air, a slick progression of flowing poise. His bladework was flawless, technically perfect, but empowered by an innate understanding of the art form of the sword. With a start, Lucius realised that this warrior was almost the equal of him.

A jolt of uncertainty flooded Lucius at the thought that the warrior had a chance of besting him. He laughed, giddy at having finally met a worthy foe, his every nerve surging at the idea of defeat, even if the possibility were so remote as to be next to impossible. That such a possibility existed at all was reason enough to revel in it.

‘My friend,’ he said, parrying a low cut to the groin and riposting with a playful strike to the head. ‘Your name, I must know it.’

The warrior responded with a viper-swift lunge to the neck and a spinning cut to the throat. Angry now, Lucius batted away the strike and slashed at the Raven Guard’s wrist. A black blade turned the blow aside and a counter-strike of uncanny speed cut a groove in the eagle on Lucius’s plastron.

‘Answer me, damn you,’ snapped Lucius, and another stinging cut slipped past his defences to open a deep gash on his cheek. Astounded, Lucius broke the circle of the duel and lowered his weapons in astonishment. Blood dripped from his face and his anger vanished in an ecstatic burst of happiness.

‘You wounded me,’ he said, amazed and thrilled at the same time. ‘You actually wounded me. Do you know how rare that is?’

Before the warrior could answer – not that Lucius really expected him to – another figure burst into the circle of the duel and barrelled him to the ground. Lucius fell hard, losing his grip on his swords and striking his head on a buckled deck plate. Through a haze of blood and dizziness, he saw a blur of pink and gold throw itself at the Raven Guard swordsman.

The new arrival swung a pair of swords in a beheading cut, and even through a red veil of blood Lucius recognised the clumsy bladework of Bastarnae Abranxe. The Raven Guard ducked below the blow and spun around his attacker. His swords plunged into Abranxe’s midriff in the gap between his backplate and culet. Abranxe grunted in pain, but before he could do more than spin to face his attacker, his throat was opened by one blade, and the top of his skull by another.

Abranxe fell dead and Lucius laughed to see him so humiliated. He doubted even Fabius could undo that kind of damage.

The Raven Guard didn’t pause to enjoy his kill and sprang forwards to finish Lucius.

But the Fates, it seemed, had purpose yet for him.

A blue-hot dome of electric fire exploded in the centre of the embarkation deck, sending a booming thunderclap of displaced air through the arched chamber like the shockwave of an atmospheric munition. The Raven Guard stumbled and Lucius tasted the bitter metallic tang of teleportation energy. He blinked away the after-images of multiple light sources and phantom echoes of things that had never existed.

The fighting in the embarkation deck ceased as the blue light vanished.

In its place stood Perturabo within a circle of robotic guardians.

FIFTEEN

Another Way to Fight
Iron Within
Rally to the Captain

Thamatica ran the length of the enginarium, moving between reactor vent controls through streaming plumes of escaping gases. Hot enough to flense bare flesh, each superheated blast scorched his armour of paint and made the interior feel like a furnace. He sweated through his bodyglove, the perspiration stinging his eyes and blurring the reams of information flickering past on his visor.

Emergency vents were draining power from the reactors as quickly as they could. He paused by a venting station and watched the ivory numerals on the display click and clack as they spun down like the altimeter of an aircraft in freefall. The newly limbered servo-harness on his back worked red iron flow-wheels on the pipework higher up, and a data inload spike stabbed into an open terminal port nearby. His bloodstream surged with synaesthetic heat from the protesting reactors.

‘Still far too high,’ he said. ‘Tyro’s not going to like that. No, not one bit.’

Voices cried in his ear, demanding updates, but he ignored them. What could he tell them that would matter? The power levels in the ship’s reactors were spiralling out of control, and no matter how many null rods he deployed, they were on the verge of going critical.

‘And once that happens…’ He left the sentence hanging.

Thamatica moved on through the engine spaces, watching dying servitors whose skin bubbled and peeled in the intolerable heat as they worked. Exo-shielded enginseers fought with the venting controls, diverting power into redundant systems and looking for additional ways to bleed off the excess safely. A futile task, but one which might buy the captain some time to fight the enemy boarders. That was all Thamatica could give him, and it galled him that he had brought them to this.

‘I should be down in the decks, fighting,’ he said, diverting a portion of his attention to study the tactical feeds from the ship’s data engines. The embarkation deck was holding – just – though reports on the nature of the enemy made little sense, but it wasn’t the fighting there that concerned Thamatica.

A number of splinter groups had broken into the Sisypheum on the levels above the embarkation deck. Quick reaction forces were even now moving to intercept, but more and more it looked like the initial attack was intended to pin the defenders in place while some other objective was the true goal of the attack.

Thamatica shut off the feed. While he was as fearsome and indomitable in battle as any warrior of the X Legion, he knew this was where he could do the most good. He disengaged his inload spike and moved back towards the control station at the end of the engine spaces. Shapes moved in the fog of irradiated steam: servitors who would be dead within the hour from atomic poisoning and lexmechanics whose higher brain functions would already be degrading in the chemical backwash.

Here and there, a few Iron Hands worked in the guts of opened reactor casings, braving radioactive bleed-off and boiling, corrosive gases to keep a lid on the imminent reactor meltdown that would blow the Sisypheum to its component parts.

An explosion of such magnitude would destroy everything nearby.

Suddenly Thamatica knew how he too could fight the enemy.

The Iron Circle locked their shields together in a blunt wedge, like the prow of a Legion starship, and leaned into their charge. Gunfire ricocheted from their energy shields and heavily armoured plates. Driven by fibre-bundle muscles and power cores, their frame was thickened around the shoulders, heads and arms to better resist incoming fire, and nothing the Iron Hands could throw at the battle robots slowed their pace one iota.

An unstoppable juggernaut of burnished iron, gold and jet, they hammered the Iron Hands defence like a wrecking ball. A pair of Rhinos were smashed aside, sent skidding back fifty metres by coordinated swipes of their shields, and half a dozen Legion warriors were crushed beneath the unstoppable power of their siege hammers.

With machine precision, their shields parted and Perturabo surged from within their aegis with Forrix and Kroeger at his side. Forgebreaker swept out and hammered down onto the deck. Seismic shockwaves surged out in a radial pattern, flipping over armoured vehicles and sending debris flying through the air. Iron Hands were swept aside and hurled against the walls like leaves in a hurricane. Mobile gun platforms were smashed into their component parts and the emplaced weapon turrets went offline with the pressure differential.

The Iron Circle locked their shields to the deck and swung up shoulder-mounted weapons: rotary cannons, grenade launchers and quad-carbines. Overlapping fields of fire fanned out from their position, a horizontal sheet of trace and las that burned and blasted anything in its path.

‘My lord!’ shouted Forrix, dropping to one knee and bringing his combi-bolter up.

Perturabo saw a Rhino that had somehow managed to remain upright. Straight away, he saw its mass was considerably more than a standard-pattern APC. Vox antennae told him that this was a commander’s tank. A warrior of the X Legion sat in the cupola, aiming the slaved storm bolters.

‘He’s mine,’ said Perturabo. ‘Finish the rest yourselves.’

Forrix nodded and waved three of the Iron Circle to his side, pushing round to the flanks where the Emperor’s Children had fallen upon the reeling Iron Hands. Their slaughters were unseemly, but thorough. None of the X Legion warriors would be getting up again and none would be fit for gene-harvesting. Kroeger leapt a fallen bulkhead plate, his bolt pistol banging off rounds into the stunned defenders. Another three of the Iron Circle kept pace with the newest triarch, keeping the worst of the enemy fire at bay and adding the power of their own weapons to his charge.

Two of the Iron Circle took position ahead of Perturabo as a blitz of bolter shells blazed from the Rhino commander’s guns. The shields of the Iron Circle intercepted them in a storm of sparks and detonations. The battle robots skidded around and lowered their shields like a ramp before him, and Perturabo used them as a springboard to vault into the air with his hammer raised high. An arcing stream of rounds followed him up, detonating on his armour without effect. Forgebreaker arced down like an unstoppable piston and flattened the front half of the armoured vehicle entirely. The tank flipped up and somersaulted overhead.

Perturabo turned to watch the Rhino be slammed down with bone-crushing force by the integrity field. It rolled into a projecting stanchion, buckling what remained of its armour like foil.

More gunshots reached out to him, blasts of coldly accurate bolter fire and the spiralling contrail of a missile. An energy shield deflected the missile up into the roof space and another took the battering impact of the mass-reactive shells. He dropped his hammer to his side and swung his arm around, unleashing a thundering salvo from his gauntlet. Heavy, custom-fabricated rounds – fashioned by a machine of the Firenzii polymath – punched through Legion plate with plasmic armour-piercing warheads and used their victims’ body mass as bio-thermic fuel.

Warriors ignited like human pyres with every detonation, and Perturabo walked his fire through the Iron Hands as they rallied on their sergeants and officers. Each time Perturabo saw a ranked warrior establish control, he slew him with a lethally accurate round that punched through his centre mass and set him ablaze.

A desperate group of Iron Hands charged from the wreckage of a blazing vehicle, a kill team with meltaguns, plasma rifles and grenade belts. The carapace guns of the Iron Circle cut down a handful, who vanished in the blue fire of premature detonations. Perturabo stilled the violence of the battle robots with a thought and let the enemy come.

Fifteen hard, hungry warriors. Elites by the look of them.

He saw hate in the light of their helms, theirs and his own reflected.

Their armour was beaten and scarred. Their willingness to die was admirable.

His hammer took the first three, breaking them apart like porcelain dolls. A burst of gunfire ripped another two in half. Then they were upon him, swords cutting and high-energy pistols flashing with sun-hot brightness. The Iron Hands were a Legion of killers, men born into clashing tribes and violence; part of a warrior culture shaped by the ruined world upon which they grew to manhood.

They fought well, some even managing to land blows upon Perturabo’s armour. A plasma blast scored across his breastplate. He snapped the weapon in two and crumpled the wielder’s head with the broken barrel. A shriek of flash-burned air scorched his shoulder plate black before Forgebreaker turned the warrior to a mist of exploded body parts. His gauntlet spat death, each shot punching through its target like a fiery lance. Wherever he gestured, flames and screams followed.

The Iron Hands could not defeat him, could not even fight him, but they never faltered and did not let the absolute impossibility of the task distract them from its execution. Perturabo admired them for such single-minded devotion even as he killed them without mercy.

The last warrior dropped, his upper half a pulped mess while his lower half twitched at Perturabo’s feet. Even without looking up, it was abundantly clear that the battle for the embarkation deck was over. Forrix and Kroeger hounded the Iron Hands as the sounds of gunfire slackened. The last of the defenders were either dead or had fallen back behind metres-thick blast shutters that would take breaching charges to penetrate. The crew would be manning pre-prepared choke points throughout the ship, bottlenecks and killing grounds where their lack of numbers would not be a disadvantage.

The Emperor’s Children cavorted without honour among the fallen, looting the corpses and making sport of their burned and violated flesh. Valuable time was being wasted, and time was of the essence in any boarding action. The success or failure of such an assault depended on preventing the enemy from regrouping or rallying behind surviving commanders. Keeping the initiative in any fight was key to victory, and never more so than during the desperate struggle to wrest a starship from its crew.

Yet Perturabo hesitated to push the attack.

He took a moment to study the troops by which this victory had been won, a monstrous host of unnatural forms and nightmarish appearances.

A few dozen of the living creatures wandered as though lost, while the corpses of the dead lay strewn around the deck. Perturabo knew them for what they were: the terata wrought from the harvested gene-seed of Isstvan’s dead by Fulgrim’s flesh-alchemist. Perturabo’s heart hardened as he saw squad markings and Legion tattoos that surgery or cellular manipulation had not obscured. Those of the Iron Hands were in the majority, but there were Salamanders and Raven Guard aplenty too.

It sat ill with Perturabo that his brother’s Legion chose to violate the genetic structure of the Space Marines, even enemy ones, for once such a technology was unleashed, it would be impossible to contain. What other boundaries might such a man flout if given free rein with the Emperor’s genetic knowledge?

Nor had these disgusting abominations been drawn only from the Legions still loyal to the Emperor. Here and there, Perturabo saw markings belonging to the Legions of Angron, Mortarion, Alpharius, Lorgar and even one of the Sons of Horus. He had known Fabius had plundered the dead of their enemies, but to know that no treachery was beyond him was a sobering thought.

If Fulgrim cared so little for the warriors of his brothers in rebellion, to what deeper betrayals might he yet sink?

Escorted by a capering, gibbering honour guard of drooling terata and Marius Vairosean’s Kakophoni, Fabius made his way through the corridors of the Sisypheum with single-minded haste. A maintenance postern left unsealed for a moment too long had granted them access to the guts of the ship and the mutant strength of his terata had broken them into its working heart.

The four creatures with him were the very best of his work, ones whose genetic structure had required the smallest amount of surgical modification. Superficially they still resembled Space Marines, albeit hideously bloated and overgrown, with whatever loose plates of armour he had been able to scavenge strapped to their bodies.

Yes, these were his greatest creations, but even these terata were consuming themselves.

Biological furnaces raged within them, voraciously devouring nutrient matter to sustain the physiological changes wrought upon their flesh. The chemical gruel they were fed should have been enough to keep them from immolating under the demands of their flesh, but too many had collapsed and died under the stresses of combat – enough to convince Fabius that something was very wrong with his underlying gene-coding.

Was it possible the data Alpharius had stolen from the Raven Guard had been flawed?

Unlikely, for none among the Alpha Legion had the necessary expertise to insert such a corrupting agent without his being able to detect it. No, the flaw was one of his own making, and the thrill of rooting it out was as potent as the frustration of its occurrence.

The sounds of battle echoed strangely through the corridors. They grew and receded as the defenders fought tooth and nail to hold onto their ship, not knowing it was already lost.

‘Where are we going?’ demanded Vairosean, his voice mangled by his raw screeching and distended jaws. The former captain of the Third Company was one of Fabius’s more successful surgeries, the bone structure of his skull augmented and reshaped to better allow his selected mutations to function. His unexpected pairing with the experimental instruments designed by Bequa Kynska had proved to be wholly beneficial.

‘The apothecarion,’ said Fabius.

‘Why?’ gurgled Vairosean.

‘Because there is something there I desire.’

‘What?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Fabius, irritated at being questioned.

‘You don’t know?’ growled Vairosean, and his axe-like weapon matched his ire.

Vairosean was still considered to be a captain of the Legion, and commanded respect. The way the Legion was fracturing, that wouldn’t last much longer, but while it did, even Fabius was bound by the chains of command.

‘There is a power source there, an ancient machine whose function resonates in frequencies I have never encountered. I do not know what it is, so I want it. You will help me get it.’

Vairosean grunted something unintelligible in reply and the three Kakophoni at his back loosed a grating bark of squalling noise. The low static burr of their weapons set Fabius’s teeth on edge, and their constant howling was only contained by the razor gags they wore. Those could be disengaged with a command from Vairosean, and the screaming killers would shred the faces of anything in their path with their sonic thunder.

Fabius put the Kakophoni from his mind as they penetrated deeper into the enemy ship via a circuitous route. They had not reached this far without cost, but the fury of his terata and the shockwave power of Vairosean’s warriors had swept aside the pockets of resistance they had encountered along the way.

The bare ironwork of the Iron Hands ship was drab and gloomy, quite without the splendour of the Andronius. Though Fabius eschewed the gaudy theatrical vigour of his brother warriors, his labyrinthine domain was drenched in sensation of an altogether different kind. It was hard to remember a time when the fleets of the 28th Expedition had looked like this. A lifetime or more ago, thought Fabius.

One of the terata looked down at him, its mashed and spread features like that of a bloated gigantism sufferer. Its eyes were red with haemorrhaging and bulging with chemical reactions. Saliva drooled from between its swollen jaws and its breath was hot and animal.

‘What funny?’ it asked.

‘Nothing,’ said Fabius. ‘Don’t speak to me again.’

‘They speak?’ said Vairosean. ‘I hadn’t thought any of them retained the intellect.’

‘Some do,’ said Fabius, unwilling to admit that the loss of intellect was one of many problems to be rectified in the next batch.

Vairosean said, ‘You’re a long way from the next level of post-human evolution, Apothecary. These are a backward step to humanity’s primate history.’

‘I can’t produce the next great leap forwards in evolution without cost,’ said Fabius, his finger tightening on the haft of his medicae needle gun. ‘Every living thing is linked and part of a great chain that stretches back and forwards in time. Millennia from now there will be life-forms that look at us with a kind of horror that we were so unevolved.’

‘Speak for yourself, Apothecary,’ grunted Vairosean.

Fabius wanted to kill Vairosean, success or not, but before he could act on that sudden impulse, the terata’s heavy head snapped up and its enlarged nostrils twitched as it sifted a cocktail of scents.

Fabius caught them a second later: lapping powder, gun oil and expended munitions, and the cold, caustic stink of an apothecarion.

A rabble of Iron Hands appeared at the end of the corridor, weapons drawn. Fabius wasn’t worried; he’d known they wouldn’t make it all the way without running into some opposition.

‘Kill them,’ he said.

And the terata sprang to obey him.

‘Thamatica!’ shouted Cadmus Tyro. ‘For Medusa’s sake, answer me!’

He threw down the vox-horn and made fists on the edge of the command lectern. The few systems available to him all told the same dispiriting story of defeat and failure. The embarkation deck was lost and the enemy would be through the blast doors in a matter of minutes. And once that happened, the ship was lost.

Tyro refused to accept that.

‘Wayland,’ he said. ‘Tell me you have some power.’

‘A little,’ said Sabik Wayland, moving between the various bridge stations as reports flooded into each of them. ‘I’ve diverted most of that to the weapons.’

Tyro nodded; he’d felt the vibrations through the Sisypheum’s super-structure.

‘We’re hurting them?’

‘Some, but not enough.’

‘So why are they not firing on us?’

‘I don’t know for sure, Cadmus,’ said Wayland. ‘Maybe because there is a primarch aboard. Whatever the reason, be thankful for that small mercy.’

Tyro knew he should be thankful that the Andronius wasn’t shooting at them, but it felt like an insult that they were being boarded, a spiteful knife in the guts that smacked of arrogance and a disregard for the abilities of those aboard.

‘Any word from Cybus?’

‘No,’ said Wayland. ‘Not since Perturabo teleported onto the embarkation deck.’

Tyro felt his flesh crawl at the idea of being boarded by so terrible a foe. In any war scenario, having one of the Emperor’s demigod sons take to the field immediately shortened the odds, and he was finding how bitter it tasted to be on the opposite side.

‘Then he’s dead,’ said Tyro.

‘Is the ship lost?’ asked Varuchi Vohra. ‘Will the enemy take us alive?’

Tyro looked into Vohra’s face. Though his words were spoken calmly, Tyro saw naked terror lurking behind the guide’s eyes. He feared being taken by the enemy, which was entirely reasonable, but he saw something else, a fear that had nothing to do with whatever fate the Emperor’s Children or Iron Warriors might have in store for him.

Garuda flapped down from the rafters and landed on the engine control station. The bird let out a warbling caw, and danced its claws over the metal edging. A chatter of binary jabbed at the base of his neck like an insistent tapping, and he bent over the console to see what had attracted the bird’s notice.

A cascade of information scrolled across the slate, the specific substance of which was beyond Tyro’s expertise. He understood the gist of it, however, and his anger at Thamatica’s dabbling soared to new heights.

‘Wayland!’ he called. ‘Is Thamatica up to what I think he’s up to?’

The Iron Father scanned the data, his cognitive augmetics parsing the data into manageable chunks of digestible information. From the look on his face, it was clear that Thamatica was doing exactly what Tyro thought he was doing.

‘He’s not venting the excess energy any more,’ said Wayland. ‘He’s drawing it all into the engine core. They’ll go critical in under four minutes.’

‘Can you stop him?’

‘Not from here, captain,’ said Wayland.

‘Then get down there,’ ordered Tyro. ‘Get down there and stop him.’

He saw the hesitation in Wayland’s eyes and said, ‘Did you hear me?’

‘I heard you, captain,’ said Wayland.

‘Then why aren’t you en route to the enginarium?’

‘Because I think this might be the only option left to us.’

‘Destroying the ship?’ snapped Tyro. ‘Never. While we still have breath and bolters, we’ll fight these bastards to the end. Ulrach Branthan entrusted the command of his ship to me and the Land of Shadows will be noonday bright before I let Thamatica blow it up.’

Wayland rushed over to the captain’s station.

‘I know, captain,’ said Wayland. ‘But think about it. An enemy primarch is aboard, and nothing short of another primarch is going to be enough to drive him off. If Thamatica is doing what we think he’s doing then we can kill Perturabo. Right here and now. It won’t matter how tough a primarch is, he won’t survive this. We can avenge Ferrus Manus.’

The armoured door of the apothecarion blew in with a dull clang. Escaping gases vented explosively through the torn hatch, followed closely by a shrieking blast of noise. Glass shattered and medicinal fluids spilled out; a stink of chemicals mixed with counterseptic. Clashing soundwaves zipped through the chamber like miniature comets, crazing steel and shattering anything crystalline.

Cracks spread over the surface of Ulrach Branthan’s casket as Ignatius Numen and Septus Thoic returned fire, filling the empty space with shots. The sound was deafening in the enclosed space. Booming echoes and spiralling contrails pierced the gunsmoke.

Atesh Tarsa knelt beside Ulrach Branthan’s casket and sighted down the length of his sniper rifle. The scope was slaved to his narthecium gauntlet and projected a wireframe rendition of his target onto his visor, with their internal organs highlighted in red. It made for kill shots every time, but ensured his battles were fought in a neon chrome shimmer of bio-thermal imagery. Right now the blown hatch was lousy with flaring heat, bolter trails and scattered, impossible readings.

A roaring form ploughed through the haze, a thunderous giant bleeding heat and biometrics that defied easy understanding. Enormous and powerful, its organs were like miniature suns within its frame, spreading energising light all through a body of monstrous proportions. Tarsa snap-fired, and the thing’s organs immediately went supernova as his custom-designed bio-ammo sent it into toxic shock. Distilled from the venom of the sulvaek lizards of the Wa’kulla ash swamps, Tarsa’s concoction was lethal to even the most robust cardiovascular system.

The creature kept coming.

Another round into its chest slowed it, but didn’t stop it. Two headshots from Ignatius Numen finally put it on its back, but by then more were pressing through the hatch.

‘Rally to the captain!’ shouted Numen, moving position as a third impossible beast pushed into the apothecarion. Septus Thoic rolled from behind cover and fired a short burst into the chest of the lumbering creature. It turned and backhanded him across the chamber.

‘This is Tarsa!’ he yelled into the vox. ‘We need help in the apothecarion. Now!’

He disengaged the narthecium link and his vision snapped back into focus.

Immediately he saw the beast was a Space Marine, one mutated far beyond its base genome. Tarsa was an Apothecary, one of the Legion’s guardians of its genetic heritage, and to see such a gross insult to the great work of the Emperor was an affront like no other. Even the Warmaster’s betrayal shrank in comparison to this treachery. Horus’s rebellion was an insult to an ideal and had its roots in mortal disaffection, however hard that was to comprehend, but this was an insult to life itself.

He fired at the beast Thoic had injured. The shot punched into its skull like a trepanning auger and the toxin devoured its brain in seconds. It dropped with its club-like paws clutched to its head as its higher functions were necrotised.

Yet another monstrous Space Marine pushed into the apothecarion and Numen put a burst of fire into its chest before it was upon him. Tarsa went to swing his rifle round, but stopped as he saw three warriors in garishly decorated battle-plate appear in the wrecked doorway. His senses recoiled from the shrieking noise surrounding them, a din of clashing disharmony and a riot of screams issuing from shoulder-mounted augmitters. He recognised the Emperor’s Children from their hideous appearance on Isstvan V and wasted no time in putting a round through the throat of the first warrior as he unlimbered a long wire-coiled stave connected to an amplification device on his back.

The warrior dropped to his knees, a gurgling howl of pleasure torn from his opened throat as the stave flared with a burst of blue fire and a booming bass note that hurled Tarsa against Branthan’s stasis casket. He crashed down on the other side, rolling to his feet and moving away from the fallen captain.

The gurgling warrior slumped forwards as another turned a low-slung weapon around, its neck slender and flanged with whipping steel strings and a vicious barb at its end. The legionary pounded the flared base of the weapon before Tarsa could wonder at its exact function, and the air between them buckled with pure concussive force. Once again Tarsa was hurled back and his armour cracked open under the sonic pressure.

He fell to the tiled floor, his visor a static blur of overloaded systems, his rifle shattered into fragments by the blast.

Bolter fire and a roar of hatred sounded among the bellowing screams and shrieks of the Emperor’s Children’s bizarre weaponry. A head bounced from the walls and rolled towards him, a pink helmet with all manner of auditory pickups worked into the metal. Blood drooled from the ragged edges of the neck, and Tarsa pushed himself to his feet in time to see Ignatius Numen bury his chainsword in the guts of another legionary. The Morlock’s breastplate was cratered in the centre, as though from a tremendous impact, and his battle helm was missing.

Septus Thoic wrestled with one of the gene-spliced Space Marines, but his strength was no match for the boosted physique of the monster. Tarsa climbed onto the end of Branthan’s casket and leapt onto its back, driving the functional end of his reductor into the back of its skull. Drills, blades and organ scoops normally used to remove progenoid glands chewed a fist-sized chunk from its head. Gurgling brain matter and blood filled the tissue compartments of Tarsa’s gauntlet, and the creature let out an anguished howl before its nervous system finally processed that it was dead.

Tarsa dropped from its back as it fell, and – too late – felt a presence dart in close to him. Something long, sharp and slender punched into his flesh through the cracks in his armour, and he let out a cry of agony as a poisonous chemical sent shrieking bolts of pain along every receptor in his body. He fell like a broken automaton, his limbs jerking and his internal organs pulsing as their functions went into overdrive.

Tarsa’s vision blurred with induced pain, but he saw Septus Thoic brought down by a series of clubbing blows from the last of the mutated Space Marines. The creature stamped down on Thoic’s form, but Tarsa couldn’t see whether the Morlock was still alive. Another blast of concussive sonics filled the apothecarion and Ignatius Numen collapsed, clutching his skull as though it were about to burst.

Tarsa tried to crawl towards Ulrach Branthan’s casket, but his nerves were jangling as if an ogryn were hammering the synapses of his brain. Nothing was his to control any more, and he wanted to scream in anger, but even that catharsis was denied him.

A figure loomed over him and turned him onto his back, propping him up against the edge of the stasis casket. Tall and swathed in a long robe of a grotesquely fleshy texture, the figure’s long white hair, sunken cheeks and parchment-yellow skin marked him as a practitioner of the deathly arts, one who in ages past would have been called a necromancer. And yet he still bore the sigils of the Apothecary on his pauldrons, a faded prime helix still visible beneath fresh daubs of mindless vandalism. A squatting machine-like presence clung to the Apothecary’s back, a loathsome mechanised parasite with blackened limbs of blades and hypos. Its waving parts appeared to be studying him.

Tarsa wanted to spit in the traitor’s face, but even as he felt a measure of control in his facial muscles, he knew he would never regain mastery of his body in time to thwart this Apothecary’s plans. His head lolled to one side, and he saw Ignatius Numen spasming uncontrollably, his weapons fallen to the floor as he sought to stem the tide of blood streaming from his ears.

Two Emperor’s Children stood, splay-legged, before him, cradling their howling, squalling instrument-weapons in their spiked gauntlets. One stood a head taller than the other, his armour bedecked in obscene sigils, hooks and vibrational pickups. His face was a viciously stretched and swollen nightmare of mutant bone growth and bionic implantation, making it look as though he were permanently screaming.

Tarsa fought for some defiance, but whatever toxin or nerve agent had been used against him was too potent to overcome. The Apothecary saw the hate in his eyes and grinned, exposing yellowed teeth and exhaling a corpse’s death rattle.

‘Don’t die yet, little Salamander,’ said Apothecary Fabius. ‘I might yet have need of you.’

SIXTEEN

A Matter of Trust
Unconventional Entrance
Sisypheum Unleashed

Cadmus watched the readout on his command lectern, swallowing as the power levels in the engine core continued to rise. In a matter of moments the reactors were going to explode and destroy the Sisypheum, and though every fibre of his being rebelled against such a course of action, he knew Wayland was right.

If by their deaths they could kill a traitor primarch then they would have achieved something worthwhile after all.

He knew he should say something to the crew, final words to express the honour he felt at having served with them, but the words wouldn’t come. Branthan would have given a valediction that would have survived his sacrifice, words that would live on beyond his death and be quoted by men and women facing their own demise.

Tyro had nothing, and never had he felt more like an inadequate replacement for Captain Ulrach Branthan.

He looked over at Sabik Wayland, but the Iron Father would not meet his gaze, too fixed on the readings streaming into the engineering station. Garuda flapped its metal wings in the upper reaches of the bridge, cawing and swooping down around the eldar guide. If Varuchi Vohra was irritated by the bird’s attentions, he gave no sign.

‘How long?’ asked Tyro.

Wayland looked up. ‘I’d estimate around three and a half minutes.’

Tyro cleared his throat. ‘We did some good out here, Sabik,’ he said.

Wayland nodded. ‘Aye, captain,’ he said. ‘That we did. Ferrus would be proud of us.’

‘I’ll settle for not being a disgrace,’ said Tyro.

Wayland looked confused by that, but his response was broken off when the vox-station crackled with an incoming transmission. A blare of emergency horns and whooping brays of superheated steam filled the bridge, but through it all cut a voice that was part desperation, part gleeful anarchy.

‘Cadmus? Cadmus, are you there?’ called Frater Thamatica.

‘Frater? Is that you?’

‘Yes, of course it is,’ answered Thamatica. ‘Who else would it be?’

‘Damn you, Thamatica, you’ve killed us all,’ spat Tyro.

‘Not yet, boy, but keep interrupting me and you might.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Is Frater Wayland still on the bridge?’ asked Thamatica over the crashing bangs and screeching sirens from the engineering spaces.

Wayland rushed over to the vox-station and grabbed the speaker horn.

‘I’m here, Frater,’ he said. ‘You’re drawing all the excess energy into the engines.’

‘I am,’ agreed Thamatica.

‘They’ll go critical in under three minutes.’

‘I think you’ll find it’s slightly over three minutes, Frater,’ said Thamatica. ‘You can’t beat in situ data recording. But accuracy aside, you need to get Cadmus to transfer command authority to the data engine down here. I need the ship.’

‘Not a chance,’ snapped Tyro. ‘I’m not giving you the ship’s last command.’

‘You have to,’ barked Thamatica, all levity gone from his voice. ‘And do it quickly, captain, or we are all dead.’

‘Dead? We’re already dead, Thamatica,’ said Tyro. ‘You’ve seen to that. You’re going to blow up the ship.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Thamatica. ‘I’d never blow up this grand old ship. Well, not deliberately anyway. Now you listen to me, Cadmus Tyro. I’ve been pushing starships to the edge of their tolerances and beyond since before you got your fist lopped off. Now transfer command to my data engine, and I swear by the Seven Sacred Shadows of Karaashi that we will live through this. And if we don’t, well, it won’t matter anyway.’

Tyro looked up at Wayland, who shrugged with incomprehension.

‘What are you planning?’ asked Wayland.

Thamatica’s amusement was audible even over the noise below decks.

‘You’ll see, Sabik,’ he said. ‘But best get that guide ready at the helm. Oh, and one last thing.’

‘What?’

‘Hold onto something.’

The breaching charges were in place and ready to break open the guts of the Iron Hands ship. Every legionary of the Iron Warriors was a demolitions expert, and Kroeger was no exception. Within minutes of the embarkation deck’s clearance, he had rigged charges capable of tearing through the heavy armour of the blast doors. Kroeger checked the ring of explosives around the main shutter one last time and jogged back towards Perturabo.

The primarch had said nothing since the last of the Iron Hands had been killed, walking among the dead as though seeking something lost. Forrix was at his side, the wily old First Captain having delegated the placement of his demolition charges.

‘We’re ready to breach,’ said Kroeger, arriving at Perturabo and Forrix’s side.

The Iron Circle formed a wide ring around the primarch, their number smaller by two. That the Iron Hands had managed to destroy any of the battle robots had surprised Kroeger, but he should have known the X Legion was never one to lie down and take a beating. Once again, Kroeger had been honoured to watch his primarch in battle, and standing in the ruin of another crushing victory, Kroeger had never been prouder to serve the IV Legion.

Perturabo surveyed the aftermath of the fighting: the dead bodies, the wrecked vehicles and the torn-up remains of flesh. Backlit by the flames of a gutted Rhino, he stood taller than Kroeger remembered. His cloak lifted and flapped in the thermals of the fires and the black and gold gemstone in the skull brooch caught the firelight.

Perturabo nodded and dropped to one knee with his hand pressed to the deck.

‘Not yet, triarch,’ said Perturabo. ‘I need a moment.’

Kroeger looked over at Forrix.

‘They’ll be regrouping at choke points deeper in the ship,’ he said, knowing that Perturabo and Forrix must surely be aware of this.

‘They are indeed,’ said Perturabo. ‘And we will root them out and destroy them. It will be difficult and we will lose many warriors along the way.’

‘We lose more the longer we wait,’ said Kroeger.

‘I know that.’

‘Then I don’t understand why you’re hesitating, my lord.’

‘You mistake consideration for hesitation, Kroeger. I am giving our worthy enemies a last stand,’ said Perturabo, rising and indicating the hideously mutated flesh of the monsters Fabius had brought aboard. ‘This was not an honourable victory, so we owe the Iron Hands an honourable death.’

‘That makes no sense,’ raged Kroeger. ‘We need to push on quickly, kill them all before they can turn this ship into more of a death trap than it already is.’

Perturabo drew Forgebreaker and swung it round, letting the killing face come to rest on Kroeger’s breastplate.

‘Careful, my young triarch,’ said Perturabo, his voice devoid of tone. ‘I need a plain speaker in the Trident, not a yapping dog. Be silent.’

Kroeger looked to Forrix for support, but the First Captain had the fingers of his right hand pressed to the side of his helm. His head nodded at whatever he was hearing over the vox and he looked up. His alarm was obvious.

‘My lord,’ said Forrix urgently. ‘We need to get you off this ship.’

Perturabo lowered his hammer and turned to the First Captain. ‘Explain.’

‘Barban Falk reports a massive build-up of power in the ship’s engine reactors,’ said Forrix. ‘They’re almost overloaded; minutes at best from blowing this ship to radioactive debris.’

Perturabo shook his head. ‘It’s a bluff,’ he said. ‘If the Iron Hands are dying here, they’re going to do it fighting.’

‘You can’t be sure of that,’ said Forrix.

‘I knew my brother,’ said Perturabo. ‘And his Legion would not end their own lives like this. Not when there are enemies left to fight.’

‘Ferrus Manus is dead, my lord,’ said Forrix. ‘Who can say what his Legion of flesh-haters are capable of now that he’s gone?’

‘Not this,’ said Perturabo, adamant.

‘No,’ said Kroeger with sudden certainty, confident of what he would do were the roles reversed. ‘You’re wrong, my lord. They’ll gladly blow this ship apart if they think they’re going to kill you in the process. What do the lives of a few hundred legionaries matter against the killing of a primarch? One ship of warriors measured against the life of the Lord of Iron? It’s no question at all. I’m just surprised it’s taken them this long to realise it.’

Perturabo didn’t reply, considering the words of his triarchs.

With every second that passed, Kroeger expected to feel the white-hot instant of detonation as the ship’s reactor core exploded.

‘My lord,’ pressed Kroeger. ‘You wanted a plain speaker, well this is as plain as I can say it. You need to get off this ship right now. They’ll end their lives in a nuclear fireball if they think you’ll die too. But if it’s just us, then they’ll fight. We can take this ship, you know we can, but we can’t do it with you aboard. You need to go and leave the killing to us.’

Kroeger tensed as Perturabo’s cold eyes fixed on him. Berossus had been broken by Forgebreaker for less. At last the primarch nodded and drew the hammer across his shoulders.

‘No,’ he said. ‘We all go. As you say, this ship is a death trap by now, and I’ll lose no more warriors to Fulgrim’s vanity. We will return to the Iron Blood and blow this ship apart with our guns. And if the Andronius gets in our way then we’ll gut it too.’

Kroeger grinned. This was the Iron Warriors way of war.

Absolute and unrelenting, remorseless and unforgiving.

‘We can’t give the Iron Hands an honourable death,’ said Perturabo, ‘but I’ll take payment for their deaths from Fulgrim.’

Forrix nodded and said, ‘Falk, teleport homers engaged. Get us out of here.’

Atesh Tarsa struggled against the chemical poison keeping his limbs immobile, but it was like struggling against an implacable tide of webgun solution. The traitor Apothecary regarded him curiously, as though they were old friends who had recently been reconciled after a period of estrangement.

‘The device on the dead warrior’s chest,’ he said, his voice the hiss of parched dust in the desert. ‘It is old technology from the times before, is it not?’

Tarsa shook his head. ‘It is of no use to you. It is keyed to Captain Branthan’s genome.’

Fabius grinned and wagged a scolding finger before his face.

‘You Salamanders make such terrible liars,’ said Fabius, running a cracked and grimy fingernail along the line of Tarsa’s jawline, over his cheek to his eyes. ‘I blame Vulkan.’

‘Don’t you dare say his name,’ spat Tarsa.

‘Why not? Is there some tradition of Nocturne not to speak ill of the dead?’

‘Vulkan lives,’ said Tarsa, repeating the words like a mantra. ‘Vulkan lives. Vulkan lives!’

Fabius laughed. ‘Such conviction for one so ignorant of the truth.’

Tarsa gritted his teeth as he felt a painful, awakening sensation in his extremities. His fingertips twitched.

‘Kill him, Fabius,’ said the howl-faced warrior. ‘Take what you want and let us leave.’

‘In time,’ said Fabius, and Tarsa’s nerve endings danced painfully within his flesh. He was able to control the involuntary motions with an effort of will. He pulled his fingers into a fist.

The arachnid machine on the traitor Apothecary’s back hauled Tarsa to his feet, propping him up against the stasis casket. Fabius stared through the glass with a ferocious desire, his hooded eyes alight at the prospect of plundering the Heart of Iron from Branthan’s body.

‘The things I will do with this device…’ he said hungrily.

‘You’ll kill him,’ managed Tarsa through gritted teeth.

‘And you think I–’

Tarsa swung his arm in a perfect right cross and smashed his fist into Fabius’s face. Teeth broke and blood sprayed from the traitor Apothecary’s jaw as he reeled from the blow. The mechanised arachnid released Tarsa and he slumped to his haunches. He tried to push himself to his feet, but the blow had taken everything he had.

Fabius stood above him, the lower half of his face a mask of red, his black eyes furious.

‘You will suffer for that,’ he said. ‘You will beg for death over the years I can keep you alive to endure my tortures.’

Tarsa looked up and the ghost of a smile touched his lips.

‘Why do you smile?’ demanded Fabius.

‘Brother Sharrowkyn,’ said Tarsa. ‘Is there something wrong with the floor?’

Fabius turned to see the Raven Guard drop from the tangle of cables and pipework on the ceiling. Two black-bladed swords plunged into Fabius’s chest, and oily black gore squirted from the wounds. The Apothecary fell back, his rictus features twisted in open-mouthed horror. Sharrowkyn wrenched the swords out and pivoted on his heel to hurl one of his blades. It spun in the air and punched through the helm of one of the Emperor’s Children, who dropped with a strangled shriek of dissonant sound that echoed painfully in Tarsa’s skull.

Before Sharrowkyn could finish Fabius, the last of the monsters threw itself at him. The Raven Guard flipped up and over Ulrach Branthan’s casket, landing by the far wall with his slender-bladed gladius held high at his right shoulder. The creature smashed into the wall of the apothecarion, its body swelling before his eyes and crimson veins standing out on its muscles like hydraulic feeds on the verge of rupturing from the pressure. Whatever biological processes were at work within the beast, they were driving it into paroxysms of rage and strength. Blackened claws erupted from its fused hands and rippling bone spikes exploded along the length of its spine as hissing drool spilled from its elongating, crocodilian jaw.

‘Right now would be good, brother,’ said Sharrowkyn, though Tarsa had no idea to whom he was talking.

The gene-maddened beast charged at the Raven Guard with a bellow of hatred.

Sharrowkyn threw himself to the side.

And the wall of the apothecarion exploded outwards in a cascade of sparking metal, snapped cabling, ribbed supports and coffered panels. A towering construction of bare steel and black-streaked warplate smashed through with powerful mechanised strides and pounding arms. A rotating fist of crackling energy and hyper-dense fibre-bundle muscles took hold of the brutish Space Marine mutant and slammed its head against the wall.

Incredibly, the beast’s skull remained intact. It reeled from the blow and attempted to focus on the thing that had somehow managed to hurt it.

Brother Bombastus, the Iron Thunder of Medusa, shrugged himself clear of debris and cable runs from the interior of the wall spaces. Too large to enter the apothecarion by any conventional means, Bombastus had made an unconventional entrance.

Still bloating with rampant self-consumption, the mutant reared up on legs that cracked and swelled as they realigned themselves to some new and unfathomable genetic instruction. Its elongating arms slammed into Bombastus, its slavering jaw crunching down on his skull-stamped sarcophagus. Acid-drooling fangs bit deep gouges in his bare metal plates, and diamond-hard claws tore into his armour like plasma cutters on a Techmarine’s servo-harness.

Bombastus took hold of the creature’s thickening neck and smashed the upper arc of his iron casket into its face. Bones shattered and fangs snapped as the entire front half of the creature’s skull became instantly concave. Just for good measure, the storm bolter slung beneath Bombastus’s fist roared. A mushrooming fountain of blood and brain matter sprayed the ceiling as the explosive shells detonated within the monster’s brain cavity.

The creature flopped like a rag doll in the Dreadnought’s grip, and its shredded remains were dropped to the floor with a harsh grate of distaste.

‘Apothecary Tarsa,’ boomed Bombastus. ‘You called for help.’

Tarsa almost laughed in relief as Sharrowkyn attended to him. His body still felt weak, but at least he had command of it again.

‘That I did, Brother Bombastus,’ he said, struggling to his feet and enclosing one fist in the palm of his hand. ‘Your assistance is most welcome.’

Tarsa looked around for the Emperor’s Children who had come so close to killing him and disrupting Captain Branthan’s stasis casket. They had fled at the sight of Bombastus, and Tarsa couldn’t say he blamed them.

‘Are you all right?’ asked Sharrowkyn.

‘I am fine, or at least I will be soon enough,’ said Tarsa.

Sharrowkyn nodded and moved off to check on the two fallen Morlocks. Tarsa took a moment to collect himself as Bombastus leaned over to look down into Ulrach Branthan’s casket. The captain’s immobile face stared up, unmoving and frozen in mid-sentence.

‘I offered to give him this body of iron and steel,’ said Bombastus.

‘And he refused,’ said Tarsa. ‘He would not take what is not his.’

‘It is not right that I exist and he does not.’

Tarsa gestured to the rapidly decomposing corpse of the last mutant beast. ‘Right now, I am very glad that it is you that walks among us, Brother Bombastus.’

‘You are Salamander,’ said Bombastus. ‘You do not understand. Flesh is inherently flawed, and his will not long endure this drawn-out death. I have lived long enough in this iron shell, and it would better for a Captain of Battle to be abroad than a simple warrior.’

‘You are wrong,’ said Tarsa.

‘You presume too much familiarity,’ said Bombastus. ‘You do not know me, and I would die a thousand times over if it gave my captain life again.’

Tarsa had no answer for the Dreadnought, and left him to his melancholy. He helped Sharrowkyn lift Septus Thoic onto a listing examination gurney. The Morlock’s armour was torn and bent out of shape, but he had survived the beating he’d taken. Both his arms were bent at angles that suggested multiple dislocations.

Ignatius Numen pulled himself to his feet, wearing a dazed expression that told Tarsa he was clearly concussed from the sonic barrage that had felled him.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked as Numen retrieved his weapons.

Numen did not respond, and Tarsa reached out to place a hand on the Morlock’s arm.

‘Brother Numen?’

‘Are you speaking?’ asked Numen, his words coming too loud.

‘Yes,’ said Tarsa. ‘Can you hear me?’

‘What?’

‘I said, can you hear me?’

Numen shook his head. ‘I can’t hear you. You’ll have to shout.’

Tarsa looked at the dried blood and tissue on Numen’s cheeks and knew that whatever rudimentary hearing had been left to him after the plasma blast on Isstvan was now gone.

The Morlock was completely deaf.

Wayland watched the power levels rising in the engine cores and felt the iron fingers of his left gauntlet twitching. He wasn’t afraid, as such; it had long been his secret belief that they would all die out here in the northern marches, unremembered and alone, at best a footnote in the future histories of this war. What concerned him was the fact that they might be about to die by the reckless actions of an Iron Father many had considered unfit for the position, a dangerous rogue element in the Legion machinery.

Thamatica was brilliant, no question of that, but the nature of his brilliance was that he learned more from his failures than he did from his successes.

Wayland hoped the Sisypheum wouldn’t be the last of Thamatica’s failures.

Blazing circuits of light flared around Forrix as the last of the teleportation energies dissipated into the damping coils encircling the chamber. Superconducting conduits bled the power required for teleportation into the energy soakaways, and a klaxon brayed in time with the pulsing bleed-off. Moments later, the teleport disc, a skull-etched podium of electrically-scoured iron plates, was thronged with armoured figures. Forrix felt the nauseous, stomach-punch dislocation of teleport and clamped down on the familiar sickness.

‘You don’t like teleporting, do you?’ said Kroeger.

Forrix shook his head. ‘No. Being broken up like that, it’s like dying each time.’

Kroeger nodded as though he understood, and they stepped down from the podium as the warriors of the Iron Circle buzzed and clicked inside their armoured chassis. Their onboard systems would take a moment to realign after the translation. Perturabo strode from the disc and made his way from the chamber through an irising doorway as the energy coils dropped into the floor.

Kroeger and Forrix followed the Lord of Iron, feeling imminent violence in his silence as they made their way back to the bridge. Falk was at the command station, a hololith floating in the air before him that displayed readings from the Iron Hands ship and its unmistakable reactor overload.

‘How long?’ asked Perturabo.

‘Less than a minute,’ said Falk.

Beyond the shimmering graphic, the main viewscreen showed the snub-nosed bullet of the enemy ship as it wallowed in space like the carcass of a brain-dead void whale.

‘Their manoeuvring jets are firing,’ said Forrix, noticing tiny corrective flares of thrust along the length of the ship. ‘They’ve some power back.’

‘Not enough,’ said Falk. ‘This is just a last desperate attempt to put themselves as close to us as possible before their engines explode.’

‘You’re moving us clear?’ asked Kroeger.

‘Of course,’ snapped Falk, staring at a portion of the wall behind Kroeger, as though seeing something in the faded paintwork of the bulkhead. ‘I had to wait until your return, but yes, we’re moving away.’

‘Will we be in the blast radius when that thing goes up?’ asked Forrix.

Falk switched the floating graphic to one of concentric spheres of effect. The Iron Hands ship sat at the centre, with the Andronius and the Iron Blood within the first impact ring.

‘Very much so,’ said Falk. ‘We’ll move away, but we’ll still likely take a beating.’

Perturabo held up a hand, his head cocked to one side as he studied the readings flaring from the hull and reactors of the enemy ship. He flicked between the energy emission readouts and the slowly rotating form of the Iron Hands vessel.

Forrix would relive this moment a hundred times or more in an attempt to interpret Perturabo’s expression. The corner of the primarch’s mouth twitched, as though in amusement, yet his eyes never lost their cold, calculating ice. His body language was tense, his battle-choler still to the fore, but with a sanguinity that took the edge from his raw aggression. The primarch was a mass of contradictions, but never more than at this moment.

‘Hold here,’ said Perturabo.

‘My lord?’ said Falk. ‘We’re still in the primary blast zone. An explosion at this range would do us some real damage.’

‘I said hold, Barban Falk, or do I need to repeat my orders to you every time?’

‘No, my lord,’ said Falk, swiftly cutting power to the engines and holding them in place. Forrix felt a growing apprehension, but he had no fear that Perturabo did not know what he was doing.

‘Armaments has a firing solution, my lord,’ said Kroeger.

‘Do not shoot,’ said Perturabo, moving to the front of the command deck and standing before the viewscreen. ‘I said that Fulgrim’s Legion would pay for the deaths we suffered. This is that payment.’

The engineering deck was as close an approximation of the ancients’ idea of hell as could be imagined. A sweltering nightmare of scalding steam, superheated gases escaping from splitting conduits and glaring red light. The bodies of the dead lay strewn around the cavernous space, servitors whose innards had boiled and enginseers whose exo-armour had been breached by the crushing radiation bleeds and sudden thermal spikes.

Shadows moved in the sepulchral red gloom, monstrous beings with multiple arms and claws; the lords of this abode of the damned. Yet these were no daemons, but Iron Hands, the masters of this vessel and the very souls trying to save it.

Thamatica wrestled with multiple system outputs at once, letting the cognitive architecture scaffolded onto his brain by the Martian priests balance the woven threads of data at a speed beyond that which even the most gifted mortal could manage. To say that what he attempted was a delicate procedure was to say that advanced bio-augmetic neuro-surgery would be somewhat challenging to a feral world savage. The reactor loads were a hair’s-breadth from breaching their containment fields and turning the ship into an expanding cloud of radioactive dust.

The way Thamatica looked at it, if he were able to wrangle the colossal energies correctly then they might have a way out of this mess. If he couldn’t, then they might at least do some damage to their attackers. The Emperor’s Children vessel was pulling back from them, a swarm of firefly-bright traceries describing the arcs of escaping Stormbirds and recalled boarding torpedoes on magnetic tethers.

Curiously, the Iron Warriors vessel was no longer in retreat.

Did its captain suspect what he planned?

Perturabo was aboard the Iron Blood, so it was entirely possible.

But why hadn’t he told the Emperor’s Children?

Freeing his mind from thoughts of the past, Perturabo watched the gently rolling form of the Sisypheum with profound admiration for its crew. The Iron Blood’s data engines had finally identified the Iron Hands vessel, its up-armoured and heavily modified silhouette causing the pattern matching and energy signature algorithms numerous recognition errors along the way. Such were the differences in its structure and emissions that several iterations had even quantified it as a warship of the greenskins.

Perturabo had recognised the vessel long before, its underlying structure clear to him beneath the upgrades, modifications and patch repairs effected by its crew. The Iron Hands ship was an ugly thing now, a prison shank compared to the gladiator’s blade of the Andronius. But a blade was a blade, and even the crudest could still kill.

And the crew of the Sisypheum had murder in mind.

A too-bright halo of nuclear reactions pulsed from its over-burdened engines. A tsunami of electromagnetic radiation bloomed from the Sisypheum to engulf the Iron Blood and Andronius. Dozens of consoles blew out in a barrage of sparks and flame as unshielded systems fused and overloaded.

‘Bones of Lochos!’ Falk swore as his command console erupted in flames.

‘Kroeger, do you still have a firing solution?’ demanded Forrix.

‘Not a chance, weapon auspex is blind.’

‘Get it back,’ ordered Forrix.

‘Give me a minute,’ snapped Kroeger, struggling with the few fire control systems that remained intact.

‘We don’t have a minute!’ snarled Forrix, pushing Kroeger out of the way. The panel was a blackened mess, but enough systems remained active to launch an unguided spread of torpedoes and a mesh pattern barrage.

‘Do nothing,’ said Perturabo.

‘But–’

‘I said do nothing!’ shouted Perturabo, but by then it was too late to do anything anyway.

A searing fireball of incandescent energy exploded from the Sisypheum’s engines like the tail of a comet approaching too close to a super-dense star. The vessel shot forwards like a missile fired from a shoulder launcher, accelerating from a virtual standstill to escape velocity in the blink of an eye.

The Sisypheum closed the distance to the Andronius in a streak of laser brilliance and lanced into its flanks at a point just behind the beauteous vessel’s plough-shaped bow. Gilded and ornamented as it was, the Andronius was still a fighting vessel of the Legiones Astartes, and was armoured to withstand missiles, torpedoes and explosive ordnance.

Against the speed, mass and prow weapons of the Sisypheum, it had no chance.

The hull of the Emperor’s Children vessel crumpled in the face of the tapered missile of the Iron Hands ship, the impact a punching thrust through its guts that sent billowing scads of ignited oxygen blossoming into space. The blazing wake of the Iron Hands ship ignited the atmosphere within the Andronius and sheared the prow from its body as keenly as a guillotine. The bow spun away on a spiralling wake of burning oxygen, and armoured plates along the entire front half of the vessel buckled and warped as internal explosions cascaded along its length. Fire spurted from ruptures in the hull and beams of brilliant light speared from compartment breaches as the cataclysmic damage burned the Emperor’s Children vessel from the inside.

An expanding cone of fire and debris detonated outwards as the momentum and weapons fire of the Sisypheum punched through the vitals of the III Legion’s ship. Like a bullet exploding from the body of a gunshot victim, the Sisypheum blasted from the interior of the Andronius, trailing molten debris and a flame-wreathed halo of ignited plasma. It rippled with void haze, and Perturabo saw the tortured squalls of light tearing at the edges of the exit wound as its shields dragged kilometres’ worth of armour plating in its magnetic wake.

Though notions of up and down were an irrelevance in space, the Andronius listed downwards, swinging around like a punch-drunk fighter. Its gyroscopic systems fought to stabilise the vessel, but the damage was too severe, too sudden and too shocking to correct. Though her shipmaster fought to save her, Perturabo knew the Andronius was doomed. Energy fields shimmered in a desperate attempt to preserve internal atmosphere as the front half of the vessel spun away. Its structural integrity gone, the Andronius began to tear itself apart as its enormous mass and the eager riptides of the warp reached up to claim their prize.

‘By the Twelve…’ breathed Forrix, watching the awesome sight of a starship dying before his very eyes. To see a starfaring leviathan destroyed in battle was a sight no warrior could ever forget; the invincible defeated, the invulnerable humbled. The Andronius was dead in space, its running lights flickering for a moment before being extinguished. The ship’s engines still flared in fits and starts, twisting the gutted carcass from the carefully mapped path laid before them. In moments, it would be swallowed by the bleeding warp currents, another victim of the empyrean’s tempestuous wrath.

‘Do you think anyone’s left alive on there?’ asked Falk.

‘There will be some,’ said Forrix, moving to the surveyor station and linking it to the launch decks. ‘A few will have reached saviour pods, but some are still out in the void aboard Stormbirds and torpedoes. There’re bound to be more left aboard the wreck too. I’m launching a full spread of rescue craft.’

Perturabo watched as the Trident began re-establishing control throughout the Iron Blood, establishing a contravallation of picket ships and organising the rescue effort for the crew of the Andronius. Thousands had died in its sudden, merciless demise, but Forrix could yet save hundreds with his unmatched logistical nous.

He watched the Iron Hands vessel twist on its axis, more agile than anything that ugly had a right to be. Still bleeding a tail of ignited plasma and mag-locked debris, the Sisypheum arced down towards a knot of storm clouds that looked to offer no easy way through.

‘My lord,’ said Kroeger, his fingertips hovering over fire control. ‘Do we shoot now?’

‘No,’ said Perturabo. ‘Leave them. They’ve earned that much.’

SEVENTEEN

The Tower
Fratricide
I Will Command

Unlike many of his brothers, Perturabo did not hate the Legions that had remained true to the Emperor. They were tools with which their father had carved out his empire, warriors as abused as Perturabo’s sons, but too stubborn or too blind to see it. The Iron Hands were an honourable Legion, but they had changed in the centuries since Perturabo and his brother primarchs had each made that climb to the crenellated peak of the Astartes Tower to swear their oaths of moment.

Awaiting Fulgrim amid the structured chaos of his sanctum, with its stasis-sealed paintings, anatomical apparatus and half-built automatons, Perturabo toyed with the gear workings of a mechanical lion with carved lilies in its jaws. Remembering its construction back on Olympia, Perturabo broke his most inflexible rule and looked to the past. He thought back to his ascent up that polished marble spire, the night before leaving Terra for a life of war. Each step had required a superhuman effort of will, determination and courage. It was no simple screw-stair, but a challenge to the heart and intellect, a psychic communion with the Emperor himself that tested the very boundaries of a warrior’s endurance. Not all of them had passed the test.

Perturabo was no longer sure he had passed the test.

Heroic operas had been composed that told of the mighty oaths sworn atop that great tower. Imagists of every stripe had tried to capture the majesty of the moment when each primarch had stepped from its gilded archway, and hundreds of dramaturges had attempted to render in poetic verse the idealism embodied in the idea of such a profound moment.

None of them had even come close to succeeding.

They thought the oath symbolic; an arbitrary moment chosen to mark the beginning of something magnificent. They thought it powerful only for the instant of time it marked in the sand of Terra’s history. Perturabo had replayed the memory of that day many times, subjecting the words that passed between him and his father to the scrutiny of a critic. Each interpretation of the words gave him no comfort in the coldness of solitude that betrayal brought; only reproach.

‘You will be my hammer, Perturabo,’ his father had said. ‘What our enemies build to keep us from our destiny, you must put asunder.’

‘No one shall build anything I cannot break open. No one.’

‘I know,’ said his father, turning His gaze to the stars. At the top of the world they were clear as diamonds, the Palace built high above the low-lying fug of chemical residue from centuries of war and its ashen aftermath. Perturabo followed his father’s gaze, relishing the prospect of leading his warriors out to those selfsame stars.

‘Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war, my son,’ said his father. ‘It stains the soul forever and is like a cancer that gnaws away all that was once good in a man. To send men to their deaths without noble purpose and consign those you fight to the grave is a burden no man can bear and no man should forgive. Always remember that, my son. Fight when you must, but wield the power of your Legion with a solemn heart. Once unleashed, the beast of war does not return to its iron cage until it has sated its hunger in the blood of innocents.’

The words had been said in a reflective tone, as though they carried his father’s regret and a weight of bitter experience. Now they echoed from the past with a sting of prescience and a viper’s bite of forewarning.

‘But what I ask of you is necessary beyond the understanding of most men,’ continued his father. ‘Many in this new world think me vainglorious, citing my hubris in declaring a manifest destiny to rule the stars, but they understand nothing of the truth of the universe. They cannot know that this is a war of species survival. Either we go out into the galaxy and win it in time or we will be consigned to a slow death or a stagnation that may be far worse.’

‘Your sons will not let that happen.’

His father had smiled. ‘It may already be inevitable.’

‘Nothing is inevitable.’

‘I hope you are right, Perturabo,’ said his father, and a moment of genuine affection passed between them, the like of which Perturabo had not felt before and would never feel again. ‘Over the centuries, our species has tried many ways of fighting the forces of evil: prayer, fasting, good works, ritual and holy books, but that is not how we will fight it.’

‘Evil?’ Perturabo had asked.

‘A turn of phrase,’ said the Emperor, not quite convincingly. ‘All those ways were meaningless and ineffective, and saw millions dead. We, on the other hand, will fight with bolters, blades and the courage of the greatest warriors this galaxy has ever seen. That is how you fight evil.’

That word again.

‘The Iron Warriors are yours to command, father,’ said Perturabo. ‘Wherever our paths take us, whatever we meet and however long it takes, we will not fail you.’

His father turned to look at him, His golden eyes like two siege augers digging into Perturabo’s heart, coring his very essence and learning everything about him in the blink of an eye. But whatever He had seen was not reflected in His impenetrable expression, and Perturabo had spent long years trying to breach that wall.

The Emperor looked from the tower windows, over the mountains that pierced the highest clouds of the world, over the millions-strong workforce still set to transforming this mountain range into an edifice deserving of awe. His gaze encompassed everything laid before Him, from the newest settlements accruing around the Palace precincts to the distant war-ravaged lands of the fallen techno-barbarian kings, all the way to the farthest satrapies.

‘I can no longer see the paths and outcomes leading from this moment,’ said his father as anabatic winds lifting off the plain below filled the silence between them.

‘Is that why Magnus and his Legion remain on Terra while the rest of us crusade across the stars?’

‘Partly, though he will join you soon enough. I hope that one day Magnus will return to me again, for he sees much that I do not.’

‘He will not stay on crusade?’ said Perturabo, disappointed.

‘Magnus will return to Terra, but not for a very long time,’ said the Emperor, turning to him as though surprised at his dismay. ‘You and he are close?’

‘I’ve only met him a few times,’ said Perturabo after a moment’s consideration. ‘But, yes, I like him. He’s already helped me in translating some of the more obscure texts in my collection. I think he and I will be good friends.’

‘Why?’

It had seemed like a strange question, even then. Time and the later events at Nikaea only made it stranger, as though the Emperor had already known the path upon which the Crimson King was setting his feet.

‘We share a love of learning, and a hunger to know new things,’ said Perturabo. ‘After all, without culture and learning, what’s the point of any crusade? To destroy, to lay waste? No, if a crusade is to have purpose, it needs to forge something better in its wake.’

‘Ah, the words of your Firenzii polymath,’ said the Emperor with a soft grin.

‘And here I thought to pass it off as my own wisdom,’ said Perturabo with a matching smile.

These words returned to him often, mocking what had become of the great vision promised by the Emperor. Two centuries of idealism and hope swept away in a spasm of rebellion, uncounted great works undone in an instant.

What would future historians make of Horus Lupercal’s gamble? Would they pore over their dusty books and play out events long past and see what might have been? Perturabo dismissed the question as irrelevant; history was not a game that could be played out again and again to create fresh outcomes. What had happened had already happened, and what did not happen could not come to pass. Games of ‘what if’ might be diverting for scholars and theoreticians, but for warriors they were a distraction.

Fulgrim had climbed the Astartes Tower years before him, and Perturabo had often wondered what he and the Emperor had spoken about on their final night on Terra. Was the Phoenician plagued by memories in the dark watches of the night? Was he troubled by hidden meanings and subtexts in their father’s words that only now became obvious?

Was there a voice in Fulgrim’s head that whispered dark-hued truths?

The survivors from the Andronius had been housed on one of the upper decks of the Iron Blood until the Pride of the Emperor was ready to retrieve them. In lieu of a large enough space to hold the three thousand souls rescued from the void, they had been housed amidships in what had once been the remembrancer decks. The interior of an Iron Warriors ship was a hard-edged, functional environment, with little in the way of superfluous space, but these decks reeked of abandonment. The thousands of remembrancers that had attended the Legion in the latter days of the Crusade years had lived and worked here, but they were all gone now, and none of the IV Legion made use of those dark spaces. Scraps of the remembrancers’ graffiti still lingered on the walls, snatches of poetry, pornographic caricatures and hastily drawn musical scales, but many were now obscured by bloody handprints and spattered arcs of dried gore.

Honourable Soulaka made his way through the host of mortals and legionaries that thronged the cramped, low-ceilinged corridors with a growing sense of disbelief and outrage. Legionary bodies were laid out in random piles with triage marks on their shoulder guards, though it was clear that no one had attended to even those in need of immediate aid. The stench of open wounds was strong, as was the overpowering aroma of gene-modified coagulant that meant a great many Legion warriors had been badly wounded.

Iron Warriors Apothecaries had immediately made their way to the remembrancer decks without any orders needing to be given, but the survivors of the Andronius turned them away. Soulaka alone remained, hoping against hope that he might see some of the creatures the Stonewrought had described after his abortive sojourn at the Emperor’s Children’s revels. Howls like the hunting cries of crag-raptors drew him deeper into the twisting maze of corridors, the wet-throated sounds amplified by the metal walls and distorted by the many turns. Dissonant bass notes thrummed the air and a skirling, squealing whine scratched on his nerves like badly-tuned vox-output, but he could see no source for these grating sounds.

Injured legionaries sat in pools of sticky blood, ignored by all except a handful of III Legion medicae-implanted servitors, cybernetic slave creatures that were only ever intended for low-priority walking wounded. No one of any apparent skill appeared to be tending to the mortally injured amongst the survivors.

It made no sense to Soulaka.

Without Apothecaries, a great many warriors would die who did not need to.

Without speedy implementation of reductor protocols, the gene-seed of the dead would be lost, but the Emperor’s Children didn’t seem to care. The most precious resource of a Legion, and the Phoenician’s warriors were heedless of its loss.

The deeper into the remembrancer decks Soulaka went, the more he began to suspect why.

A great many of the Emperor’s Children had diverged so far from their original gene-template that it was almost impossible to recognise them as legionaries any more.

Or to know if their gene-seed could even be conventionally harvested.

Soulaka saw a warrior with a shattered breastplate, beneath which he observed a broad chest that resembled the rugose flesh of a reptile’s belly, another whose arm bent in ways that indicated the presence of far too many joints, and yet a third whose battle helm appeared to have fused with the meat of his skull, such that there was no telling where armour ended and flesh began.

And these were among the least of the changes he saw.

Eyes of multifarious hues and facets stared angrily at him, as though he were the intruder on their vessel. Instead of an Apothecary attempting to help those in need of medical attention, he felt like a neophyte scout on his first mission behind enemy lines who’d just given away his position.

He moved quickly, cataloguing the various deformities and mutilations worked into the bodies of the Emperor’s Children. Some were clearly surgical adaptations, but others could only be the result of manipulation of the gene-seed. That anyone had the skill to do such a thing beyond the hidden laboratoria on Terra and Mars was astounding, but having heard what the Stonewrought had said upon his return from the Pride of the Emperor, there could be only one man capable of such a feat.

Soulaka heard a groaning gurgle of breath beside him and felt questing fingers weakly grasp his leg. He looked down to see a wounded warrior whose cyanotic complexion and bloodied eyes spoke of dreadful hypoxia and flash depressurisation injures. This warrior had been blown out into the vacuum of space without any means of life support, and that he had survived at all was a testament to the robustness of Space Marine physiology.

The legionary was blind; his eyes had literally filled with blood until they ruptured.

‘Apothecary?’ said the warrior. ‘I’m hurt…’

Soulaka knelt beside him and grimaced as he saw the rings and toothed hooks stitched into his face. The warrior gripped the barbed haft of a whip that lay coiled beside him like a sleeping snake. Soulaka blinked as he thought he saw the toothed length of the whip twitch in recognition of his scrutiny.

‘Tell me your name,’ said Soulaka.

‘Kalimos,’ said the warrior. ‘Ah… the pain…’

Soulaka nodded and held out his arm, letting the narthecium’s auspex play over Kalimos and collect diagnostic information that would allow him to treat the warrior’s wounds. His injuries were severe: many of Kalimos’s internal organs were already damaged beyond repair by oxygen starvation, and those that remained were on the verge of complete failure. He was not beyond saving, and with a full suite of medicae tools, Soulaka could restore Kalimos to the fighting ranks within a few days.

‘I can fix you,’ said Soulaka. ‘But I need to get you to the apothecarion.’

Kalimos twitched as a spasm of agony passed through him. He licked a bifurcated tongue over his cracked lips, and Soulaka saw that his canines had been replaced by implants of razor-sharp surgical steel.

‘You are not Third Legion,’ said Kalimos, twin runnels of blood flowing from the corners of his mouth. ‘You don’t know, do you?’

‘I don’t know what?’ said Soulaka, leaning in.

‘The pain…’ said Kalimos.

‘I can help with that,’ said Soulaka, extending his narthecium.

Kalimos slapped the surgical device away and shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘The pain… It’s exquisite, you see. I never knew how good it could feel… to die…’

His head slumped to one side, and Soulaka needed no warning tone from the narthecium to tell him that Kalimos was dead. Soulaka had seen many warriors die before him, but this death sat badly with him.

No Space Marine should welcome death.

‘Your war is over, Legionary Kalimos,’ said Soulaka, placing a hand on the dead legionary’s shoulder. ‘And I will honour your memory with the promise that your gene-seed will live on.’

Soulaka carefully removed the dead warrior’s plastron to reveal a bodyglove wired with the electrical conductor pads from a defibrillator. An extruded scalpel blade cut through the toughened fabric, and he bared Kalimos’s wide, flattened chest, thick with the ridges of the ossified bone shield. Tattoos of writhing snakes engaged in what looked like either coitus or battle slithered across the bruised skin, and the inks glistened with curious hues that made Soulaka strangely unsettled.

He tapped a memorised code into his narthecium and it altered its configuration in a series of rotating, shifting panels to emit a puff of icy air. The reductor’s drill core snapped from the upper edges of his gauntlet as a series of glass tubes slotted home behind it. Soulaka sprayed sterilising solutions over the centre of the dead warrior’s chest and swabbed the area clear of contaminants.

Resting the flesh drill against Kalimos’s chest, Soulaka engaged the penetrating spectra of his visor to locate the implanted progenoid. Soulaka could extract a dead warrior’s gene-seed under battlefield conditions in less than thirty seconds, but it took him almost that long to locate the progenoid amid the confusion of biology he saw within Kalimos.

Organs and artificial trunkways threaded his body, linked to his nervous system in ways he had never seen or imagined were possible. A panoply of hybrid organs and unknown biological hardware packed the man’s chest, most of which had no business being inside a living being.

Eventually, he found what he was looking for – the small, plum-shaped organ connected to a host of mysterious fleshy tendrils as thin as hairs.

‘Now what might be going on here?’ he wondered as he engaged the energised edges of the drill and pressed down hard to break through the layered bone protecting the organs within. Laser cutters burned through flesh and bone as internal tubing siphoned the blood away, and Kalimos jerked as the laser sent pulses of electrical energy through the strange pathways of his body. Fresh blood leaked from his ruptured eyeballs, and an exhalation of what sounded like pleasure sighed from between his blue lips.

The drill clamped in place and the automated mechanisms of the reductor finished its work. Carefully, Soulaka withdrew the drill as the hollow tubes filled with blood and the squirming lump of the harvested organ. The blade self-sterilised and the reductor retracted into his gauntlet, sealing the precious gene-seed within.

‘Is that really yours to take?’ said a voice behind Soulaka, and he jumped in surprise, reaching for the bolt pistol at his hip. A hand flashed out, swift as thought, and clamped down on the butt of the weapon before his own could reach it.

‘Now, now, not so hasty,’ said a warrior with a face full of scars and an arrogant, cocksure glint in his eyes. ‘We’re all friends here, are we not?’

‘Who are you?’ asked Soulaka, slowly lifting his hand away from his holster.

‘Lucius,’ said the warrior, kneeling beside Kalimos.

‘Where are your Legion’s Apothecaries?’ demanded Soulaka. ‘There are legionaries dying here. They could be saved.’

Lucius ignored the question and freed the toothed whip from the dead man’s grip.

‘You won’t be needing this then, Kalimos,’ he said, relishing the feel of the barbed grip in his bare hand. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll take good care of it for you.’

‘Did you hear what I said?’ said Soulaka.

‘I heard,’ said Lucius, standing and hanging the coiled whip from a hook on his belt. Now that he took a moment to study this Lucius, Soulaka saw a man perfectly in balance with his physique, a killer with an intimate knowledge of his body’s limitations.

‘Well?’

‘Well what?’

‘Where are your Apothecaries?’

‘Only one came aboard your iron ship,’ said Lucius. ‘And I don’t think he’s particularly interested in saving lives.’

‘Then what kind of Apothecary is he?’

Lucius leaned in close, and Soulaka could taste the sourness of his breath, the rank sweat of his unwashed body and the blood of fresh scarring.

‘The kind that’s standing right behind you,’ said Lucius.

Soulaka spun around and found himself face to face with a gaunt-featured cadaver of a man with thready white hair, the blackest eyes and a cloak of leathered flesh over his armour of purple and gold. A leprous form of servo-harness sprouted from his back, and he carried an elongated needle pistol in slender, mantis-like fingers.

Soulaka heard a tiny thip sound and felt a sharp sting at his neck, like an insect bite.

He reached up and tugged a sliver of hollow crystal from his neck. A droplet of blood hung suspended at the tip, like a ruby tear. He tried to make sense of what he was seeing, but his mind was suddenly fogged and sluggish.

‘Fabius?’ he said, his voice sounding as though it echoed from the bottom of a deep chasm.

‘None other,’ said the man, who reached out and lowered him to the ground as the strength poured from Soulaka’s body. He tried to speak, but Fabius hushed him with a finger placed tenderly over his lips.

‘The xyclos toxin thrives on resistance and will make your suffering much worse should you desire to die in pain,’ said Fabius.

Soulaka could no longer feel his limbs and he nodded, as though what Fabius was saying was the most natural thing in the world.

‘You took something that does not belong to you,’ said Fabius, expertly opening Soulaka’s code-locked reductor to remove the gene-seed he had taken from Kalimos.

‘No, I…’ said Soulaka, but whatever he had been about to say slipped away.

Fabius placed something heavy against his chest.

Soulaka looked down and though he knew he should recognise the device, its name and purpose escaped him. Fabius pressed hard and Soulaka grunted as laser-edged blades spun up to cutting speed, coring down through the layers of his plastron and the thickened bone of his chest. He felt the device boring deep into his body, but there was no pain. Which was good. He felt a tugging sensation inside him as an internal organ was cut free. Tears welled in the corners of his eyes, though he could not say why.

Fabius leaned in close to whisper in his ear. ‘Tell me your name.’

‘What–?’

‘Your name,’ said the white-haired angel of death. ‘What is it?’

That at least he did know.

‘I am Honourable Soulaka,’ he said, pleased to have remembered this fact.

‘Honourable? You are a mason master?’ asked Fabius.

‘I am,’ said Soulaka.

‘Interesting,’ said Fabius.

Soulaka looked down. A neat hole had been bored through his breastplate. Blood coated his armour with a glistening sheen, and a viscous froth of blood and bone fragments pooled in his lap. The Apothecary of the Emperor’s Children cradled a metallic vial, upon which the spidery arms of his bio-harness scratched two words: Honourable Soulaka.

With his last breath of life, Soulaka fell back on the one source of strength left to him.

‘From iron cometh strength. From strength cometh will. From…’

His words faded away.

‘Yes,’ said Fabius. ‘Your gene-seed should be ripe with potential.’

Fulgrim took his time in answering the summons, but Perturabo had expected that, and his humours were in balance when the layered doors swung open. The robots of the Iron Circle brought their threat sensors to bear, but Perturabo waved them down as Fulgrim swept inside with a tired, pained expression.

Perturabo’s attention was focused on a clockwork automaton: the working model of a Warhound Titan that was almost as fully functional as the real thing. Its upper carapace was hinged open, revealing a fiendishly complex latticework of gears, cogs and timing shafts. The metronomic beat of its mechanical heart tick-tocked to a precise rhythm, and the miniature screwdriver Perturabo held was no thicker than a human hair.

Two of the Iron Circle moved aside to allow Fulgrim within, and behind him came two of his captains – Kaesoron and Vairosean – together with the limping form of his last Lord Commander, Eidolon. Behind them came the Trident, who moved to take position at the cardinal points of a triangle around their Lord. Perturabo gave Forrix a slow nod.

Fulgrim glanced around, and seeing that little – if anything – had changed from his last visit to Perturabo’s sanctum, lost interest in surroundings that would have captivated Terran scholars for months. Fulgrim was clad in his battle armour, bearing a fresh coat of paint that was almost painfully vivid in its colouring. The amethyst and gold were somehow too real, too sharp-edged; as though painted on the surface of Perturbo’s retinas.

‘Sit,’ said Perturabo.

For a moment, he thought Fulgrim would refuse, the command too imperious, too demeaning in the presence of their subordinates. Though he knew it was a childish ploy that a narcissist like Fulgrim would see through in a heartbeat, he ignored his brother and continued working on the Warhound’s interior.

Just as he judged Fulgrim was about to speak, he said, ‘I summoned you five hours ago.’

‘I am aware of that,’ said Fulgrim, tight-lipped and bowstring taut. ‘But I just lost a warship, so my attention has been somewhat diverted.’

‘You needlessly lost a warship,’ pointed out Perturabo.

‘Is that why you summoned me to your tinker’s workshop?’ snapped Fulgrim. ‘To berate me for showing a measure of intrepidity? If you have brought me here to gloat or say I told you so, then you can save your breath. I will not apologise for wanting to learn more of those who would oppose us.’

‘And what did you learn?’ said Perturabo, finally looking up from his working. ‘What great revelations do your monsters bring us from so bold an expedition?’

Fulgrim said nothing and cast his gaze around the room, as though the paintings, anatomical diagrams and mathematical proofs were now of sudden interest to him. His gaze hardened as his eyes alighted on the sketches over Perturabo’s shoulder, and the Lord of Iron knew exactly what Fulgrim was going to say before he said it.

‘How did you get those drawings?’

‘Which ones?’

‘The gruesome ones,’ said Fulgrim. ‘The ones showing what looks like…’

‘Primarch anatomy? You know how I got them.’

Fulgrim nodded and an ugly expression of bitter jealousy clouded his features.

‘I remember little of the time before our scattering,’ said Fulgrim with a dismissive shrug.

‘You remembered enough to pass on something to your fleshsmith.’

‘Fabius?’ said Fulgrim. ‘No, I gave him nothing except permission to explore to the furthest reaches of his knowledge.’

‘Really? You told him nothing?’

‘Well, I may have pointed him in certain directions,’ admitted Fulgrim, ‘but the work he has done is all his own. Admittedly, what he has manufactured so far leaves something to be desired, but no great art is ever achieved without effort and blood.’

‘It is wrong,’ said Perturabo.

‘Wrong?’ said Fulgrim, as though the word were anathema to him. ‘Haven’t you seen yet? There is no right and wrong. We are beings of will and desire, and only by exercising the former and indulging the latter do we move closer to ultimate perfection. Fabius’s imperfect science might be crafting monsters just now, but eventually he will create something godlike.’

‘All he will create are bastard hybrids, mongrel half-breeds that should be strangled at birth,’ said Perturabo. ‘You should stop what he is doing before it goes any further.’

‘I will not,’ stated Fulgrim.

Perturabo sighed and returned his attention to the clockwork model of the Warhound.

‘You are never so certain as when you don’t know just how wrong you can be,’ he said, picking up his tools and working on the machine’s interior once again.

‘Is it broken?’ asked Fulgrim.

‘The perpetual motion driver at its heart is losing time,’ said Perturabo.

‘I thought that was impossible.’

‘On the contrary,’ said Perturabo, tightening a screw no larger than a grain of sand. ‘A genius of Old Earth discovered the theoretical principles thousands of years ago, but he lacked the technology to manufacture a working prototype. I have many of his journals and secret papers in my library and was able to extrapolate what had been lost to draw up the schematics for Vulkan to build.’

Fulgrim nodded, already bored. ‘I would have thought Vulkan would have better things to do with his forges, like making guns and swords.’

‘Then you don’t know him at all,’ said Perturabo. ‘His love of the forge encompasses all things, from crafting weapons to fashioning miniature wonders of artifice.’

‘But that one isn’t working?’ asked Fulgrim. ‘Then he’s not as good as I heard.’

‘No, it was perfect,’ said Perturabo. ‘It was damaged during the fighting at Phall. It fell from a shelf and the mechanism was knocked out of alignment. If you listen closely, you can hear the variation in each cycle of its mechanical heart.’

Perturabo reached out and placed the Warhound on the workbench in front of Fulgrim.

‘I have no interest in your toys,’ he said.

‘Listen,’ insisted Perturabo.

Fulgrim sighed and leaned in close to the table, turning his head to listen.

Perturabo’s hand flashed out and gripped Fulgrim’s hair. With sudden force, he slammed his brother’s face into the Warhound. The wondrous automaton shattered into a thousand pieces as Fulgrim’s head crunched into the pitted surface of the workbench.

Bone broke and blood spattered. Cogs flew, tiny springs and gear levers spun off.

Fulgrim cried out in painful shock and his captains surged forwards.

The Iron Circle smashed them aside with wrecking-ball blows from their energy shields and before the Emperor’s Children could recover, the Trident were upon them. Perturabo hauled Fulgrim over the workbench, scattering drawings, fragile tools, schematics and half-finished sketches. Though Fulgrim was fully armoured, Perturabo lifted him by the neck with no more effort than lifting a mortal man. Fulgrim spat blood, and Perturabo slammed his fist into his brother’s face, snapping his head back with a crack of bone.

Fulgrim’s eyes blazed black and his face glimmered with reptilian malice.

He started to speak, but Perturabo didn’t give him the chance. Like a fist-fighter going for the kill, he battered his brother’s face with pistoning jabs until he had him backed up against an iron column. He pinned Fulgrim in place and drew back his free hand to reach for Forgebreaker.

The hammer rose, but Perturabo left the blow hanging.

Fulgrim’s perfect face was a wet meat wound, leaking blood, snot and tears. His breath was hoarse and clogged with phlegm and broken teeth, his eyes were swollen shut. He tried to speak, but Perturabo cut him off again.

‘No, brother,’ he said. ‘I am speaking now, and you will listen to me.’

Falk, Kroeger and Forrix hauled Fulgrim’s captive officers over, powerful arms wrapped around their necks and wide-bore pistols jammed in hard to their flesh.

‘I have bitten my tongue and allowed you to bring my Legion into this place,’ said Perturabo. ‘I have followed your lead in all things, I have listened to your tall tales and allowed you to set the pace of this expedition.’

Perturabo leaned forwards and said, ‘That ends now.’

He released Fulgrim, who held himself erect in the face of Perturabo’s cold anger.

‘Your warriors have no discipline, monsters fight your battles and you have allowed an entire vessel to be sacrificed in the name of vanity, but no more. From here onwards, I am in charge and for the duration of this mission, your Legion is mine to command. Your warriors will obey my orders, they will follow my lead, and they will do nothing except by my command. If you agree to that, then we will continue on into the Eye of Terror and finish this together. If you don’t, then I will take my Legion and leave you here. Do you understand?’

Fulgrim nodded and swallowed a mouthful of blood.

‘I understand, brother,’ he said, his voice a gargled, mangled mockery of its once perfect cadence. ‘I understand that you humble me and expect me to swallow my pride. To be your lapdog.’

‘I don’t need a damn lapdog,’ snarled Perturabo. ‘I need an equal.’

‘But I am not your equal, brother,’ said Fulgrim, grinning through his bloodied features, as though this outburst of violence was somehow amusing. ‘I surpass you in every way.’

‘And yet I’m the one holding the hammer,’ said Perturabo.

‘You say you want an equal, but where is the equality when you secure my assent at the end of a weapon?’

Perturabo lowered Forgebreaker and harnessed it across his shoulder once again. He turned to the Trident and said, ‘Release them.’

‘My lord,’ said Barban Falk. Kaesoron struggled in his grip, despite the pistol wedged under his stretched-open jaws. ‘Are you sure?’

‘I’m sure,’ said Perturabo. ‘Because the lesson of history tells me that the best way to get what you want is to make sure you give the other man something too.’

‘And what do you give me?’ said Fulgrim, coughing a wad of red-flecked saliva.

‘I let you live,’ said Perturabo.

‘That’s not much to give.’

‘It’s what I’m offering. Take it or leave it. Take it, and no one in the room will ever speak of this. You have my word on that.’

Fulgrim shrugged, as though the matter was of no consequence. He looked down at Perturabo’s chest and smiled with reptilian hunger.

‘I see I have misjudged you, brother,’ he said. ‘Do you know how long it has been since anyone has caused me real pain? No, of course, you don’t. But trust me, it’s been a while.’

The swelling around Fulgrim’s jaw was already fading. Shattered bones in his cheek and nose and jaw would be knitting, and the bruises around his eyes were yellowing. Primarchs healed fast, but Perturabo was impressed at the speed with which Fulgrim’s body was undoing the damage he had suffered.

‘So do we have an agreement?’

‘We do,’ said Fulgrim, running his hands through his hair and giving his warriors a curt nod. The Trident released their charges, but instead of the expected posturing and threats, Fulgrim’s captains merely followed the Phoenician as he strode away. Perturabo watched him go, surprised Fulgrim had agreed so readily, but content he had shown his brother that he would not be so casually disobeyed.

The encounter with Fulgrim had left him drained, and he let out a shuddering breath, rubbing his hand over his scalp. His eyes were gritty with exhaustion and he needed a drink. The violent urges of his triarchs were a potent cocktail of combat stimms and aggression pheromones, chemical precursors to a fight that hadn’t happened. Kroeger was disappointed more blood had not been shed, and Falk’s fists were still balled in anticipation of killing.

Only Forrix looked uncomfortable at what had just happened, picking over the smashed remains of the broken Warhound.

‘Something troubles you, my triarch?’ asked Perturabo.

‘I don’t know why, but I’ve always hated this model,’ said Forrix. ‘Though I’m sad to see it destroyed.’

‘That’s not what I meant,’ said Perturabo. ‘You think I was wrong to bloody Fulgrim?’

‘No.’

‘You are a poor liar, Forrix.’

‘I don’t think you were wrong to bloody him, my lord,’ said Forrix. ‘But did you have to humiliate him in front of his warriors?’

‘Fulgrim needed to be taught a lesson,’ said Kroeger.

‘That he did,’ agreed Forrix, lifting a tiny cog-toothed wheel and turning it in a slow circle between his thumb and forefinger. ‘But if you’re going to skin a cat, you don’t keep it around as a house pet.’

Theogonies – III

The ruined manufactory provided shelter from the wire storm, keeping the three of them alive while the razor-flecked particulates howled and surged beyond the irradiated skin of the building. Ptolea and Sullax had complained about the need to stop here, but what was the alternative? To suffer the ravages of a storm that could strip a man to the bone inside of a minute? Yes, the rad-counters were in the red, but Coryn knew the danger would pass before they’d suffer hazardous levels of exposure.

People said that places like this had once been generating stations, that it had taken dangerous materials and employed forgotten technology to harness its power. Well that power had evidently turned on its makers, and laid waste to the planet, releasing toxins that had burned the atmosphere and boiled the oceans away.

Their structures were irradiated and would remain so for thousands of years. That was the only reason they hadn’t been torn down and their materials reused.

Everything was reused in Callax – the bleak, iron-walled fortress factory Coryn called home. Almost nothing was new, everything had once been something else. The planet’s only readily available water was what could be extracted from the air by the towering vapour mills, and the food was reconstituted from yesterday’s bodily waste. Coryn had never known anything different, but the chapbook his father had given him on his fifth birthday spoke of the ancient gods and their sumptuous banquets, tables groaning with endless goblets of pure water and rich food that hadn’t been scraped from recycling vats or processed a thousand times to remove any impurities.

The book had belonged to Coryn’s great-great-grandfather, and its pages were brittle and thin, yet the inked pictures were still vivid and full of life. They were the only spots of colour in Coryn’s bleak, grey existence. They showed skies of blue and gold, with hundreds of lights that his father had told him were stars. His father said there were still stars up there, beyond the Umbral, but no one really believed that. His father said a lot of things, but no one believed much of what the old man had to say. His days were numbered anyway, his limbs too weak to work the forges and his mind too prone to straying to be of any use in the logistical executives.

Coryn unzipped his padded jerkin and slipped the book from his shirt, taking great care not to damage its cover and whisper-thin pages. While the storm blew out the worst of its flensing rage on the building’s exterior, he read stories he knew by heart, but still enjoyed for the respite they provided from the miserable labours of daily life.

‘Still reading your children’s stories?’ said Ptolea, trudging into the room and wiping glittering flecks of steel wool from her padded jerkin. She sat down next to him with her back to the wall and her knees drawn up in front of her.

‘They’re not children’s stories,’ he said.

‘Don’t see the point of them,’ said Ptolea, lighting a smoke that was mostly sweepings from a factory floor. The smell was terrible, but Coryn wasn’t about to deny his friend one of the few pleasures left to her. ‘What’s the point of reading about things that don’t exist?’

Coryn turned the book around and showed her a page featuring a warrior in blue armour wrestling with a great serpentine creature with many arms.

‘Because they’re better than the things that do,’ he said.

‘Pretty,’ she said and reached out to take the book, but he pulled it back to his chest.

‘Sorry,’ he said by way of apology. ‘It’s delicate. Kind of a family heirloom. I always hoped I’d pass it on to my kids, you know, if I get permission.’

Sullax stomped in from outside and also swept himself clear of wiry dust particles.

‘Won’t be any chance of children if we stay here much longer,’ said Sullax, cupping his groin. ‘Place is buzzing with radiation. Bloody stupid idea coming out here.’

‘You didn’t have to come,’ pointed out Coryn.

‘Course I did,’ said Sullax, as though he were being obtuse. ‘You’re my work-brother, and I need to keep you alive.’

‘Touching,’ said Ptolea.

‘Yeah – if he dies, I need to make up his quota,’ growled Sullax, only half-joking.

Coryn didn’t answer, well aware that it was a risky venture they were on, but unwilling to admit that to his fellow scouts. He’d had to fight to persuade the executive to let him take the patrol out in the first place. The last thing he needed was to bring back dead bodies torn up by a wire storm or dosed with radiation that would make them infertile or, worse, unproductive.

He wasn’t sure what had driven him to venture beyond the safety of Callax’s hermetic walls, but the sight of that violet cometary fall had struck a chord in him that was still thrumming with purpose. Coryn had to know what it was, and he’d managed to convey that passion to the grey-suited members of the executive. Perhaps it was evidence of another surviving world, a link to their lost history and the other planets that were said to have existed once beyond the Umbral. Perhaps it might be the remains of a satellite whose orbit had decayed enough for gravity finally to drag it down.

Either reason was good enough to warrant a patrol, but the only resources the executive had seen fit to allocate him were two other scouts. Both of whom, they insisted, had to be volunteers. Naturally he’d picked his dwelling-sister and his work-brother. Neither believed this was a good idea, but neither had they liked the idea of him going into the chem wilderness alone.

The comet had fallen no more than a couple of kilometres beyond the walls, but it was still a difficult and dangerous journey. They hadn’t been allocated any transport, and had been forced to trudge through the ash and rock on foot. Beneath the perpetually grey sky, they’d just about reached the haunches of the mountains that rose up behind Callax when the wire storm had set in and driven them to take shelter in the ruined power plant.

‘Looks like it’s dying down,’ noted Ptolea, leaning up to peer through a crack in the steel panelling. ‘It’ll be nasty and sore, but we can make good time and be back before next shift.’

‘Come on then,’ sighed Sullax. ‘Some sleep before shift would be good.’

Coryn felt a surge of guilt and tried to keep it from his face. Shifts in the factories, reclamation plants and vapour mills were hard enough, never mind trying to get through one without enough rest.

They pulled their chem cloaks on and settled their masks in place before making their way back down to ground level and setting off into the blunted teeth of the wire storm.

Ptolea had been right, its fury had passed its peak and the vortex at its centre was already moving on. He felt the stinging impacts of the sharp-edged particulate matter battering his heavy canvas trousers and padded jacket, knowing his skin would be dotted with tiny blood blisters when he removed his protective outer layers. But the farther they went, the less intense the surges and squalls became, until he could at last see the edges of the mountain.

It wasn’t difficult to see where the meteorite had come down.

A smoking furrow of rock had been carved from the low foothills, the edges sagging and molten-looking. Pyroclastic material fell like hot black rain, smelling of burned metal. Coryn let some of it settle on his gloved palm and held it out to the others.

‘Carbon re-entry burn residue?’ he asked. ‘From a starship?’

‘Maybe,’ said Ptolea, but Coryn heard the excitement in her voice.

They marched into the newly created valley, its sides glassy and vitrified by the passage of whatever had carved it. Sheltered now from the last remnants of the storm, Coryn lifted his mask, and took a breath of air. It was utterly still and calm and smelled sweet and fragrant, free of the toxins he’d expect to taste, more like the oils rubbed on newborn babes.

‘Still think this was a waste of time?’ he asked Sullax.

‘I don’t know yet,’ said Sullax. ‘Depends what’s at the end of this.’

‘Better this than a shift at the fans,’ said Ptolea, moving on.

Coryn and Sullax joined her and they moved deeper into the slice cut in the rock. A hundred metres or so away, a shimmer of light lit the far end of the furrow. Clearly whatever had fallen here was still white hot. They approached cautiously, but as the distance closed, Coryn began to realise that what he was seeing was not the remains of a crashed satellite or a downed spaceship.

He didn’t know what it was.

It was light, a cohering illumination that filled the end of the valley with its brilliant glow. Coryn stared at it, trying to pin some kind of form upon it, but all he could see were fleeting images and shapes: eyes, golden wings, a thousand wheels turning like the heart of the mightiest machine, multiple impossibly latticed genetic helices interleaving in a billion times a billion complex ways.

‘What the bastard hell is that thing?’ demanded Sullax, unlimbering the single-shot rifle he carried. ‘Is it dangerous?’

‘I don’t know what it is,’ said Coryn. ‘But I don’t think it’s dangerous.’

‘How do you know?’ asked Ptolea.

‘I just do,’ said Coryn, and he did. Though he did not know how he knew, he appreciated that whatever this light was, it had not come to harm them. He moved towards the light as it began to coil into itself, reshaping its form into something wondrous, a being reborn in its own self-immolation.

He felt something brush his mind, a presence greater than anything he could possibly have imagined. Everything he was, it knew. Everything he knew, it knew. He felt no violation at this, the presence was wholly benign. Tentative even, like a hand offered in friendship to a beautiful stranger.

As the light was pulled into itself, a shape began to form, and Coryn gasped as he saw what lay at its heart.

A baby boy, as perfect as any born to one of the gene-pure hermetics.

‘I don’t believe it,’ said Sullax.

‘It’s impossible,’ added Ptolea.

‘No,’ said Coryn, kneeling beside the baby. ‘It’s the miracle we’ve been waiting for.’

The child’s skin was radiant, as though the light that had surrounded him had been somehow incorporated into his very flesh. The baby gurgled happily at the sight of him and reached up to him with a smile that seemed far too knowing for something that had only just come into being.

‘Don’t touch it,’ warned Sullax. ‘It could be dangerous.’

‘It’s only a baby,’ said Coryn. ‘Babies aren’t dangerous.’

‘You don’t know what it is,’ said Sullax. ‘We should kill it and be done.’

‘Kill him?’ snapped Coryn. ‘What are you talking about?’

Sullax drew his knife. ‘It’s an orphan, and you know the rules about orphans. They don’t get to be a burden on the rest of us.’

‘We’re not killing him,’ said Coryn, lifting the baby into his arms. The child’s flesh was warm to the touch and that warmth spread into every cell of Coryn’s body in a fiercely protective surge.

‘Put the knife away,’ said Ptolea.

‘Trust me, I’ll be doing us a favour if I take the knife to its neck,’ said Sullax. ‘Who’s going to raise it? You? Him? You don’t need that extra burden when it’s not blood of your blood.’

‘I said put the knife down,’ said Ptolea as the light of the baby spread over her face.

‘No,’ hissed Sullax, reaching to snatch the baby from Coryn’s arms.

Ptolea’s bullet punched out through the back of Sullax’s head, and he dropped to his knees before toppling onto his side. Blood pooled at their feet, and though Coryn knew he should be shocked at the killing of his work-brother, he felt nothing.

Sullax’s death left him cold.

He saw that Ptolea understood, her face radiant and free of any guilt at taking the shot.

Sullax had threatened the perfect child and had suffered accordingly.

Coryn looked down as he heard a gurgle of something liquid at his feet and saw a trickle of water running from a crack in the ground where the baby boy had lain. That trickle grew to a steady flow, until crystal-clear water was pouring from the depths of the earth in a river. Water flowed around them, washing the blood and chem-dust from their boots and filling the air with its purity.

‘He brought the waters,’ said Coryn, handing the baby boy to Ptolea. She cradled his tiny body with a love the equal of any new mother holding her child for the first time. Coryn took the chapbook from his shirt pocket and flicked through its pages, heedless of the paper fragments that fell from its crumbling spine and disintegrated in the water.

‘Look,’ he said, tears flowing down his face as he held the book out to Ptolea.

The pages depicted an ancient creation myth, a purple-hued god rising from primordial waters to bring life to a barren world where nothing ever grew, but which was now reborn as a fertile paradise.

‘Who is that?’ asked Ptolea.

‘It’s the water-bringer,’ said Coryn. ‘Fulgrim.’

EIGHTEEN

See it Done
Crone World
City of the Dead

Exacting attention to detail had served Perturabo well in his centuries of life. In war and at peace, he revelled in the minutiae of any given task, be it reducing an alien fortress to rubble or establishing the golden ratio within every portion of a theoretical design. Angron had berated him for wasting time on irrelevant details, while Guilliman had lauded him for his thoroughness.

Two very different characters, two very different opinions.

Both were correct in their own way, but neither fully appreciated his methodology or the bitter drive behind his exacting preferences. The need to be better, the urge to prove his worth beyond taking the metal to the stone.

Perturabo was a craftsman, and to be worthy of the appellation, every piece of work that bore his name must be judged for as long as it stood. His legacy was to leave no undertaking unfinished.

Every task was approached as though it might be his last, and this was no different.

His sanctum was draped in shadows, the grand designs and priceless artworks hung on the walls kept hidden from sight. The automata were slumped and silent on their shelves, with only the rustle of stacked weapon schemata on curling wax paper to disturb the silence. Not even the distant throb of the Iron Blood’s engines intruded upon his introspective isolation.

Spread before him, like components of the most intricate chronometer imaginable, were the pieces of the smashed Warhound automaton. Fulgrim’s head had broken it into fragments, and Perturabo was painstakingly repairing it. It had been an act of impulse to destroy the Warhound – one calculated to drive a point home, but impulsive nonetheless.

Bent over his workbench, Perturabo gently teased out a bend in a cogwheel, using the microscopic tines of precision callipers to realign each miniature tooth. It would be the work of months to repair it fully, but Perturabo had always believed that once a task was begun, only a lesser man would fail to see it through to the end.

Ten days had passed since his assault on his brother.

Perturabo did not regret the act, but Forrix’s words had struck a chord within him. It was foolish to trust to the word of a narcissistic egomaniac. The Trident had urged him to lead the Iron Warriors fleet from the Eye of Terror – his newly chosen name already gaining currency – and return to the Warmaster’s side, but he had given Fulgrim his oath that he would see this to the end and that was that.

Perturabo knew his brother would betray him. He was resigned to its inevitability. Such individuals could never be relied upon to do anything other than further their own interests, and Fulgrim was no exception. The only question was when the betrayal would come.

Speculation was pointless. It would happen, and he would be ready for it.

Part of him looked forward to it.

At least then he would be freed from his obligation to Fulgrim.

Satisfied that the cogwheel was returned to its original form, Perturabo carefully placed it back where it had come from and slotted the tool into its compartment. He straightened and rubbed the heels of his palms over his face. His eyes were heavy and felt gritty, as though he had not rested or had slept badly.

Perturabo sat back and poured himself a heavy goblet of wine from a bronze ewer. Bitter and flavoured with almonds and gene-recovered spices from Terra, the beverage was one fermented by a son of the Crimson King. Thinner than the robust Olympian wines, but exciting and full of interesting contradictions.

Much like the Crimson King himself.

He pulled his fur-lined cloak about himself, feeling cold in his flesh and weary to his bones. Of all the things Fulgrim had brought to this mission, Perturabo valued the gift of this cloak the highest. Its fabric was warm and the workmanship of the skull fastener inhumanly beautiful. The stone at its centre was polished smoother than even he might manage in a lapidary’s workshop. It had been black with hair-fine golden threads when Fulgrim had first presented it to him, but was now a melange of gold and black, the former gradually becoming the dominant colour.

Perturabo turned the stone, letting it catch the light from the hovering lumen globes.

‘An inconstant thing,’ he said. ‘The perfect gift from my brother.’

Perturabo sighed and returned to the broken Warhound, picking up a timing lever and beginning to work the kinks out with a miniature hammer and laser measuring device.

The massed fleets of the Iron Warriors and Emperor’s Children still plied the tempestuous currents of the warp under the guidance of Karuchi Vohra, but their journey was almost over. The Trident were eager to be unleashed, to set their Grand Battalions to war once more.

A single warship with a competent Navigator could utilise the torrential currents of the warp, slingshotting from squall to squall to make best speed, but to attempt such manoeuvres with a large fleet was to invite disaster. Perturabo would not risk such impetuosity, not this deep in the Eye of Terror, where each storm and tempest was strong enough to tear ships apart in the blink of an eye.

The Paths Above were indeed a calm current through the warp, as Karuchi Vohra had promised, but to move so many ships through them took time.

He didn’t trust Vohra, just as he did not trust Fulgrim, but he could not say for sure what the guide’s true agenda might be. What could a lone eldar scholar – if that was his true vocation – hope to gain by deceiving them? Barban Falk had standing orders to put a bolt-round through the guide’s head at the first sign of betrayal, a task he was already hoping he would have to carry out.

And then there was the matter of the second ship he had glimpsed when the Sisypheum had inadvertently unmasked itself. None of the ship’s surveyor apparatus had registered it and none of the bridge crew had witnessed it, but Perturabo knew what he had seen.

Who else might be on the hunt for the Angel Exterminatus?

Imperial forces? Unlikely, for there was every indication that the second ship had been hiding from the Sisypheum as well. Perhaps Karuchi Vohra was not as alone as he claimed, or perhaps there were other races who knew of this mission and sought to thwart its success or profit by its achievement.

Further questions were put aside as a gentle chime sounded from the entrance to his sanctum. Perturabo answered without looking up.

‘Enter.’

The door opened and Forrix stood silhouetted in the stark glare of the vapour lights behind him. In his Terminator armour, he looked invincible.

‘My lord,’ said Forrix. ‘Pardon the intrusion.’

‘What is it, my triarch?’

‘The eldar says we have reached our destination.’

Perturabo waited until he had finished working on the timing lever, the laser telling him it was as straight as it ever would be. He put it and the hammer back in their proper places.

‘Have you been able to fix it, my lord?’ asked Forrix. ‘The Warhound, I mean.’

Perturabo stood with a groan of weariness, sudden pain lancing up his spine.

‘A handful of components amongst thousands,’ he said, rubbing his face. ‘There’s a lesson there somewhere, but I’m too tired to think of it.’

Perturabo had never seen a world like it.

Like a pearl set in a canvas left out in the rain, it was a pristine bauble in the miasma of boiling energies of the warp. Where other pockets of matter were storm-lashed hell-worlds of impossible physics and nightmarish pseudo-realities, this planet had somehow remained untouched, a point of light against a backcloth of impenetrable darkness.

‘Wonderful,’ said Fulgrim, his holographic form wavering and crazed with static. ‘It is a virgin in a bordello, a regimental mascot in a slaughterhouse.’

Fulgrim’s image was clad in battle-plate, the golden wing of his shoulder guard gleaming, even over the patchy holographic connection. There was no sign of the hurt he had suffered at Perturabo’s hands.

‘Does it have a name?’ asked Perturabo.

Karuchi Vohra stood beside the command lectern, with Barban Falk his constant shadow a pace behind him.

‘This region of space was once home to a world known as Iydris,’ said Vohra. ‘A world said to have been favoured by the goddess Lileath, but I do not know if this is the same place.’

‘And you’re sure this is where we’ll find the weapons?’ asked Forrix.

‘Of course he’s sure,’ snapped Fulgrim. ‘How many other worlds like this do you imagine there are?’

‘This is the place,’ said Vohra. ‘The sorrow I feel just from looking at it tells me so.’

‘What does that mean?’ asked Kroeger.

‘This is a crone world, a relic of my people’s long-vanished empire,’ said Vohra. ‘A race fell to ruin here, billions of souls lost forever. It is not easy for me to see this.’

Perturabo sensed falsehood in Vohra’s answer, but there was little to be done about it now. They were here, and there was work to be done. He turned to address the hybrid machine shipmaster of the Iron Blood.

‘Captain Vort, give me a full surveyor sweep of the surrounding area,’ he commanded. ‘I want to know if there is anything else nearby.’

‘You think the Iron Hands might be here?’ asked Fulgrim.

‘Don’t you?’ he countered.

‘I think their vessel must surely have been too badly damaged after ramming the Andronius to have survived much longer than my beautiful ship,’ said Fulgrim.

‘Then you’re forgetting how resourceful Ferrus’s sons are,’ said Perturabo. ‘They’ve taken enough punishment to cripple a capital vessel and are still flying. That ship’s as hard as Olympian bedrock, and it’s going to take more than a collision to put it out of the fight.’

‘Assuming you’re right, what can one ship do against our massed strength, brother? We have two entire Legion fleets, hundreds of vessels, tens of thousands of warriors.’

‘You heard what happened on Dwell?’

‘No,’ said Fulgrim.

‘You’re lying,’ said Perturabo. ‘And you should know better than to dismiss any warriors of the Iron Tenth.’

‘They died easily enough on Isstvan,’ sneered Fulgrim.

‘You have a short memory, brother,’ said Perturabo. ‘They died hard and they died fighting. And they’re here somewhere.’

Soft plainsong issued from the vox-grilles mounted on the ceiling. A melody without a tune and a wordless evocation of emotional intensity beyond understanding. The sound permeated every corner of the Iron Blood’s bridge, a lyrical note that jarred with the hard edges and uncompromising lines of the space. Even the soft binaric burr of the bridge data engines seemed to still itself in the presence of the sound.

‘What is that?’ said Kroeger.

‘Background radiation and fluxing emissions from the planet,’ came the bark of the captain’s augmetic voice. ‘The auspex is interpreting it as a vox signal. Filtering it out now.’

‘Wait,’ said Perturabo. ‘Leave it.’

‘You hear it too?’ asked Fulgrim.

Perturabo nodded. ‘Yes. That’s not interference.’

He saw the confusion in the faces of his triarchs and said, ‘It’s a lament.’

‘And a warning,’ added Fulgrim. ‘I have heard the like of it before, around Murder.’

‘A warning of what?’ said Forrix.

Perturabo shifted the focus of the viewscreen and what had been lost in the magnification of the pearlescent world was revealed.

The heart of the Eye of Terror, a gravitational hellstorm with a supermassive black hole at its centre. A sphere of polished onyx swirling with colours like oil smears, it was a sucking wound in the flesh of the galaxy that vomited unnatural matter into the void. Whatever cataclysm had brought the Eye of Terror into being, this was its epicentre. A dark doorway to an unknowable destination and an unimaginably powerful singularity whose gravity was so strong that it consumed light, matter, space and time in its destructive core.

‘How is that planet not being dragged in?’ wondered Forrix. ‘How are we not being dragged in?’

‘Legend says that Lileath was protective of her world and held it tight to her breast,’ said Karuchi Vohra. ‘Not even Morai-Heg’s black hunger could wrench it from the firmament.’

‘That’s no answer,’ boomed Falk.

‘It is the only one I have,’ replied the eldar guide. ‘The Paths Above have brought us to Iydris in such a way that whatever force holds this world from destruction and keeps the ravages of the warp at bay keeps us safe too.’

‘Then we should be about our business before that changes,’ said Perturabo, switching the display on the viewscreen to a topological representation of the planet’s surface. ‘Where is the citadel of Amon ny-shak Kaelis? Show me.’

Karuchi Vohra nodded and zoomed in on the planet’s surface. There was no indication of the world’s climate or environment, nothing beyond its superficial geography, yet Perturabo instantly saw one unique feature of its form.

Fulgrim saw it too and said, ‘It’s a perfect sphere.’

‘What does the planet’s shape matter?’ asked Kroeger.

‘Such ideal geometry is virtually impossible in planetary formation,’ said Perturabo. ‘The push and pull of gravity from nearby stars and celestial phenomena stretches and compresses planets. Most are flattened ellipses, but this is perfectly spherical.’

‘What could have caused it?’ said Forrix.

‘I don’t know,’ said Perturabo. ‘Who truly understands the forces at work in the warp?’

‘There,’ said Karuchi Vohra, and a shimmering crust overlaid the smooth surface of Iydris, a hazed representation of soaring towers, grand palaces and magnificent temples. As the composite image gathered information from the Iron Blood’s many surveyors, the spread of structures eventually covered the entire world.

A tomb world, its entire surface given over to mourning and remembrance of the dead, perhaps?

No, that wasn’t right, but Perturabo couldn’t grasp the true nature of this world.

‘The Sepulchre of Isha’s Doom sits at the centre of Amon ny-shak Kaelis,’ said Vohra, pointing to a shimmering arrangement of geometric forms at what, on a Terran-standard world, would be the northern polar icecap. ‘It stands astride the entrance to the prison tomb of the Angel Exterminatus.’

‘How is it defended?’ asked Perturabo.

‘This maelstrom was said to be Asuryan’s best defence against anyone finding the resting place of the Angel Exterminatus,’ said Vohra. ‘Though some legends speak of an army of immortals who stand sentinel upon the citadel’s walls to watch over its weapons, but that is all I know.’

‘Immortals?’ said Kroeger. ‘Robots, maybe?’

‘Unlikely,’ said Forrix.

‘Then what?’

Perturabo ended their debate by jabbing a fist at the structure Karuchi Vohra had indicated.

‘This is where we will break in,’ he said. ‘What are the rest of these structures? Why raise a world’s worth of buildings if there’s no one to put in them?’

‘I do not know, my lord,’ said Karuchi Vohra.

Once again, Perturabo felt the lie uncoil from the eldar, but Fulgrim spoke before he could understand the heart of it. ‘What does it matter, brother? We will find out when we make planetfall. A little mystery is nothing to fear.’

Perturabo nodded to himself and folded his arms, feeling a chill seep into his bones at the sight of the dead planet before him. His entire body felt numb and his lungs burned with the effort of breathing.

He threw off the lethargy and said, ‘Falk, I want everything around that sepulchre levelled. Leave an exclusion zone of three kilometres from its farthest edge, but everything beyond that for a hundred more is to be bombed flat.’

‘What? No!’ cried Fulgrim.

‘This is my command,’ said Perturabo. ‘And I don’t land a single warrior into a potentially hostile environment without a preliminary bombardment.’

‘You might damage what’s below!’

Perturabo took note of Fulgrim’s phrasing and shook his head.

‘Trust me,’ he said, ‘If there’s one thing the Iron Warriors do better than anyone else, it’s launching pinpoint barrages from orbit.’

The IV Legion fleet assumed bombardment formation over Amon ny-shak Kaelis, their barrage cannons, mass drivers and bomb bays loaded with surface-smashing ordnance, short-burn incendiaries and electromagnetic pulse-bomblets. Those ships assigned fire sectors closest to the citadel were loaded with lower-yield munitions, while those tasked with levelling the outer regions prepped the largest warheads. Volley-firing frigates jostled with heavier capital ships as they prepared to rain explosive fury upon the world below.

The Emperor’s Children played no part in the bombardment preparations. Perturabo was unwilling to trust their fire discipline, and Fulgrim declined to bombard a world he had coveted for so long. Within an hour of the order’s issue, the last assigned ship in the Iron Warriors fleet had assumed geostationary orbit around Iydris with its weapon bays and cannons ready to lay waste to the surface.

The fire command came a second later, and the heavens lit up with the collimated fire of a Space Marine Legion as it unleashed a controlled instant of lethality. One burst was all it took, one searing instant of precisely calculated fire.

Flash-burning lances struck first, igniting the atmosphere to eliminate the frictional drag on the following ordnance. Kinetic mass driver munitions hit next, slamming into the surface of the planet like the hammers of gods. Shockwaves spread out in radial sector patterns, sending tectonic blasts along mathematically precise vectors. Conventional warheads followed, pounding the earth in stepped barrages, marching outwards in repeating waves.

Incendiaries razed the target zone flat, vitrifying the rock and burning away whatever organic material might remain on the surface. A cone of fire gouged the surface of Iydris, burning, pounding and flattening in the blink of an eye structures that had stood inviolate for tens of thousands of years.

A barren ring of pulverised earth encircled the citadel of Amon ny-shak Kaelis, leaving its walls, towers and temples an isolated island cut off from the rest of the planet’s structures by a billowing firestorm of planet-cracking force.

And in its wake came a blooming haze of iron and violet steel.

Flocks of Thunderhawks, Stormbirds, Warhawks and heavy planetary landers launched from crammed embarkation decks. Bulk tenders descended to low orbit and disgorged thousands of troop carriers, armour lifters and supply barques. Titanic, gravity-cushioned mass-landers moved with majestic slowness as two battle engines of Legio Mortis took to the field, and this was but the first wave of the invasion.

Another eight would follow before the martial power of two entire Space Marine Legions and their auxiliary forces had made planetfall.

But Iydris was fighting back.

Forrix knew it was nonsense to think like that, but that was how it felt.

Most worlds did not welcome the presence of the Iron Warriors, for the IV Legion was known to bring ruin and bloodshed in its wake. Not for its legionaries the cheering crowds and floral-lined triumphal marches enjoyed by the likes of Guilliman’s popinjays.

But this world seemed to be actively repelling them.

The blasted wasteland of ground zero was a glassy plain of powdered rubble and blackened fragments of some unknown material. What might once have been an area of awe-inspiring architecture from a bygone age of a fallen civilisation had been razed more thoroughly than any barbarian horde had ever left a city of Old Roma.

The landing zone was awash with thousands of armoured vehicles, supply camps, munition depots and fuel silos. Clouds of toxic fumes gathered overhead like looming thunderheads, from the armada of tracked fury ready to bear the Iron Warriors and Emperor’s Children to the Sepulchre of Isha’s Doom. Battalions of mobile artillery strained to be unleashed and hardened magazines of wall-shattering ordnance had already been built to service their insatiable hunger.

A great army awaited the order to attack, but its dropsite was yet to be declared secure.

Within minutes of the first Iron Warriors ship landing, Perturabo’s Legion had begun the task of building fortifications to shelter the invading force and protect their chain of supply from orbit. Towers and walls were raised in the time it took to unload a single cargo bay, modular construction patterns, natural affinity and centuries of practice making the task as natural as breathing.

The Emperor’s Children dropped in the wake of the Iron Warriors, their maddened carnival of lunatic mortals disgorging onto the surface of the planet in a panoply of shrieks, insanity and waving banners. Fulgrim’s warriors followed their devotees onto the surface, basking in the adulation and forming up with a rigour that had surprised Forrix.

Resplendent in their battle armour of gold and purple, iron and bronze, Fulgrim and Perturabo climbed to the peak of the first tower Forrix had built and took in the vista of the city-sized sepulchre they were to capture.

‘A city of the dead,’ Perturabo had remarked.

‘But one to recognise that there is beauty in death,’ Fulgrim had responded.

Forrix was forced to agree; the orbital augurs had failed utterly to capture the scale and drama of the place. Not even Fulgrim’s hyperbolic tale-telling in the Thaliakron had come close to the sheer immensity of the eldar tomb city.

With relentless inevitability, the Iron Warriors were fortifying the landing zone, but where the rock of Hydra Cordatus had welcomed the blades of their picks and augers like a lover, this world rejected them. It resisted their giant digging machines, it mocked their leviathan earth-movers and not a stone was laid that didn’t have to be reinforced beyond all expectations.

Three hours in-theatre and the initial contravallations were still unfinished.

Forrix was livid, loudly berating the Pneumachina, his underlings and his sapper crews, but there was little to be done. High, spike-topped walls were stretching around the vast acreage of the deployment zone, much slower than Forrix had ever known, but lengthening with every passing minute.

Forrix moved down the line of this newest segment, the heaving, belching, grinding engines of the Pneumachina like colossally industrious worker ants pasting together a hive for their queen from sheet metal, liquid permacrete, high-tensile rebars and ultra-dense hardcore. Walls like this could take a hit from a starship’s macro-cannon and remain standing. Blockhouses, barracks and strongpoints were worked into the fabric of the walls, and battalions of Selucid Thorakites were already occupying them.

Dust from the orbital bombardment hung in the air like granular mist, hazing the strange light in the sky. From orbit, the planet’s environment had appeared serene, but from the ground, it was anything but. A keening wail filled the air, like a plaintive cry at the threshold of hearing; some strange side effect of the bombardment or a lingering echo of some local phenomenon. Either way, it was a disquieting sound, part lament, part hostile curse. Strange colours swirled in the choked sky, a ceiling of pus yellow, spinning matter ejections of bruised purple and red, and vomited froths of bilious green.

All lit by the noctilucent glow from Amon ny-shak Kaelis.

The lambent emerald light seeped into the sky from beyond the wall, as though the stone of the distant sepulchre were irradiated. It oozed over the landscape, sluggish and lethargic, bathing the invasion forces in a poisonous green glow.

Forrix’s dislike for this place was only getting worse.

He watched scurrying riveter-slaves following in the wake of a towering, smoke-belching machine that swallowed debris and excreted pre-formed blocks of hardened stone, enjoying the repetitive rhythm of their work. The engine’s hydraulic jaws crushed gathered stone and its piston-driven hammers pounded the blocks into shape, ready for its rear-mounted lifter gear to haul into place. Forrix knelt to examine where the shaped stone met the ground, seeing a web of hair-fine cracks spreading from the sloped base. Already the walls needed strengthening and he shook his head in disbelief.

The Pneumachina engines had moved on, an implacable process of construction that was much slower than he demanded, but which was still unstoppable. Forrix reached a set of ironwork stairs bolted to the walls and climbed their scissoring height to the ramparts, emerging onto a covered walkway of overhanging kinetic hoardings, murder holes and grenade dumpers. Designed to secure a landing site or prevent an enemy force from relieving a besieged city, the walls were square-edged and hard-lined, the very antithesis of this world’s organic architecture.

All around the landing zone, the vast bomb-razed plain stretched to the horizon in all directions, an exclusion zone made secure by the orbital bombardment. Nothing moved on this flattened wasteland. Only glittering reflections and drifting banks of smoke broke the uniform emptiness.

Despite the bleakness of the landscape, Forrix could not escape the feeling of being watched, as though a host of unseen observers were studying him, assessing him and determining his worth. Forrix shook off the sensation and stalked the ramparts. Iron Warriors from the 134th Grand Battalion and the Thorakites manned the walls. The officers gave him nods of respect as he passed. Forrix crossed the rampart, staring at the distant city he and his fellow warriors were to put asunder.

It was a city of elegantly proportioned towers with fluted leaf-domes, sweeping walls that were gracefully defensible and arcing bridges of such slender dimensions that it must surely be impossible they could bear any weight. The city was alive with temples of gilded roofs, sepulchres that celebrated the lives of those interred beneath, and mausolea of such grand scale that only an emperor would be worthy to lie within.

The city was haloed on the far horizon by a disc of monstrous blackness, the terrifying black sun that lay at the heart of the Eye of Terror. It was an emerald city in the shadow of a nightmarish power that could devour it with a single inhalation.

Yet for all the city’s beauty, there was no mistaking its hollow emptiness.

Nothing lived here. Nothing had ever lived here, nor ever would.

The Stonewrought had said it best when he stepped from the belly of a Stormbird.

Placing one palm on the ground, Vull Bronn had shaken his head and said, ‘This world is dead, it has no soul. The rock will not stand.’

Overly poetic perhaps, but for once Forrix knew exactly what the Stonewrought meant.

Three kilometres farther along the wall, Barban Falk stared at the rising section of bastion before him, his breath coming in short, wheezing hikes. The same grinning skull-face he’d seen on the bridge of the Iron Blood was leering back at him from the cracks in the crumbling stonework of a toothed merlon that had fallen from the battlements.

‘No,’ he hissed. ‘I am not seeing this.’

Denial, a keening voice in his head seemed to laugh. How unoriginal…

Falk shook his head and tore his gaze from the phantom image, striding down the length of the construction and forcing his mind to concentrate on the details of his Grand Battalion’s work. Fresh sections of wall were being lifted in by enormous crane-engines under the supervision of his warriors and beaten into place by titanic siege robots with hammers the size of Land Raiders.

Falk felt an insistent tugging on the frayed edges of his mind – a wheedling, insistent pressure carried on the sighing cries of the wind that compelled him to pause and stare at the newest section of wall like a malfunctioning servitor. At first he saw nothing out of the ordinary, but then the arrangement of stress lines, runnels of permacrete and hissing rivets at the base of the wall seemed to cohere into that familiar deathly face, as though skilfully placed there by an artist who desired an audience of one. He blinked and the image was gone, but no sooner had he turned away than he saw it billowing in a dust cloud, shaped by an arc of the Pneumachina’s crane limbs or formed in a scattering of superfluous offcuts. Falk shut his eyes, letting the image of the grotesque skull fall from his mind, even as he heard it scratching at his thoughts, like an animal left out in the dark.

He released a shuddering breath, and forced himself to look back at the work as it progressed. The grinning, fleshless face met his gaze and this time there was no mistaking the voice in his head.

Barban Falk, it said. A name for he who will be nameless.

Kroeger hated this world like he had hated no other.

The shimmering green glow from the distant sepulchre tainted everything with a sickly illumination, fraying Kroeger’s already short temper. Since making planetfall, nothing had gone as planned. Machines had failed, stone had crumbled and metal had warped beyond usable tolerances.

He bit back an angry curse as yet another portion of the wall footings sank into the rock, leaving the split line flush with the surface. Dust billowed from the sunken blocks, necessitating yet another halt in the work as heavy lifter machines with bright carapaces and fluttering cog banners rolled in on wide tracks to haul them from the ground.

Gangs of robotic and cybernetic slaves dragged long bars of rust-coloured steel to add yet more reinforcement to the foundation trench.

‘Another delay this campaign can ill afford,’ said Harkor with a weary resignation Kroeger only half believed.

‘I know,’ he snapped in reply. ‘My first war action as triarch and I’m behind in every element of our projected advance. Might as well have myself buried in the foundations.’

Harkor held out a data-slate with crawling lines of progress reports.

‘Every other warsmith is encountering similar delays.’

‘I don’t care about them,’ said Kroeger. ‘All I care about is that I’m on schedule. The sooner this work is complete, the sooner we can attack that cursed sepulchre and get off this world.’

The growling roars of the construction engines cleared Kroeger’s thoughts as a cloud of filthy blue oilsmoke enveloped them. Cursing, he moved clear, hearing the grinding crack of splitting stone as the earth-moving leviathans fought to remove the subsided blocks from ground that now seemed to want to grip them tightly.

‘Some strong words with the Pneumachina might speed things up,’ suggested Harkor.

‘My thoughts exactly,’ said Kroeger, pushing through the silent ranks of servitors as a block was wrenched from the ground and broke apart in a cascade of crumbling fragments.

The servitors ignored him, and Kroeger saw a trio of black-robed magi arguing in crackling binary at the edge of a rubble-filled trench that was supposed to be heavy with foundation stones. Multiple holographic images of ground-penetrating auspex readings haloed one of the priests, and Kroeger felt his anger focus on this inhuman hybrid.

The magos waved multiple augmetic arms as he directed the work of whipped slave gangs with blurts of binaric nonsense. Before Kroeger even knew it, his sword was in his hand, his thumb pressing the activation stud.

One economical swing and the machine priest fell to the ground, hacked down from shoulder to groin. A squealing roar of machine pain erupted from his augmitters, which was swiftly silenced as the organic components of the priest collapsed in a clatter of metal and a wash of oily blood.

The remaining Pneumachina priests retreated from the sudden death of their leader, barking furious scraps of machine code. Kroeger put a bolt-round through the gleaming, half-flesh, half-iron skull of the nearest and brought the smoking barrel to bear on the last hooded priest.

The Pneumachina’s agent balked at Kroeger’s rage and loosed a burst of panicked binary.

Kroeger eased the hammer back on his pistol.

‘Gothic,’ he said. ‘Do you speak it?’

The priest nodded and Kroeger heard a series of wetly metallic clicks as whatever passed for vocal chords were rearranged beneath its hood.

‘I do, warsmith,’ said the priest. ‘Enhancement: as did my compatriots.’

‘I’m sure they did, but they’re both dead and now you’re in charge of this wall’s construction,’ said Kroeger. ‘So tell me, what’s the damn hold-up?’

‘You understand the difficulties we face?’ asked the priest.

‘I do,’ said Kroger. ‘And I don’t care, just get this bastard wall built.’

The priest pressed on, resigned to or uncaring of Kroeger’s volatile temper. ‘Clarification: then you must also be aware that this ground is not conforming to any known model of geological dynamics in the Martian records. Its measured strength is not matching up to the reality of our build parameters.’

‘Here’s some clarification for you,’ said Kroeger, pulling the trigger.

Harkor knelt beside the corpses and flipped back the hood of the last priest. Nothing was left of the man’s face, only a snake’s nest of cables twitching from the ragged stump of neck. Pumping squirts of black, bio-organic fluid spilled into the trench. The stink was all chemicals and spoiled meat.

‘Those were some strong words,’ said Harkor.

‘Get me some more Pneumachina priests,’ snapped Kroeger. ‘Ones that know how to build a damn foundation.’

Kroeger turned on his heel.

NINETEEN

Amon ny-shak Kaelis
Disharmony
Someone I Want to Kill

The assault began five hours later, despite the full circuit of fortifications still being incomplete. The landing zone was almost surrounded, but the encircling walls had yet to meet one another. Layered rings of minefields and acres of razorwire spread from the outer faces of the walls, making the approach next to impossible for anyone without detailed maps and temporary dormancy codes.

Leaving Toramino and five thousand Iron Warriors to oversee the completion of the works and establish battery positions for the guns of the Stor-bezashk, Perturabo climbed to the cupola of a converted Shadowsword, one with additional armour plating to all sides and extended command and control functions. To accommodate the Lord of Iron’s scale and his automaton bodyguards, the vehicle’s superstructure and engine had been radically overhauled by the Pneumachina. Its main weapons were enhanced, and no more effective a killing machine existed in the Legion’s vehicle pool.

Perturabo gave his transports no names, but the Iron Warriors knew it as Tormentor.

Normally he did not hold with the theatrics of riding into battle in a vehicle’s cupola, but as this army’s commander, sometimes a little theatre was not to be forgone.

Perturabo lifted Forgebreaker from his shoulders and held it high enough for all to see.

‘Take the iron within!’ he roared, sweeping the weapon down.

The Shadowsword’s engine growled with a thunderclap of combustion, and a belching, toxin-laden cloud billowed in its wake as Tormentor rumbled forwards, crushing the rocky ground beneath its three-hundred-tonne weight.

The engines of a thousand Rhinos roared as they moved off with a thrumming bass note that cracked the foundations of the walls around the landing zone. The very air shook with the reverberating sound, and a fog of exhaust smoke drifted over the planet’s surface. Alongside the Rhinos came entire squadrons of Land Raiders, Predators, Whirlwinds and the strange, agglomerated vehicles of the Pneumachina: claw-armed walkers, stalking tanks with underslung weapon pods, flame spheres, wrecking machines and others whose purpose was not so easily divined.

The two Battle Titans of Legio Mortis marched with the Iron Warriors, Reavers both, and engine killers of their former brothers. Mortis Vult and Malum Benedictio had fought through the viral hellstorm of Isstvan III and both bore newly crafted kill banners depicting those Legions that had once fought as their brothers.

The Iron Warriors had come in force and the Emperor’s Children no less so.

Scouting III Legion jetbikes zipped through the air above and in front of Perturabo’s war ensemble, pink-skinned darts that probed the ground before the army’s advance. Perturabo’s lip curled in distaste at Fulgrim’s riotous assembly of armour and infantry, a pageant of armoured vehicles at play. Like Perturabo, Fulgrim rode at the head of his army, a warrior god in impossibly bright armour. His brother might have ceded control of this mission to him, but Fulgrim was making sure he was still its figurehead. With his golden sword held out before him like a knightly lance, an outside observer could be forgiven for mistaking Fulgrim for the leader of this host.

Perturabo’s gaze was drawn to the lunatic mortals following Fulgrim’s warriors. The carnivalia of madness that had attended the Emperor’s Children’s arrival on Hydra Cordatus was in full force. Skirling music drifted from its heaving mass and hundreds of vividly patterned banners fluttered and snapped in the riptide thermals of engine heat.

Throughout the history of war, armies had been attended by all manner of hangers-on: suppliers, smiths, butchers, whores, ostlers, families, bakers, launderers, surgeons, tailors and a hundred more professions, but they were traditionally left in the rear when battle was joined.

Fulgrim, it seemed, intended to bring his army’s followers to the heart of the battle.

Tormentor travelled the distance between the landing zone and the isolated sepulchre quickly and implacably, grinding the rubble of pulverised tombs beneath its tracks as it approached what crumbling ruins the orbital barrage had left standing. The shell-cratered emptiness gave way to occasional stumps of walls, lone facades and brittle exoskeletons of structures that looked more like pollarded trees than anything built from component materials.

Thermal-tugged dust clouds slipped through the shattered buildings and the keening cries that drifted on the air were amplified by the ruins. The advance slowed as the driver picked a path through the outer elements of the sprawling citadel. Lower-yield munitions had been employed closer to the citadel, and areas of this outer region of impact had been left more or less unscathed. Tormentor smashed it all aside, the vehicle’s heavy prow bludgeoning an unwavering path towards the point where orbital surveyor feeds had identified a number of entrances in the citadel’s wall.

Perturabo kept a constant data feed open between his visor’s display and the super-heavy tank’s auspex suite. Low-grade interference was fogging much of the returns, but what he was seeing did not worry him unduly. The ruins were empty of life – no hidden graviton traps, no sniping rocket teams and no buried minefields to blow a track.

For all intents and purposes, the route into the citadel of Amon ny-shak Kaelis was undefended and their route unopposed. An axiom of war that Corax was fond of repeating was that it wasn’t the enemy you saw that killed you, it was the enemy you didn’t see, and Perturabo couldn’t quite believe that a world of such obvious importance to the eldar had been so comprehensively abandoned. Snares and delusions to deter the unwary were all very well, but were no substitute for warriors with guns who knew how to use them.

Even the impenetrable Cavea Ferrum was typically surrounded by thousands of legionaries.

Perturabo opened a helm pict-link to Fulgrim, and a shimmering holographic representation of his brother appeared floating in the air before him, suspended above the armoured glacis of the Shadowsword.

‘Exhilarating, is it not?’ laughed Fulgrim, his dark eyes wide with anticipation and his moon-pale hair pixelated behind him.

‘I don’t like it,’ said Perturabo. ‘It’s too easy.’

Fulgrim looked irritated at having his ebullience punctured. ‘We are on the verge of achieving what we set out to do, brother. Why must you spoil this moment for me?’

‘Because when the tactical situation’s too good to be true, it’s usually a sign you’re about to get hit harder than you ever thought possible.’

Fulgrim shook his head and said, ‘Be maudlin if you must, brother. I will enjoy this moment of sweet success.’

‘This place is empty, its walls undefended,’ said Perturabo, twisting to look around as the density of structures became greater. ‘You must have known that.’

‘I suspected it might be the case,’ admitted Fulgrim.

‘Then why did we not simply launch our assault straight into the heart of the citadel on the wings of Stormbirds and drop pods?’ growled Perturabo, angry at this latest revelation.

‘Because it might not have been the case,’ said Fulgrim. ‘Besides, I didn’t want to deny you the chance to build some of your grand fortresses. To plant the flag, so to speak.’

‘You didn’t need me here,’ said Perturabo. ‘Nor my Legion.’

‘On the contrary, I’d say it’s always better to have a siege master nearby and not need him, than to need him and not have him.’

Fulgrim smiled, but there was predatory malice to it. ‘Trust me, Perturabo, I cannot do this without you. I will need you at my side before this is done, brother dearest.’

Fulgrim’s words sent a dark chill down Perturabo’s spine, but everything Fulgrim said these days was loaded with hidden meaning and secret poisons. Nothing his brother said could be taken at face value, but whatever barb these words contained would need to wait.

The buildings Tormentor passed were those on the very edge of the bombardment’s outer area of effect, and had retained much of their former character. White-gold towers of a strange lucite material soared overhead, reflecting the spectral illumination that emanated from the city itself. Perhaps these had once been an inner precinct of the citadel, a grand approach to its magnificence. Now they were its outer edges, tombs and buildings of unknown purpose that possessed a grace and harmony Perturabo found beguiling.

Even in his most unfettered flourishes of design, when he had relaxed his obsession with straight lines, he had never known such fluid grace in his architecture. A sudden guilt touched Perturabo at this wanton destruction, and the image of burning Olympian towns and cities, the burned-meat smell of the world-pyres, and the ashen taste of loss returned to him with a powerful jolt.

‘Brother?’ said the holographic Fulgrim.

Perturabo shook off the disorientating memory as the ground opened up into a wide circuit passing around the outer walls of the citadel. Soaring hundreds of metres into the air, the citadel’s walls were smooth and unblemished, like the face of a beloved gem polished by a skilled gemsmith.

It was from these walls and the structures within that the greenish glow emanated, a soft radiance that somehow managed to illuminate an impossible world. Wondrously shaped towers rose from the battle-ments, looking more like organic growths of coral than anything formed by the craft of an artificer. A multitude of wide gateways led within, tall and leaf-shaped, their outer edges carved with alien letterforms. It seemed ludicrous to build such high walls only to pierce them with so many entrances.

‘There aren’t even any gates,’ he said, aiming Tormentor towards the nearest opening.

‘You sound disappointed,’ replied Fulgrim.

‘Not disappointed,’ answered Perturabo, watching the smooth battlements for any sign of a mythical army of immortals appearing above him. ‘Just suspicious.’

Tormentor passed beneath the archway and Perturabo felt a shiver of scrutiny, like the tingling sensation of a medical auspex or a biometric analyser as it penetrated flesh and bone. The feeling of being watched that he had experienced since landing increased, as though a hidden, glacially slow sentience at the heart of this world had only now become aware of their intrusion. Though tactical prudence and natural inclination urged Perturabo to keep pushing deeper into the citadel, he brought Tormentor to a halt three hundred metres inside the wall.

He climbed down from the high cupola, dropping to the ground in front of his growling Shadowsword, letting the funereal character of the interior wash over him. The Iron Circle disembarked from widened crew doors on the super-heavy tank’s side, forming a shieldwall around him.

Perturabo ignored them and craned his neck to examine the coffered panels on the upper pediments of the nearby sepulchres. Each was filled with emerald-lit murals of weeping maidens and hooded reapers. Vibrant frescoes and mosaics adorned the lower reaches of every facade, depicting the dead in the passage of their life; arms aloft in unbounded joy before being plunged into all-consuming despair in an endlessly repeating cycle.

Perturabo saw no two alike, and marvelled to see such love and care lavished upon those who would never know of it. Thousands of glittering oval gemstones of ocean green, sky blue and blood-drop red were inset on every mural: some as the necklaces and brooches of the immortalised dead, some as allegorical representations of hearts and souls.

The spaces between the mourn-towers, mausolea and sepulchres were wide, more akin to open plazas dividing grand civic structures than streets, making the city feel open and airy, like a wide park filled with sculptural architecture. Yet there was an oppressiveness that made Perturabo feel as though the buildings were pressing inwards like the crushing walls of a compactor.

The sense of being watched was stronger than ever.

The Iron Circle parted to allow the Trident through as Perturabo’s attention turned to the slender-limbed statues of bulbous-headed constructs on plinths that lined the spaces between each building. Taller than a Contemptor Dreadnought, but without the obvious bulk and power of such war machines, they were exquisite carvings, fashioned from an opaque crystal. Wing-like spines flared from their shoulders, and winking gemstones glittered deep in the centre of their elongated helm-skulls. Thousands of these statues lined the avenues and processionals of the city, silent observers to this violation of its inner precincts.

‘The army of immortals?’ wondered Forrix, following Perturabo’s gaze.

‘If so, then they are a poor choice of guardian for this place.’

Perturabo once again felt that cyclopean presence within the citadel, like a colossus that only now took notice of the ants swarming at its feet.

‘My lord,’ said Barban Falk. ‘Should we press on?’

‘No,’ said Perturabo. ‘We dig in.’

The Iron Warriors complement of Rhinos divided into three sections. The first formed a laagered bridgehead within the citadel, while the second created a cordon around the ingress points. Each of the IV Legion’s Rhinos was a specially converted Castellan variant, a design of Perturabo’s, with unfolding armour plates and impact bracing that turned them into miniature bunkers. The modular construction allowed the Rhinos to be linked together in a chain, forming a makeshift fortified line when materials for more permanent emplacements were unavailable or a defence had to be fashioned quickly.

Four hundred Rhinos assumed a perfect formation outside the walls in a layered barbican protecting the Legions’ line of retreat, while inside, an identical number of vehicles mirrored them. With the perforated citadel walls dividing them, the Rhinos became a fortified bunker complex from which to launch operations within the citadel. Another three thousand Iron Warriors and Emperor’s Children would hold this smaller fortification.

Perturabo broke the final section down still further into three smaller forces, giving command of each to one of his triarchs. Kroeger would take the left thrust, Falk the right, while he and Forrix advanced along the centre. Each blade of the Trident’s advance was comprised of around three thousand Iron Warriors, with thirty Rhinos, ten Predator tanks, four Land Raiders and assorted mobile artillery support. Warsmith Berossus led the Legion’s thuggish Dreadnoughts through the wall and attached himself to the centre, spreading his war machines throughout each blade of the Trident. Both Titans of the Legio Mortis marched straight up the middle, a pair of towering war gods walking in escort of the primarch himself. The colossal battle engines loosed braying war shouts that echoed from the buildings and shook their very foundations. Mortis came not in the shadows, not in ambush, but loudly and with malice in their hearts. The enemy would know they were coming, and that fear would only grow with each titanic footfall that brought the war engines closer.

Each force was a concentration of martial power that could bring a world to heel by itself, its fighting strength far in excess of what would be required to capture this place. Perturabo was taking no chances; if events unfolded as he suspected, he wanted overwhelming power ready to respond in an instant.

Fulgrim’s host broke apart into individual warbands, ranging in size from around a hundred warriors to groups of nearly a thousand. Each of these autonomous groups appeared to be led by a captain, though such was the bizarre ornamentation and embellishment on each warrior’s armour, it was often impossible to discern specific rankings. Though far from standard Legion doctrine, the III Legion’s warriors at least retained a measure of their former adherence to a chain of command as they spread out and attached themselves to one of the three prongs of the Trident. Lastly came a long convoy of cargo-20s, sixty heavily laden and high-sided container haulers with their bellies riding close to the ground. Normally used to ferry the vast quantities of ammunition required by mobile artillery regiments, they were guarded by warriors in Terminator armour and a host of Dreadnoughts.

‘What are you planning, brother?’ wondered Perturabo, keeping his voice low.

Fulgrim looked over and gave Perturabo an expansive bow, his cloak flaring out behind him like the golden wings of the mythical beast to which he had always likened himself. Karuchi Vohra stood in Fulgrim’s shadow, attended by two of his brother’s Phoenix Guard. The eldar’s face was gloating, but pinched tight with wary hostility, as though the citadel’s interior simultaneously entranced and terrified him.

Perturabo decided that when they were done with this place he would kill the alien.

‘Give the word, brother,’ said Fulgrim, the feral smile and indulgent tone making it sound as though this was a gesture of magnanimity on his part.

Perturabo nodded and a howling cheer erupted from the throats of the Emperor’s Children as hundreds of vehicle engines roared to life.

His triarchs turned away to rejoin their warriors, but Perturabo stopped them.

‘Be watchful,’ he said, stealing a sidelong glance at the Emperor’s Children. ‘For anything.’

Forrix nodded in understanding. ‘Iron within,’ he said.

‘Iron without,’ answered Perturabo, and leaving the fortified bridgehead behind, he led the Iron Warriors and Emperor’s Children into the heart of Amon ny-shak Kaelis.

Lucius jogged alongside the growling Rhinos as they prowled through the plaza-streets of the citadel, irritated there was no sign of any enemy. The shimmering green light of the city illuminated well enough, but there was no life to it. One curious fact he noticed was that it reflected from nothing, no matter how polished and clear it might be. The blade of his sword showed not the slightest green tint in the gleaming silver.

Warriors of the III Legion moved in a rabble, each warband finding its own pace; some dawdling, some pushing ahead of the vehicles. Jetbikes shot overhead, weaving complex patterns through the air and sometimes flashing so close he could have beheaded the pilot had he so wished.

The dour Iron Warriors formed the centre of the advance, their combined force ridiculously overpowered for such a ludicrously easy task. This element of the assault was led by Barban Falk, one of Perturabo’s inner circle, and Lucius passed a few idle moments working out the man’s balance, reach and strength.

In case this fragile alliance should crack, he thought with delicious amusement.

Falk was a giant, even allowing for the layered bulk of Cataphractii plate, who seemed to be looking for something, judging by the way his head was darting around from place to place. Lucius saw hesitancy in the warrior, a wariness that was keeping him from matching the pace of the other two thrusts.

Lucius wondered what Falk was seeing, filing this latest fragment of information away. Lucius knew his blade would struggle to penetrate Falk’s armour, but even with that advantage the Iron Warrior wouldn’t be fast enough to get his tearing gauntlets upon Lucius. The swordsman flexed his fingers over the whip he’d taken from dead Kalimos. The textured grip was fashioned from the outer skin of a deep sea cephalopod, and micro-hooks extruded from every square millimetre of its surface, making it wondrously intense to crack.

Lucius tore his thoughts from the murder of Barban Falk to the statues lining the wide streets. Letting the armoured column slowly rumble past him, Lucius jogged over to a nearby sepulchre, drinking in the bright colours and vibrant texture of the mosaics rendered on its surface.

The figures were, for the most part, a mix of artists, sculptors, singers, acrobats and other creative types, but what seemed like a disproportionate amount were also warriors. Some made war with long pikes that spat fire, others wore screaming masks, while still others fought with twin blades. Lucius liked the grace and poise of these warriors and followed the movements of the sword-wielding eldar, adopting their poses and fighting stances as he leapt and danced, with his blade spinning a web of silver steel around his body.

Lucius grunted, moving faster and faster, each twist of his body and flickering blow a blur of pinkish-purple plate and glistening blade edge.

He spun around the statues lining the road, revelling in the rapturous glances he was receiving from his Legion brothers and those of grudging admiration from the Iron Warriors. Lucius slalomed down the length of the mausoleum, weaving a path between the crystalline statues. As he approached the end of the structure, he leapt into the air and cracked the barbed whip. The toothed length wrapped around the neck of the statue at the corner of the building and sliced cleanly through its glittering neck.

As the head fell, Lucius’s sword licked out and cut through its centre. The two halves fell to the ground and exploded into gleaming shards of glass. He dropped lightly from his spinning decapitation, blade angled up behind his body and whip twitching on the ground.

Lonomia Ruen detached himself from the advance, and Lucius cursed. Since the death of Bastarnae Abranxe, Ruen had transferred his cultish adoration to Lucius. For a while it had been an interesting diversion to have a slavish devotee, but Lucius was already tiring of the man’s desperate need.

‘Your body is a wonder,’ said Ruen.

Sycophancy was always welcome, but Lucius preferred his flunkies to have sense enough to keep their distance. Ruen remained blissfully unaware of his status as a supreme irritant, and had become Lucius’s newly acquired shadow.

‘Learning anything new?’ asked Ruen.

‘Only that eldar fighting styles don’t suit me,’ Lucius said, coiling the whip with a twist of the wrist and hooking it on his belt.

‘Looked good from where I was standing,’ pointed out Ruen.

‘Because you barely know one end of a sword from the other,’ snapped Lucius, sheathing his sword. ‘Did Abranxe teach you nothing of their use?’

Ruen’s posture stiffened, and Lucius grinned, wondering if he would go for one of his envenomed blades.

‘Abranxe was a master swordsman, but he was no instructor,’ allowed Ruen, his survival instinct restraining his sense of hurt outrage. ‘Tell me then, why is the eldar way of the blade no use to you?’

‘The postures are intended for the lightweight physiques of the eldar and their skinny bodies,’ said Lucius, in a rare moment of indulgence. ‘It’s no use to a Space Marine. Fast as we are, we’ll never be as fast as them.’

‘You could be. Some day.’

‘Don’t be foolish, Ruen,’ said Lucius, though the sincerity of the flattery touched him despite his best efforts to remain aloof.

A warrior detached himself from the advancing column of armoured vehicles and artillery moving through the city streets, a bulky, asymmetrical warrior with a long, pole-armed axe weapon that boomed and skirled with shrieking harmonics. Marius Vairosean came with a group of similarly armed warriors, and Lucius felt his teeth rattling in his skull at the approach of the Kakophoni. Even with the majority of their sonic cannons sheathed, each warrior acted as a conduit for constant, nerve-jangling wails.

Vairosean’s bare head was a mass of fresh surgical scars where resonating amplification devices had been worked into the reshaped bone of his skull. His eyes were maddened black orbs submerged in pallid, doughy flesh, the skin flaking and veined with ruptured blood vessels.

‘Keep moving,’ said the master of the Kakophoni, and the pitch of his words sent a spasm of pain through Lucius. Vairosean’s stretched mouth formed words with difficulty, and expanding flesh sacs at his neck moved in time with his breathing. Every one of the Kakophoni were implanted with organic echo chambers in their necks and chests to enhance the nerve-paralysing effect of their sonic bellows.

‘Just admiring the architecture,’ said Lucius, bending to lift the smooth ruby stone lying amid the shattered remains of the head he had cut from the statue. It felt warm in his hand, and he laughed as he sensed panic emanating from within, as though the stone were afraid.

The sonic cannon on Vairosean’s back gave a barking howl, and the weapons of his men squealed and shrieked in syncopation. Lucius gave the stone a squeeze, grinning as its panic crystallised into terror.

‘What is that?’ demanded Vairosean, holding out his hand.

Lucius shrugged and placed the stone in Vairosean’s upturned palm.

The stone vibrated as though dissonant harmonics were passing through it, dancing on Variosean’s hand like a polarity-shifting magnet. With a sharp crack, the stone split in two and Lucius gasped as he felt a sudden jolt of energy slam into his body, as if a shot of the most incredible battle stimm had just been dumped into his system. He knew Vairosean felt it too, his face twisted in rapt bliss. The weapons of the Kakophoni blared with deafening power and half a dozen nearby statues burst apart as though attacked by invisible sledgehammers.

Reduced to powdered shards no larger than a fingernail, each fragmented statue bore a similar gemstone at its heart, and the shrieking Kakophoni wasted no time in falling upon them. They fought one another for the heart stones, clawing and barging one another as they snatched up the warmly glowing gems. No sooner had each stone been grasped than it exploded and sent billowing surges of blood-boiling ecstasy through every warrior close enough to feel it. Their weapons brayed and honked and let out shrieking howls of atavistic pleasure, filling the streets with atonal echoes that bounced from tomb to crypt like bloodhounds in search of prey.

Lucius backed away from Vairosean as the warrior unslung his poleaxe, its long haft enveloped in flickering blue light and its body thrumming with power. Vairosean slammed his hand down upon it, and a blazing whipcrack of lightning-wreathed noise pounded the air with ferocious disharmony. The facade of the tomb split open and a bomb-blast shockwave punched a ten-metre-wide crater in the road.

Awareness of the gemstones’ bounty spread through the Emperor’s Children like an infection. And what had begun as a ragged but relentless advance devolved into a raging free-for-all as every statue within reach was torn down and smashed apart in an orgy of destruction.

Barban Falk’s Iron Warriors pressed on, leaving the Emperor’s Children behind.

Nykona Sharrowkyn watched the riot spread to encompass the entire Emperor’s Children component of the traitor advance on this axis. Statues were smashed apart and the stones within them crushed underfoot, swallowed whole or placed within freshly cut, self-inflicted wounds. The screams were orgiastic, their actions inexplicable.

‘What new lunacy is this?’ wondered Sabik Wayland, shaking his head in disbelief.

‘Ever since Isstvan and the attack on the Sisypheum I’ve given up trying to rationalise the motivations of traitors,’ answered Sharrowkyn.

‘What happened to “know your enemy”?’

‘I’m coming to understand that’s not always sound advice,’ said Sharrowkyn slowly. ‘To know the Emperor’s Children would be to invite a terrible madness into your soul.’

‘You’ll get no argument from me on that,’ agreed Wayland as Sharrowkyn leaned out over the parapet of the strangely glowing sepulchre upon which they perched. Wayland had climbed hand over hand to reach this place, where Sharrowkyn had used his heavily modified jump pack. Its cross-section was less than half that of an Assault Marine’s standard equipment, and its emissions were almost invisible unless you were looking right at it.

Two hundred metres below them, the Emperor’s Children clawed and tore at each other as they fought for possession of the warmly glowing stones within each of the crystal statues. Sharrowkyn had no idea what inherent quality they possessed that had triggered such destructive behaviour, but even he felt the terrible sadness that accompanied each one’s destruction.

The Iron Warriors ignored the antics of their brethren, advancing deeper into the city. Sharrowkyn didn’t blame them. Better to have no allies than ones you couldn’t count on.

At least Sharrowkyn could count on the Iron Hands. He had fought beside a great many of his brother legionaries, but he held none in such esteem as the fatherless sons of Ferrus. A hundred and forty-six warriors of the X Legion were concealed in the shadows around the citadel’s central mausoleum-temple, the obvious focus of the traitors. Their deployment, advance and formation only confirmed that they were heading straight for the battered warriors of Ulrach Branthan.

Sharrowkyn had known where the Iron Warriors would make their ingress, and brought the Iron Hands in on the opposite trajectory once the dust had settled from the bombardment. Cadmus Tyro led the incursion force, with the veterans of Vermanus Cybus spread through the Iron Hands like structural pins in a weakened facade. Cybus had more or less recovered from his encounter with Perturabo. The crushed mechanised portions of his anatomy had been replaced with fresh augmetics cannibalised from the Sisypheum and those organic parts that couldn’t be fully restored were coated with synth-skin and implanted plasteks.

Yet more of his humanity sacrificed in the fight against the Warmaster.

The Sisypheum remained in low orbit; as close as the heavily damaged ship dared. Her encounter with the Andronius had left her broken and torn, but like the Legion she served, the Sisypheum would endure. She was pulled in tight to the planet, skimming the zones of interference between atmospheric layers to avoid detection. She was close, but still far too distant if they were detected. Only Frater Thamatica and Atesh Tarsa remained aboard, one as a punishment, the other as a guardian. The Stormbirds and Thunderhawks that had brought them to the surface sat atop sepulchres deeper into the city, clustered on rooftops like raptors waiting patiently in their eyries.

It was beyond foolish to be here.

Yes, Raven Guard squads were frequently outnumbered when they operated behind enemy lines, but this was ridiculous. Tens of thousands of Iron Warriors and Emperor’s Children were drawing near a group of warriors who couldn’t hope to fight them off. Odds of a thousand to one and beyond were the stuff of legend, but most such battles were precisely that. Legend. All very well to toast such ancient victories until you had to face those odds yourself.

Sharrowkyn’s vox crackled and the brusque tones of Vermanus Cybus filled his helmet.

‘What do you see?’ asked the commander of the X Legion’s Morlocks.

‘One column of Emperor’s Children is slowing down, but the Iron Warriors are pressing on,’ he said. ‘Multiple company strengths of armour, minimum of fifteen thousand warriors and supporting artillery. And two Reaver battle engines.’

To Cybus’s credit, the vast array of enemy power advancing on his position didn’t appear to faze him.

‘How long until they reach the sepulchre?’ he demanded.

‘No more than ten minutes.’

‘Right, we’ll be waiting,’ said Cybus. ‘Get back here now.’

The vox spat static and went silent.

Wayland had heard the exchange and felt Sharrowkyn’s aversion to Cybus. ‘A hard man to like, but a good one to follow.’

Sharrowkyn shook his head. ‘He’s forgotten that he is a leader of men. He takes your Legion’s reverence for iron and makes a virtue of flesh-hate.’

‘You misunderstand us,’ said Wayland. ‘My brothers and I, we do not hate flesh, we just know that it cannot be relied upon like iron.’

‘Too subtle a distinction for me,’ said Sharrowkyn.

‘I highly doubt that.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Sharrowkyn. ‘You know as well as I that warriors need to feel they’re following a being of flesh and blood, someone who understands and shares the risks they’re being asked to take.’

‘Deliverance?’

Sharrowkyn nodded. ‘The lessons learned during the uprising are still fresh, and any Raven Guard commander who forgets them will soon find he has no army left to lead.’

‘Perhaps you are right, but this is not the time to speak of it,’ said Wayland. ‘They are on the move again.’

Sharrowkyn followed Wayland’s gaze and saw that his comrade was right. Whatever madness had seized the Emperor’s Children had abated, and a measure of order had been restored. Among the traitors, Sharrowkyn recognised a whip-wielding warrior, the consummate swordsman he had faced aboard the Sisypheum.

He felt an unseemly thrill of recognition, reliving their duel on the embarkation deck in a heartbeat. Sharrowkyn had never faced an opponent like him and he could not have predicted the outcome had their dance of blades not been interrupted.

‘What is it?’ asked Wayland.

‘A familiar face,’ said Sharrowkyn. ‘Someone I want to kill.’

TWENTY

Isha’s Doom
This World is Alive
I Know Labyrinths

Kroeger’s column of rumbling vehicles, marching infantry and mobile artillery – with their barrels raised to the heavens – reached the heart of the citadel first. Moving unopposed, there was little need for caution, for Kroeger felt emptiness like a physical absence in his gut. Only by an exercise of his will was he able to quell the urge to charge at speed for their objective.

The advance through the citadel had grated at his nerves. The rasping, unfocused hostility he felt from every lambent green wall was like a weapon aimed at his head. His body was flooded with combat stimms and he flexed his fingers on the grip of his chainsword. He wanted to kill something, anything, just to feel the release of the tension that had been building in him ever since they had landed on this world.

The column spread out as it emerged from the wide plaza-street, moving smoothly into a staggered line. Despite his avowed distrust of Harkor, the warriors of his former Grand Battalion were well trained and highly disciplined.

And if there was one place capable of sealing in the remains of a doomed god, the building at the heart of Amon ny-shak Kaelis was it. The Sepulchre of Isha’s Doom was a monumental palace, sprawling and richly ornamented with bulbous mourn-towers and sweeping, ivory-roofed domes. Its facades were awash with curling arches and lofty processionals that were at once airy and crafted as if spun from moonbeams, and yet possessed of a strength that belied their gossamer fragility. The entire structure was like a great sculpture of ice and glass, like a natural accretion of organic crystal that had grown in some dark cave and which, once exposed to the light, had furiously accelerated its growth in new and unexpected ways. It was a wholly natural-looking formation, but the subtlety of its precise ratios was impossible to miss; organic and artificial at the same time.

The enormous structure was all contradiction – fortified and open, geometric and yet seemingly unfettered by the constraints of an architect. Thousands of the same crystalline statues that lined every roadway stood immobile in glittering alcoves and atop ranked plinths along the curving walkways that led up to a tall opening in its frontage, a narrow portal flanked by two enormous replicas of the smaller sentinels. They were easily the equal in size – if not stature – of the Mortis engines; Kroeger had seen similar war machines wreak havoc on the battlefield.

But these representations were unmoving and glassy, fragile and easily broken.

The undersea light that permeated the entire citadel was strongest here, the walls of the Sepulchre of Isha’s Doom radiant with their own inner illumination. The smooth stone of the ground was veined with that same glow, capillaries of energy and a network of living light. Kroeger’s footfalls left lightless bruises on the ground and he felt as though he were walking on the surface of some planet-wide neural network.

A Rhino forested with vox-aerials ground to a halt next to him, black worms of unlight spreading from the pressing weight of its bulk. Kroeger felt Harkor’s presence before his lieutenant spoke.

‘Something you should hear,’ said Harkor, a vox headset pressed to his ear.

‘What is it?’ snapped Kroeger; angry, but unable to say why.

Harkor held out the headset and said, ‘Listen.’

Kroeger removed his helmet and climbed onto the running board of the vehicle. He snatched the headset and mashed it to the side of his head. He heard nothing beyond a mournful howl of static, rising and falling like a desert wind at night.

‘What am I supposed to be hearing?’ he asked.

‘Keep listening,’ urged Harkor.

Kroeger kept the headset pressed to the side of his face as the lead elements of Perturabo’s column emerged from the wide streets a kilometre and a half to the east. Streaming honour banners were just visible over the roofs of the intervening structures, and the honking bellows of the two Titans echoed dully through the open plaza. Kroeger’s gaze strayed farther east, but there was no sign of Falk’s column yet.

‘I’m not hearing anything apart from static,’ he said.

‘Listen harder.’

Kroeger glared at Harkor, wondering how much trouble it would cause were he to kill the former warsmith right now. He dismissed the idea as he heard snatches of what sounded like Imperial Gothic mired in the static. Nothing certain and nothing he could fully understand, but there was something there.

‘What is it?’

‘Encrypted vox traffic,’ said Harkor. ‘Tenth Legion comms.’

Harkor watched as Kroeger’s commandeered Rhino raced off to rejoin Perturabo’s blade of the trident thrust at the citadel’s vitals. He found it impossible to keep the sneer from his lips at the thought that he had been displaced from command by a common thug like Kroeger. The man had no nobility to him and possessed little in the way of culture. Harkor had done his research and knew that Kroeger had no blood worth a damn in his lineage. He was peasant-born, a ragamuffin child with a fortuitous confluence of genes and a barely acceptable level of genetic variance that only just kept him from being rejected by the Legion’s fleshsmiths.

To have such a low-born fool in command of a Grand Battalion was an insult to the honour of the Legion. The thought made him shiver in disgust, and he keyed the vox to the previously agreed-upon frequency, one at the very edge of usability.

‘You were right,’ he said, not identifying himself and knowing that only one person would be listening on the other end. ‘His anger is growing beyond his control.’

A swoop and sway of static followed, with clicks and burps of encryption.

‘You told him of the Tenth Legion vox traffic?’ said a voice heavy with distortion.

‘I did,’ said Harkor. ‘And it was all he could do not to charge the sepulchre all by himself with his sword waving.’

‘He is low-born,’ said the voice. ‘You can expect little else from those not of noble lineage.’

‘It galls me that Perturabo cannot see it.’

‘The Lord of Iron is wise in many things, but he was wrong to remove you from leadership,’ said the voice. ‘Having mongrels like Kroeger in command is the thin end of the wedge. It is indicative of a slide into mediocrity that will lead to polluted bloodlines being raised to the fighting ranks.’

‘Over my dead body,’ spat Harkor.

‘We are the noble blood of Olympia,’ said the voice. ‘We have that uniting factor, and blood will prove true in the end.’

‘But we can hasten that end, yes?’

‘Indeed we can,’ said the voice. ‘And not just for Kroeger. Forrix can trace his blood to one of the Twelve, but he will never support your reinstatement.’

‘Then he has to die too,’ said Harkor.

‘I am master of the Stor-bezashk,’ said Toramino. ‘I can make that happen.’

Perturabo didn’t need the flickering data streams cascading down the side of his visor display to know that they had reached their destination. The Sepulchre of Isha’s Doom was an edifice like no other he had seen or imagined. The proportions were effortlessly harmonious, its structural elements innately perfect in a way that no amount of training or study could replicate. There could be no other temple raised that would do justice to the final resting place of a god.

Except there likely was no god, he reminded himself.

‘Takes your breath away, doesn’t it?’ said Fulgrim, approaching with his Phoenix Guard and the cringing form of Karuchi Vohra. ‘Beyond anything you or I might design and commit to the earth.’

Perturabo bristled at the thinly veiled insult, and only bit back a bitter response because he knew Fulgrim was correct. Just looking at the spun sugar of its web-like flying buttresses and coiling walkways, he knew he could never have designed anything like it. Yet that did not lessen the sting of Fulgrim’s words or the apparent pleasure his brother took in voicing them.

‘No, perhaps not,’ he agreed. ‘But it’s what’s within that interests me more.’

‘Absolutely,’ agreed Fulgrim, staring with undisguised hunger at the wondrous tomb-palace. ‘It gladdens my soul to finally see the object of our quest.’

Perturabo looked past his brother to Karuchi Vohra. The eldar guide seemed even more apprehensive now that they had finally reached their goal, as though just being here was making him ill. He had the sickly pallor of withdrawal and body-wide shivers.

‘Your guide doesn’t appear to think so,’ he said. ‘Why is that, Vohra?’

The eldar swallowed heavily and looked up at Perturabo through eyes the colour of bloodstained milk. ‘Would you be happy to visit a mass grave? Does being in the presence of the dead make you smile?’

Vohra’s tone was insubordinate, verging on hostile, and Perturabo thought of killing the eldar right now.

‘This is no grave,’ he said. ‘This is a city built to the memory of the dead, nothing more.’

‘Be kind to the creature,’ said Fulgrim, though even he was openly sceptical of the eldar’s explanation. ‘We are here and that is in no small measure down to my allowing him to live.’

‘So we’re here, now what?’ asked Perturabo.

‘Isn’t it obvious?’ said Fulgrim. ‘We go in.’

To a warrior raised on a volcanic world of molten rivers and sulphurous skies, cold was normally something Atesh Tarsa felt keenly, but he no longer felt the chill of the apothecarion. Though he had stripped down to his thin bodyglove to avoid any possible secondary heating of Ulrach Branthan’s casket from the power plant of his warplate, the discomfort of the low temperatures was more than offset by the stasis-sealed mystery before him.

Frater Thamatica had run diagnostic checks on all the machines keeping Branthan alive and had found no flaws, no unexpected quirks in their construction and nothing that could adequately explain how a bolter wound had miraculously vanished from a warrior kept entirely in a time out of time.

Miraculous…

A word so casually deployed, but one that silences inquisition. Calling something a miracle denied enquiry by attributing an ineffability to its occurrence. The credo of the apothecarion was that there were no such things as miracles, only events. Only when the explanation of an event was more incredible than the event itself could such a thing be counted as miraculous.

Right now, Tarsa was inclined to believe in miracles.

He had examined the injury as best he could through the inviolable bubble surrounding Branthan, and there could be no doubt that the wound had almost entirely vanished. Not completely, for there was a pinkish cast to the skin, indicative of scarring and healing.

Even outside a stasis field, such a wound would have taken longer to heal.

With the warriors of the X Legion below on the planet the eldar guide had brought them to, the Sisypheum felt very empty, its corridors prowled by servitors who cared nothing for the comfort of lonely souls left aboard ship while there was fighting to be done. Tarsa was a warrior too, one of some note amongst his fellow Nocturneans, but the care of Ulrach Branthan could be left to no one else but an Apothecary.

Besides, the mission to the planet’s surface had the whiff of revenge to it, and such missions rarely ended well.

Frater Thamatica remained in the bowels of the ship, undoing the damage his ill-advised experiment had caused. Tarsa remembered the furious argument between the Frater and Cadmus Tyro, like two thunderheads colliding. But Tyro was a captain and the designated proxy of Ulrach Branthan. Thamatica was going nowhere.

Tarsa paced the apothecarion, tapping his fingertips over the surface of his data-slate, reviewing the latest batch of monitoring readings. Ulrach Branthan’s biometrics were slowed to a standstill by the temperature, let alone the stasis field, and the results were the same as the last hundred times he had checked them.

Nothing could change within a stasis field – something that should be self-evident – but somehow in that unchanging environment, something had changed. Branthan’s body had managed to heal itself. Or, rather, something had caused it to heal without registering on any of the highly advanced, incredibly accurate monitoring devices.

Could it be the Heart of Iron?

In all his probes of Branthan’s flesh, this alone was an element of uncertainty. Not even the Iron Hands could explain its workings. All that was known of the artefact was that Ferrus Manus was said to have been given it by a ghost in the Land of Shadows centuries ago. As contrary to the Imperial Truth and as unlikely as that sounded, it was the only explanation Tarsa had been given as to its provenance.

Every senior Iron Hand claimed to have some relic of vanished technology from that desolate, benighted wasteland. The place must have been a veritable treasure trove of plunder, with ghosts lining up to hand over their priceless trinkets.

Dismissing such thoughts, Tarsa retuned his attention to the grievously wounded warrior. Unmoving icy mist fogged the casket, but Tarsa’s red orbs could easily pierce the translucent sheen to the warrior below. Branthan’s body, regardless of any healed bolter wound, was still a mess of bloody skin and ruptured flesh, broken bones and shredded musculature. The Heart of Iron remained locked to his chest, a silent, unmoving parasite whose function defied easy explanation.

From what little Tarsa could ascertain, he believed the device was attempting to regrow the inner structure of the captain’s body. Yet it was doing so by feeding on – for want of a better term – his life force. On a warrior whose wounds were not mortal, it would probably heal the damage without killing him, but Branthan’s injuries were so severe that any healing done would be at the expense of his life.

This miracle would likely kill him.

Tarsa circled the casket, all the while knowing that there was nothing more he could do for the man inside without detailed real-time data. There was only one way to gather such data, and Cadmus Tyro would never allow him to bring Branthan out of stasis without a cadre of Iron Hands around in case those moments turned out to be his last.

But Cadmus Tyro wasn’t here.

The warriors of Nocturne were not known for their rebellious streak; in fact the chains of duty in which they wrapped themselves bound them to causes and courses of action that might be deemed unwise, but which were followed through to the end. Yet Tarsa felt his hand inching towards the machinery regulating the casket’s temperature and the gene-locked stasis controls.

‘To help you I need to bring you close to death,’ he said, the further damage that might be done by rousing Branthan from his cryonic state conflicting with his oath to do no harm. He resolved that dilemma by rationalising that if he were able to save the captain then that damage would be an acceptable price to pay.

The thought of Tyro and Cybus’s retribution should something go wrong momentarily stayed his hand. Even were he to learn something vital, they would still be furious, so there was really no sense in hesitating. Tarsa was heartsick at keeping a man in a state of vegetative existence, a man who was dead in all but the most generous terms.

Wasn’t it, in fact, doing more harm keeping Branthan like this?

His moral quandary resolved, Tarsa quickly set up his bio-recording equipment, plugging his narthecium into the casket to monitor every aspect of Ulrach Branthan’s physiology. If he was going to do this, he’d have to do it right, leaving nothing to chance and seizing every opportunity to gather as much information as he could.

With everything set up, Tarsa unlocked the controls. He took a breath of cold air, now feeling the chill of the sterile apothecarion settling in his bones. Or was it the chill of uncertainty? He had already made his mind up, so he didn’t know why he was hesitating. Was he giving himself one last chance to turn back, realising that he might be about to kill Branthan?

Tarsa turned the brass dial of the power coupling to zero and the stasis field fell away like a dropped theatre curtain. The curling mists in the casket churned as time recommenced within, and the frozen captain once again rejoined the natural flow of the universe. Having crossed this rubicon, Tarsa now began to increase the temperature of the captain’s body in fractional increments. The lights on his narthecium blinked and clicked as swarms of data mobbed its memory coils. The bio-monitoring equipment chattered as fresh information flowed from the thawing body, spewing ticker-tapes of punched data-ribbons.

The devices showed increased neural activity in the pre-frontal lobes, and a general increase in synapse communications. Soon, the captain’s brain would reach a level where cognition and awareness would be restored. When that happened, Tarsa would need to be succinct in his questions.

Brain activity continued to rise, and he watched the Heart of Iron as it extruded yet more hair-fine filaments into Branthan’s body. The segmented limbs slithered around his body, as though probing for something, and it vented a thin stream of toxic fumes that smelled of rotting flesh.

‘–ers,’ said Branthan, finishing a sentence that had begun weeks ago.

‘Captain. I am Apothecary Tarsa. Your wounds are healing, but I am gathering information to ascertain why.’

A pause while the captain’s barely thawed brain raced to catch up to the present.

‘The mission?’

‘Is ongoing,’ said Tarsa, watching the spiking volume of data flow from the casket. ‘We are at the target world and your warriors are attempting to foil the traitors’ plans.’

Branthan’s brain activity suddenly spiked with waveforms Tarsa had never seen and which caused the captain’s body to twitch and spasm. Tarsa rose to his feet, looking into the casket as Ulrach Branthan’s eyes flickered with an eldritch green light.

‘Iydris…’

‘Captain?’

‘This world. The dead call it Iydris.’

‘I don’t understand, captain,’ said Tarsa. Had the captain been having lucid dreams while he was locked in stasis? That should be impossible, but if this mission into the heart of a warp storm had taught Tarsa anything, it was that words like ‘impossible’ were for the foolish and the unwary. The green shimmer to Branthan’s eyes was surely a sign of something very wrong, but he hesitated to drop the temperature and re-engage the stasis field.

Instead, he asked: ‘What dead?’

‘The souls of Iydris, I hear them all. They’re crying out in terror.’

The captain’s voice trailed off, and Tarsa realised Branthan’s synapse network had decayed to the point where he was experiencing auditory hallucinations. It would be a mercy to let him die now before the honourable hero he had been was reduced to a rambling madman.

‘You have to stop the Angel Exterminatus,’ said Branthan, as Tarsa’s hand hovered over the temperature controls.

‘What did you say?’ asked Tarsa. The data squirt inloaded by Sabik Wayland had included mention of the mythical creature, but Branthan’s words felt more specific, more immediately relevant.

‘He seeks to be reborn on Iydris. You have to stop it.’

Tarsa struggled to connect the captain’s words with what Wayland and Sharrowkyn had heard on Hydra Cordatus. The Angel Exterminatus was a dead god of the eldar, imprisoned beneath the world by their race’s supreme deity. What that actually meant in real terms wasn’t clear, but something of Branthan’s utterances didn’t gel.

‘What is the Angel Exterminatus?’ asked Tarsa, instinctively knowing this was the most important question he would ever ask.

‘All the very worst things in the world given flesh and form.’

‘How do you know this?’

‘This world, it’s alive. It cries for help. It waits.’

‘It waits?’ asked Tarsa. ‘What is it waiting for?’

‘For its makers to carry the dead home.’

A cordon was established around the sepulchre, and it was immediately apparent that it would need no lengthy siege to breach its walls. It boasted no defences and no emplaced guns, its approaches were unmarked by deep ditches, firepits, minefields or tearing wires, and the portal between the towering, crystalline giants was unbarred by any gate.

Perturabo instructed Forrix to begin work on establishing a fortified position in the open plaza before the sepulchre, and his lead triarch set about the task with gusto, requisitioning every available Rhino for the task. To surround the sepulchre would require thousands more Castellan Rhinos, thus Forrix crafted a rectangular secure area with angled bastion corners, the simplest fortress to craft with no blind spots. As each Rhino was driven into place and the armour plates unfolded, the central area of the plaza changed from being a place of shimmering light and ghostly laments on the wind to a place of cold iron, black spikes, coiled razorwire and armoured emplacements.

Few, even among the IV Legion, knew fortifications like Forrix, and even as Perturabo looked over, the final towers were rising at the corners of the emplaced position. The Mortis engines lifted the last elements into place as a final pair of Rhinos backed into position to form the two leaves of a motorised gate.

‘Your warrior works fast,’ noted Fulgrim, and Perturabo saw the jittering urge to be moving in every twitch of his limbs and every tic on his alabaster features. ‘But we should not linger.’

‘The weapons aren’t going anywhere,’ said Perturabo. ‘We don’t move until I have confirmation our fortified positions are secure.’

Fulgrim nodded, but there was a curt impatience to it.

Perturabo already knew all three fortified positions were in readiness. Despite the resistance of the rock, the fortress surrounding the landing zone was now secure, as was the makeshift fortress of Rhinos around the citadel’s walls. This latest fortification was as good as complete, but Perturabo took the time to study Fulgrim and his assembled host.

His brother was sheened in sweat, but it was not perspiration that beaded his brow.

Fulgrim was sweating light.

Faintly, to be sure, but visible to genhanced sight that saw beyond what even legionary eyes saw. Beads of light gathered at Fulgrim’s fingertips and fell to the ground, where they were swallowed by the earth and dissipated. He wondered if Fulgrim was aware of the radiance bleeding from him and decided he must be. His brother’s armour strained against his body and his features were drawn and tired, as though only by an effort of will was he still standing.

His captains looked no better, like hounds straining at the leash. Kaesoron stuck close to Fulgrim’s side, while Vairosean and his shrieking warriors roared and seethed with their bizarre sonic cannons. Eidolon and a cadre of bulky warriors in Cataphractii Terminator armour stood ready to spearhead the Emperor’s Children’s advance. The Lord Commander’s flesh was suffused with a similar light to that enveloping Fulgrim, a deathly radiance that had no place within a living being.

Alone of the Phoenician’s warriors, the swordsman Lucius seemed unaffected by the sense of potentiality that coursed through the Emperor’s Children. He glanced over towards Perturabo, as though aware of the scrutiny, and gave him an expansive bow. Perturabo saw through the blatant insincerity and felt a killing urge that saw him lift Forgebreaker from its harness at his back.

Karuchi Vohra stood next to Fulgrim, his hands knotting and twisting, like a guilty man who knew they would never be clean of blood. Perturabo knew he should kill the eldar now, just crush his frail body with one blow of his hammer, but he sensed there was yet something he could learn from their guide.

Kroeger and Falk appeared, each warrior giving him a nod of readiness.

Only two blades of his Trident would follow him, but that would have to be enough.

The Iron Circle lifted their shields as Perturabo sent a pulse of activation through his MIU to the organic wetware of their cybernetic control centres.

‘Does that mean we can go now?’ asked Fulgrim, needy and irritating.

‘It does,’ said Perturabo.

The warriors chosen to accompany the two primarchs within the crystal beauty of the domed sepulchre marched in their wake; the Iron Warriors as regimented as the day they had first formed up on the martial fields of Olympia, the Emperor’s Children like a host of raucous barbarians. Hundreds of banners flew overhead and the howling skirl of sonic weapons battered the air and tortured the ears with their echoes.

Thousands of Fulgrim’s followers came too, each bearing rigid containers across their shoulders. Perturabo had watched them unload the cargo-20s and fill those containers with what looked like crystal shards. Burdened by such heavy weight, they would not keep up with the legionaries, and Perturabo wasn’t about to wait for them.

With the Iron Circle forming a heavy wedge of shields before them, Perturabo and Fulgrim led the way up a curling walkway that approached the main portal. Only as they drew near did its scale truly become apparent. Three hundred metres high and twenty wide, it was a vertical slash in the translucent crystal walls of the citadel. The sea-green glow that spread to the rest of the fortress was, it seemed, a radiance that only went one way. Inside, all was darkness, an enfolding blackness that swallowed the light and allowed none to escape. Perturabo was reminded of the great singularity at the heart of the Eye of Terror, and did not care for that likeness one bit.

Was the interior of the Sepulchre of Isha’s Doom a region that could be spatially mapped or did its internal geography owe nothing to empirical measurements?

‘I can feel it,’ said Fulgrim as they marched between the clawed feet of the flanking guardians of the sepulchre. Light flickered through them like glittering shoals of fish darting away from a hunter’s lure. Nothing here had yet reacted to their presence, but how long that would last once they were inside was something Perturabo wasn’t keen to find out.

Perturabo halted their advance and turned to his brother.

‘Before we go any further, there is something I have to ask you, brother,’ said Perturabo.

Fulgrim’s eyes narrowed, tense and wary. ‘What?’

‘Is there anything I should know?’ Perturabo asked. ‘I give you this one last chance to tell me anything you have kept to yourself.’

Perturabo saw the lie before it was spoken.

‘No, brother,’ said the Phoenician. ‘All is as I have told you.’

Perturabo nodded, the answer exactly what he’d expected. He turned away from Fulgrim and with his warriors at his side and his robotic guardians around him, marched into the sepulchre.

Darkness welcomed him, folding around his senses in a way that confirmed it was wholly unnatural. His senses spread out, questing at the edges of his perceptions in ways unknown to mortals. What would be unremitting blackness, impenetrable and cloying and impossible to escape, was – to him – merely a gloaming.

The portal led them within an echoing vestibule of sorts, its colossal dimensions seeming to alter with every glance. A number of passageways led onwards, leaf-shaped arches of deeper darkness, but Perturabo found it next to impossible to fix on exactly how many there were.

‘Parlour tricks,’ sneered Fulgrim, looking around the twisting passageways leading off in many different directions at once.

‘No,’ said Perturabo. ‘It’s much more than that.’

‘Eldar witchery,’ spat Fulgrim. ‘Nothing of note.’

The beads of light falling from Fulgrim’s eyes were radiant tears, and the droplets sweating from his hands bloomed into liquid sunspots as they struck the marble-smooth floor of the sepulchre. Even the mortal warriors could see the Phoenician’s light within these walls. The Emperor’s Children cried out in adoration. The Iron Warriors ignored it.

Perturabo kept his gaze fixed on the black walls before him, seeing something in the shifting pathways and capricious dimensions of this space that was familiar to him. He had seen workings like this before.

‘It’s a labyrinth,’ he said. ‘And I know labyrinths.’

From a position of concealment high on a domed tomb farther out in the precincts opposite the citadel, Nykona Sharrowkyn and Sabik Wayland watched the two primarchs lead their warriors within. Perhaps a thousand legionaries and as many mortals had followed them, a narrow column that snaked inside like a parasitic worm infesting a host.

‘Cybus isn’t going to like this,’ said Wayland.

‘His likes and dislikes are immaterial to me,’ said Sharrowkyn.

‘Easy for you to say,’ replied Wayland. ‘Eventually you’ll go back to your Legion.’

Sharrowkyn said nothing in reply, and pict-captured images of the dreadful fortification in the centre of the plaza, knowing that to assault it would cost thousands of lives. Built with incredible economy of time and effort, its towers were guns taken from the Rhinos and armoured vehicles that formed its walls, and wire-surrounded emplacements housed growling Land Raiders that acted as mobile strongpoints.

‘Is that a Shadowsword?’ said Wayland.

On a raised platform in the centre of the fortification was a super-heavy tank, but one up-armoured and bulked out to an incredible degree.

‘Perturabo’s command tank,’ answered Sharrowkyn.

‘Its weapon systems can cover every centimetre of the walls and its main gun will simply obliterate anything that comes within its line of fire.’

‘Then we stay out of its line of fire,’ said Sharrowkyn.

Two Reaver battle engines bearing the banners and colours of the Legio Mortis faced off against their glassy counterparts, guns trained on them with unwavering precision. Perturabo’s warriors were nothing if not thorough.

‘A direct assault on this position will be suicidal,’ declared Wayland.

‘That’s never been the way of the Nineteenth,’ said Sharrowkyn.

‘I’ve come to learn that,’ said Wayland. ‘Come on, Captain Tyro needs to know there’s no chance of getting in this way.’

Sharrowkyn nodded and moved away from the edge of the roof. This far away from the enemy there was no need to wraith-slip, but he did it anyway. Ever since they’d made planetfall, Sharrowkyn’s preternatural senses had felt hostile eyes upon him, unseen observers watching his every move like a snake preparing to strike. Even moving with all the skill he could muster, he knew they could see him.

With sure steps, dizzying powered leaps and precipitous drops, Sharrowkyn and Wayland made their way to the sheltered portion of the ground where the incursion force of Iron Hands waited. Sharrowkyn dropped into shadow, stepping into full view of Cadmus Tyro and Vermanus Cybus. Ignatius Numen and Septus Thoic held the quivering form of Varuchi Vohra between them, and Brother Bombastus towered over them all, the monstrous flamer flickering with a hot jet of blue light.

‘Well?’ asked Cadmus Tyro. ‘Can we fight our way in?’

The captain’s face was unreadable behind the iron mask of his helm. His warplate was scored with hundreds of names, so many that there was as much revealed ceramite as there was black paint. He had been in the thick of the hardest fighting on Isstvan, and it was easy to forget he had suffered as much as the rest of them. The golden-winged form of Garuda perched on his shoulder guard, wings folded back and its red eyes reminding Sharrowkyn of Atesh Tarsa.

The eagle had a sleek look to it that Sharrowkyn liked – a hunter on the wing, like him.

‘Not a chance,’ said Sharrowkyn. ‘The Iron Warriors already have a fortress built right in front of the entrance. Nothing short of a full Legion assault would be able to punch through to the entrance.’

‘Then we’ve come all this way for nothing!’ snapped Cybus, slamming a fist into his palm. ‘I said this was a doomed enterprise from the beginning. We’ve wasted our time coming here!’

‘You don’t agree?’ said Tyro, reading Sharrowkyn’s body language.

‘Fighting the Iron Warriors head-on will see us all dead,’ said Sharrowkyn. ‘On that, Cybus and I agree, but we don’t need to fight them head-on.’

‘What do you mean?’ demanded Tyro.

Sharrowkyn beckoned Numen and Thoic forwards, and they hauled the sickly-looking eldar guide to stand before him.

‘Because the front door isn’t the only way in, is it?’

Varuchi Vohra looked up and nodded, the flesh of his face stretched tight like grease-paper over his jutting bones, his skin veined with purple lines and textured with an oily veneer.

‘No,’ said the eldar. ‘There are other ways to enter.’

TWENTY-ONE

Fragments of a Greater Whole
Immaterial Mathematics
They Never Were

The nightmare of his existence hadn’t ended; in fact, it had only worsened. Felix Cassander – though that name meant little to him now – stalked back and forth in what had once been a medicae quarantine bay aboard the Pride of the Emperor. His bones ached, each joint stiff with broken-glass pain and his one remaining lung filled with acid-burning fluids that he hacked up his throat with crippling regularity.

His supra-engineered frame was keeping him alive despite his fervent desire for death.

He and Navarra were two amongst perhaps a dozen of Fabius’s terata that had survived the assault on the Iron Hands vessel. Navarra lay in abject misery in the corner of the quarantine cell, his mutated body undulant with motion as his internal anatomy combined and split apart in genetic revolt and his limbs reshaped themselves in response to hyper-mutation of his base-pairs.

The terata were little better than beasts now, howling, mindless things of appetite and aggression, but Cassander and Navarra alone had held onto the remembrance of their former lives. Navarra’s mind hung by a thread, a teetering consciousness that kept true to the word of Dorn only thanks to Cassander’s incessant repetition of the Legion’s roll of honour, starting with the Victorix Roma and ending with Honoris Martius. His own fractured sense of self remembered who he was, where he had come from, but most of all it remembered what he had done.

He had killed Space Marines loyal to the Imperium. He was no better than the Emperor’s Children or the Iron Warriors. The pain of his minute-by-minute existence was nothing compared to that. It was his punishment, his penance for giving in to adversity. He was one of the Emperor’s own Fists, a warrior against whom no foe could triumph, whom no obstacle could delay and no pain could master.

All of it a lie.

Cassander picked at his muscle-bloated arms, the flesh scabbed with pus-filled sores that refused to heal as fresh toxins made war against his gene-twisted immune system. He had picked all the flesh from his right hand, leaving it a rotten, meat-flaked ruin. Rich crimson blood coated the bones there, the digits held together by strings of sinew and scraps of regenerative muscle tissue. He’d scraped intricate patterns into the bone with the overgrown claws of his other hand, relishing the agony of his self-mutilation and knowing it wasn’t nearly enough to atone for what he had allowed to happen.

He could still see the face of the legionary whose throat he had ripped out, the hatred that burned in his eyes. It was a hatred well earned. Though he had torn the flesh from his hand, he knew it would never be free of the loyal blood it had spilled. He tried to keep his focus on the blood, hoping that preoccupation with pain would keep the horror of what he had done and what he had become at bay.

Cassander’s perceptions were becoming ever more erratic, a collage of nightmarish images that belonged in a madman’s skull. Torturous experiments, pain-filled lights in his eyes and the crack of breaking bones as his body was continually reshaped and regrown. The passage of time itself was out of sequence, fragments of memory making no sense from one instant to the next.

One moment he was clawing the skin and meat from his guilty hand, the next he was staring up at a bank of lumen-strips in a clinically austere chamber of white ceramic tiles and steel girders painted a bilious industrial green. Being strapped to the gurney meant pain, and pain was all he wanted now. Pain meant escape. Pain was penance.

The source of all his pain leaned over him, haloed in stark light and clicking machine arms.

‘You are special, my child,’ Fabius told him, a rivulet of black blood running from the corner of his mouth. ‘You Fists retain your higher functions. The rest devolve to beasts, but not you two. Why is that, I wonder?’

Cassander wanted to reach for the demented Apothecary and tear out his throat, but the chains securing him to the table this time were as good as unbreakable. Fabius grinned his corpse-grin at him and shook his head.

‘You think I learned nothing from our last contretemps?’ said Fabius, stepping away and altering the angle of the gurney upon which Cassander lay. ‘The Pride of the Emperor might not be as… private as the Andronius, but it at least has the virtue of many well-equipped medicae levels.’

In complete opposition to the Apothecary’s previous lair, this space was brightly lit and organised much like a conventional medicae facility. The walls were lined with machinery that Cassander could not identify, save that they were all bespoke creations that no Apothecary in a loyal Legion would sanction using. Secured cabinets were filled with green glass beakers in which swilled unidentifiable mutant offspring, genetic abnormalities and hideously deformed foetal stages. Rows of reductor ampoules, each one labelled with a Legion symbol and engraved with what looked like a name, sat in a glass cryo-vat filled with coils of nitrous gases. Tissue baths, centrifuges and retorts bearing bubbling tubes and bell jars hissed, spat and boiled on a silver-steel workbench, and an opened corpse lay on the gurney to his left, amid the labelled, spliced and sectioned portions of his inner anatomy. The corpse had no head, but a Legion tattoo on his right bicep revealed him to be IV Legion.

‘Turning on your own now?’ said Cassander through his mangled jaw structure.

Fabius turned to look at the dissected corpse as though he had forgotten it was there. ‘Even before Horus chose rebellion,’ he said.

‘Why?’ gurgled Cassander, flexing the bones of his mutilated hand as it throbbed painfully.

‘Because we are led to believe we are perfect creations,’ said Fabius, coughing a wad of black phlegm and holding his chest. ‘but nothing could be further from the truth. We are fragments of a greater whole, pale reflections of something incredible. Each of the Legions’ genetic structure contains a piece of that perfection, and I would know every secret of the Emperor’s workings.’

‘Why?’ repeated Cassander, knowing it was the most important question.

‘Because I don’t want to die,’ said Fabius, opening his robes to reveal two suppurating wounds crusted with tarry deposits. Sword wounds, but ones that hadn’t healed. ‘The Emperor’s soldiers who came before us, the Thunder Warriors, their gene-code carried the seeds of their own destruction. And the gene-boosted savages before them? They were fortunate to live as long as they did before their hyper-metabolism consumed them. The primarchs think their warriors are immortal, but they are wrong. We are as mortal as any living thing, we just take longer to die. I would not have it so.’

‘You want to live forever?’

‘Of course,’ said Fabius, angry he should even ask such a question. ‘Don’t you?’

‘No,’ hissed Cassander. ‘I want to die with every breath.’

Fabius leaned over him, and the Chirurgeon extended its claw-like calliper arms. The razor-thin line of a thermal cutter sparked to life. A host of thick needles extended from another arm, followed by a blood siphon and a clacking suture gun on two more.

‘If that were true, then why have you not dashed your brains out against the walls of your cell?’ asked Fabius with the keen interest of a scholar.

Cassander had only one answer. ‘Because I am weak,’ he said, his powerful, mutated and abhorrent form heaving in torment.

‘No, my child, you are strong, so very strong. The others super-combusted with the fury of their accelerated metabolism, but not you or your Legion brother,’ said Fabius, almost tenderly. ‘That’s why I need to open you up again.’

The thermal cutter descended and the pain began again.

Atonement and agony, penance and pain.

Cassander welcomed them all.

Warsmith Toramino paced the ramparts of the landing-zone fortress, watching with ever-greater anger as the Pneumachina and his warriors battled to shore up the walls. Cracks spread and stone crumbled with every passing moment.

This world was anathema to the raising of foreign walls, and the sooner they were done with this place the better. Not even the aural filters on his helm could keep out the keening wail of the wind, and the crepuscular glow emanating from the distant city was grating on Toramino’s nerves.

Bad enough that he had been denied his rightful place in the Trident, but now he had been left as little better than a watchman. The master of the Stor-bezashk commanded firepower like no other, a host of ordnance and the means to deploy it. That he should be consigned to this lowly role was an insult to his pride and to the honour of his title.

True, in a warzone, such a task was a position of great importance and respect, but defending empty platforms and runways enclosed by high walls, minefields and acres of razorwire on a deserted world was a task with no honour and which offered no hopes for advancement. Such a task was for low-born fools like the Stonewrought or, more appropriately, Kroeger.

Harkor’s foolish recklessness on Hydra Cordatus had brought this situation about, but the former warsmith of the 23rd Grand Battalion was Olympian high-born, and even a fool of a noble was better than peon scum like Kroeger.

Toramino paused to look back into the heart of the defences constructed within the crumbling and sagging walls. A forest of cannon barrels angled to the sky like a thousand arms raised in salute: howitzers, bombards, Thunderstrikes, mortars, rocket batteries and precision hunter-killer missiles. Gunmasters and their crews swarmed their weapons, ready to unleash a rain of explosive death on any target that presented itself. Not that Toramino particularly expected that target to be a foe in the traditional sense.

It galled him that circumstances had forced his hand to fratricide, but when backed into a corner by the ignorance and jealousy of fools, what could any high-born warrior of rank and position do but fight back? He called up the schematics of the city onto his data-slate, the real-time information fed to him by the topographical data engines on the Castellan Rhinos. A three-dimensional image of the city, its buildings and the location of the Iron Warriors advance fortress hovered before him.

With such detailed target information, Toramino could flatten the eldar tomb city with a word or pick out one structure to demolish while leaving the rest untouched by so much as a shrapnel scar. He fed the data to the target-acquisition engines of his gunmasters, relishing the sheer destructive power at his command.

Toramino put away his data-slate as the wind’s lament changed in pitch, becoming more strident and insistent. He banged a palm against the side of his helmet, cursing and shaking his head in an effort to silence it. It was no use, the sound was only getting more irritating, and Toramino unsnapped the gorget seals, tearing his helmet off to reveal his patrician features and mane of ivory hair.

He sat the helmet on a toothed merlon and tilted his head to the side.

Toramino’s eyes narrowed as he stared at the horizon in puzzlement.

A faint haze rippled at the farthest extremes of his sight, a blur of greenish light like the approach of a distant sandstorm.

‘What is that?’ he wondered over the keening wail of the mournful wind.

Perturabo led the way, the pace necessarily slow as the enveloping darkness made haste impossible. The advance force kept tight together, a column of armoured warriors with blades bared and firearms primed. Even Fulgrim’s host kept their howls and chants to themselves. The heavy footfalls of Warsmith Berossus echoed from the obsidian walls, and the brittle clatter of glass from the containers being carried by Fulgrim’s mortal followers was a constant presence in the swallowing darkness.

The walls remained uniformly smooth, but distant lights swam in their glossy depths. Wheeling like distant galaxies, and just as populous, there was a universe of stars within the walls, Perturabo realised, each one distinct and no two alike.

He wondered what they might represent. Were the shimmers of light a purely aesthetic consideration on the part of the sepulchre’s builders or might they serve some unknown function? Could they be a self-repair mechanism, such as possessed by the Cadmean Citadel, an infestation of some lithobiotic parasite or perhaps the remnant of an ancient computational archive? Could this entire structure be a form of data repository, a species record of a once-dominant empire now fallen into decline? Perturabo knew better than anyone the value of the wisdom of the ancients. Hadn’t he constructed the Cavea Ferrum from the designs of a dead genius?

This labyrinth was constructed from the same principles, its intricacies working in multiple overlapping dimensions at once, and Perturabo understood that firmness of purpose was the best instrument of success when navigating a maze.

That, and the non-Euclidian equations of the Firenzii.

When ancient mathematicians first discovered the dimensions beyond the physical, many a classical scholar had been driven to insanity in his attempts to codify his findings in empirical terms. Thanks to the words encrypted in the secret journal of the Firenzii – the slender volume the Crimson King had helped him decode – Perturabo had learned the secrets of navigating such tempestuous calculus. It was an inexact science, not meant for mortal brains to comprehend, but his cognitive reach was far beyond those lunatic geniuses who had tried and failed to grasp the enormity of the worlds they had glimpsed in dreams and fugue states.

When Perturabo had first climbed to the top of the cliffs of Lochos as a youth and seen the Eye of Terror looking down at him from the other side of the galaxy, he had known instinctively there was a universe beyond its hellish borders, a place of dark miracles and nightmarish wonders. With every decade that passed and every fragment of knowledge he uncovered, its impossible mechanics became ever more visible and less unknowable. Perturabo had gradually peeled back layer after layer of mystery until the alien mechanisms at its heart lay revealed to him.

The last part of the key had been provided by the discovery of the plans in the Sabellian cremation pit, the final, heretical workings of the Firenzii, and Perturabo had revelled in the white heat of immaterial mathematics and empyreal geometry as he crafted the impossible routes and impenetrable depths of the Cavea Ferrum.

What was at play here was no different.

Worked with a subtlety and grace that was breathtaking, but fundamentally the same.

He kept silent and shut out the echoing sounds around him as he processed the fiendishly difficult calculations that laid bare the workings of the labyrinth. He paid no attention to the matrices of darting light that passed through the walls, the panicked flickers of lambent mist swirling in their depths, nor did he note the passage of time or the insistent clicking of vox-traffic from beyond the sepulchre.

Fulgrim kept close, stealing awed glances at him as he chose each turn in the maze, leading them deeper and deeper into its convoluted depths. Their path took them up and down, through spiralling walkways, back around on themselves and through chambers, tunnels and echoing halls designed to confuse and disorientate. Perturabo kept true to his principles of inter-dimensional calculus and forced his natural instinct for direction to cede control of their course to his intellect. He sensed his brother’s frustrations at the labyrinth and his inability to map it in his head. Even boastful Dorn would find it next to impossible to navigate the maze of the Cavea Ferrum, let alone this exquisite alien rendition of its myriad complexities.

The path through the maze was elaborate and layered, twisting like a nest of writhing snakes and rearranging around him in relation to their onward passage. With every step, Perturabo felt the gelid sentience at the heart of this world – if it even was a world, and he was beginning to have his doubts – becoming ever more focused in its attentions.

Whatever lay beneath them, the dreams of a dormant god or a reactivating cache of sentient weapons, Perturabo knew they didn’t have much time until it grew powerful enough to actively resist them. With a sudden self-aggrandising epiphany, Perturabo knew with absolute certainty that he alone in all the galaxy was capable of navigating this labyrinth. Not even Fulgrim’s pet guide could have done so. Far from pleasing Perturabo, the thought struck a discordant note of imminent threat.

Fixing points of reference in his mind – spatial, empyreal and mathematical – Perturabo halted their progress at an intersection of four passageways. Each was superficially identical, yet only one offered onward passage.

‘Why do we stop?’ asked Fulgrim. ‘We must be near the heart of the labyrinth by now.’

‘We are,’ agreed Perturabo. ‘One of these passages will lead us to whatever lies beneath the central dome we saw from outside. The rest lead to eternities of wandering and madness.’

‘But you know which to take?’

‘I do.’

‘Then why do we hesitate?’

‘Berossus,’ commanded Perturabo. ‘Bring me Vohra.’

The thunderous form of Warsmith Berossus hauled the cringing eldar forwards, the push of the Dreadnought’s heavy hammer ungentle. Stealing furtive glances at the behemoth behind him, Karuchi Vohra bowed to Perturabo. The guide looked terrible, thin and wasted, as though the life was being drawn from him with every step he took into the labyrinth.

‘My lord?’ said Vohra.

‘The lights in the walls,’ said Perturabo. ‘What are they?’

‘It is difficult to explain, Lord Perturabo,’ said Vohra. ‘My people do not craft walls of stone and steel as you do.’

‘Yes, you grow your structures from some bio-polymer,’ said Perturabo. ‘I’ve brought more than one to ruin over the centuries. But answer the question. What are the lights in the walls?’

‘What does it matter how this place is built?’ snapped Fulgrim before Vohra could answer, eager to be moving on.

‘It matters because I say it matters,’ said Perturabo, taking hold of Karuchi Vohra’s robe and easing him forwards to stand facing the four onward passages. Each was dark, with nothing to differentiate them from the hundreds of others they had travelled.

‘Which one?’ said Perturabo, resting his hand lightly on Vohra’s shoulder.

‘My lord?’

‘Which one?’ repeated Perturabo. ‘We are almost at the heart of the sepulchre, so I want you to tell me which of these passages will lead us there.’

Karuchi Vohra glanced nervously back at Fulgrim, as Perturabo knew he would, before hesitantly lifting his arm and pointing to the passageway second from the left.

‘That one,’ said the eldar.

‘Wrong,’ said Perturabo, snapping Vohra’s neck.

The sense of claustrophobia in the Iron Warriors stronghold had been overpowering, and Julius Kaesoron’s innards squirmed to be free of his body with every moment he’d paced its bland, steel-edged courtyard. Like a caged raptor, he was not suited for confinement or to remain static behind high walls. A wise man had once told him that stagnation was death, and that was never truer than of the Emperor’s Children.

The Lords of Profligacy had lifted the suffocating veils of the mundane from their eyes and shown them unlimited worlds of sensation and indulgence. Undreamed vistas of excess in all things: noise, music, bloodshed, hedonism, torture, violence, adoration and most of all, worship. Every second not spent indulging desires declared taboo in an earlier age was a waste of life, and Julius Kaesoron had long since declared that no act of indulgence would remain beyond his grasp.

Leaving the dull-minded Iron Warriors behind their impermeable walls, Julius led his three thousand warriors into the plaza before the sepulchre, leaving them to desecrate and destroy as they saw fit. Julius revelled in the sensation of untapped power he felt seeping up into the world like oily water in sodden sand. He bludgeoned crystalline statues and smashed the glowing stones against his skull, grinding the crushed fragments into the cuts in his skin.

The anticipatory pleasure was almost as great as the indulgence, and his altered sight perceived the lines of force and memory that threaded every structure on this planet. He marvelled that the Iron Warriors couldn’t see it, and almost pitied them their limited perceptions. How intolerable their lives must be, restricted to seeing only the functional building blocks of what was deemed reality by their own stunted senses.

Julius and his warriors circled the Iron Warriors fortress, thousands of whooping and yelling maniacs holding weapons and war banners high. The energy saturating this world was on the verge of release; like a volcano on the brink of eruption or a singer approaching a high note. He wished he could puncture whatever was holding it back, letting its bounty flow through the streets like a surge tide to drown them all.

He laughed hysterically, drawing his combat knife and plunging it up into the space beneath his skin-draped shoulder guard and scored breastplate. The pain was fleeting, the flow of blood momentary, but with every droplet that spilled onto the ground, he felt this world’s horror grow.

With a certainty not his own, he understood that his blood was polluted with something wonderful, something intolerable to the race that had built this world. Blood was his devotion, its substance tainted by the force that had ripped its way to life from the afterbirth of this race’s death.

In that instant, he knew what he had to do.

Julius threw aside his knife, its blade too small and inconsequential for what needed to be done. He drew his serrated sword, the blade impregnated with hooked barbs worked along its length. He howled his submission to the kaleidoscopic skies and charged into the chanting mass of his warriors.

His first blow hacked one of Vairosean’s Kakophoni in two, blood erupting from the mutant’s body like an exploding fuel bladder. His second opened the belly of a warrior whose armour was so torn it should have been discarded long ago. A third beheaded a bullish champion whose neck jetted twin fountains of blood three metres into the air. Julius barged and cut and hacked his way into the Emperor’s Children, feeling his certainty that this was the right thing to do with every opened artery, every severed limb and every drop of blood spilled.

He laughed as he saw the Iron Warriors looking on in horror as he slaughtered his brother legionaries, their incomprehension plain even through their flat, expressionless helmets. The stink of blood filled his senses, together with a potent sense of being on the cusp of something magnificent.

Following his lead, the Emperor’s Children fell upon one another in an orgy of bloodletting, all cohesion and sense of purpose forgotten in the lustful savagery of killing. Julius remembered the blossoming sense of freedom he’d felt in La Fenice, when the avatars of the Lords of Profligacy manifested through the broken shells of mortal bodies. The exquisite pain and ecstatic feeling of being truly alive had faded with time, and to feel that again, he would endure any pain, inflict any suffering.

No sooner had he wished for it than he felt a tugging sensation in every cell of his body, a pleading invitation to surrender his flesh.

No, not yet. Let me enjoy this a little longer…

The entire plaza before the sepulchre was now a killing floor, a battlefield with no enemy, just a screaming host of warriors bent on self-destruction.

The Emperor’s Children offered themselves up as a willing yet unwitting sacrifice, their blood carrying with it the memory of life and death, birth and doom.

The power at the heart of Iydris spasmed in hateful recognition of that contradiction.

And awoke.

‘Brother!’ cried Fulgrim as Perturabo dropped Vohra’s lifeless body to the floor.

Perturabo ignored his brother’s shock and marched in the direction of the leftmost passageway. His warriors moved off with him, the Iron Circle matching his swift stride effortlessly and without complaint. Berossus passed insultingly close to the Phoenician as he strode on.

Fulgrim’s hand closed on Perturabo’s arm, and he rounded on his brother, his fist balled in anticipation of violence. The Iron Circle turned with a clatter of shields and armaments, every carapace weapon aimed squarely at Fulgrim.

‘Do you really have to ask?’ demanded Perturabo.

‘Ask what?’ said Fulgrim, backing away with a look of outrage that made Perturabo sick to his stomach with its theatricality.

‘Karuchi Vohra had never set foot on this world before now, had he?’ said Perturabo.

Fulgrim’s mask finally cracked and he grinned, the liar exposed, the deceiver unmasked.

‘I doubt it,’ said Fulgrim. ‘But even if he had not, does it truly matter?’

‘Of course it matters,’ said Perturabo, teeth bared. ‘Because he couldn’t possibly have reached this far into the labyrinth. Yet he claimed to have seen the weapons we seek. How do you explain that, brother?’

Fulgrim shrugged and Perturabo had never wanted to take Forgebreaker to a skull more than he did at that moment. He lowered his fist slowly and turned away before his anger got the better of him.

‘I knew you were lying to me from the start,’ he said. ‘But I held onto a shred of hope that there might be a fraction of truth to what you promised. More fool me. I should never have come here with you, brother.’

‘No, I needed you to come,’ implored Fulgrim, following him, but making no moves to touch him. ‘I may have exaggerated some aspects of the eldar legend, but I knew that only you could navigate this labyrinth.’

‘So why lie to me? Why create this fiction?’

‘Would you have come if I told you I needed you just to unravel a maze?’

‘No,’ said Perturabo.

‘There, you see?’

Perturabo nodded in the direction of the passageway and said, ‘So what are we really going to find in here? What could be so important to you that you would expend so many lives and lie to your brother?’

‘Exactly what I promised,’ said Fulgrim. ‘The ability to destroy worlds and lay waste to armies. The power of the Angel Exterminatus lies at the heart of this world, truly, but it will take the two of us to unlock it. No more lies, brother, not now we are so close to victory.’

Despite himself, Perturabo could feel his curiosity piqued. Fulgrim had lied and cheated and deceived to bring him this far, but he heard no falsehood in this latest declaration. Even so, he didn’t believe his brother’s vacant sincerity.

Whatever lay at the heart of the sepulchre would be Perturabo’s alone.

‘Then we will seize it together,’ he lied.

The carnage being wreaked beyond the strongpoint’s walls was as horrific as it was senseless, and Forrix could only watch in open-mouthed incomprehension as the Emperor’s Children systematically butchered themselves. Warriors who had marched together beneath the same banners now hacked at each other with great broadswords or unloaded entire magazines into their corpses.

The wet sound of steel on flesh and the barking rattle of gunfire filled the plaza. Forrix had no intention of moving aside the Rhinos barring entry to his position to allow those few warriors not partaking in the slaughter back within his walls.

‘What in the name of the Twelve are they doing?’ said Forrix, gripping the steelwork of the battlements with his powered gauntlets. ‘It makes no sense.’

Standing beside him, Vull Bronn shook his head. ‘I have no idea. After what I saw on the Pride of the Emperor, I’ve given up trying to figure out any sense in the Third Legion.’

‘But this is so… wasteful!’ shouted Forrix, the metal bending beneath his grip.

‘Did you see what started it?’

‘I don’t know what started it, but I know who,’ said Forrix, pointing at the blood-drenched figure of Julius Kaesoron as he fought like a demented berserker through those few Emperor’s Children still standing. The captain’s sword was red with entrails and torn flesh, his hysterical screaming like fingernails on slate.

‘Should we try and stop it?’ asked the Stonewrought.

‘You want to get in the middle of that?’

‘Not when I’ve a wall to stand behind.’

‘Then we leave them to it,’ said Forrix. ‘The fools.’

The killing didn’t take long to burn itself out, thousands of lives ended in a convulsion of manic death-dealing. Forrix had never seen anything like it. As silence fell over the plaza, only Julius Kaesoron was left standing, his purple and gold armour entirely covered in crimson and loose, dribbling chunks of skin.

The sword fell from his hand and he slumped to his knees, a plaintive shriek of something dark and primal torn from his throat. The warrior buried his head in his hands and he fell forwards, as though grovelling to some unseen liege lord.

‘I don’t know why Kaesoron did this, but I’m damn well going to find out,’ said Forrix, descending to the courtyard of the strongpoint and summoning his fellow Terminators to his side. Together with five other towering warriors, he marched to the Rhino gates. With a nod, the two vehicles retracted their bracing footings from the ground and started their engines with a throaty metallic cough.

‘I will be the iron within,’ said the Stonewrought as the Rhinos reversed.

‘As I will be the iron without,’ replied Forrix, leading his warriors beyond the walls.

The gates closed behind them as Forrix marched towards the weeping form of Kaesoron.

The plaza was an abattoir, a charnel house of ripped bodies, emptied bellies and wasted lives. The Iron Warriors gave the dead no reverence, crushing the remains beneath their feet without remorse. With every step they took, Forrix felt the hostility and unseen eyes that had been upon them ever since their landing intensify their scrutiny, as if they were now within easy reach. He halted before Kaesoron, who lifted his head at their approach.

The man’s face was a horror of liquid scar tissue, burned meat and monstrous surgery. Whatever he had looked like before was utterly obscured beneath a leathern mask of self-inflicted mutilations. Kaesoron grinned, exposing rotten teeth, twisted fangs and a lizard-like tongue of reptilian scales.

‘We got their attention,’ he rasped through a mouth clogged with mutant flesh.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘The dead,’ rasped Kaesoron. ‘We goaded them and they came. Now the Angel Exterminatus can rise from the ashes of his unmaking.’

‘You killed your own men,’ said Forrix.

‘They weren’t mine,’ said Kaesoron. ‘They never were.’

‘No? Then whose were they?’

Kaesoron seemed to consider the question, tilting his head to the side as though listening for an answer. Then he smiled, and his face pulled apart as the skin folded back on itself, sloughing from his skull.

‘They belong to Slaanesh!’ screamed Kaesoron in revelatory ecstasy.

Forrix recoiled from the name, feeling it stab into him like a curse.

Then, from all around the plaza, Forrix heard a snap and crash of grinding glass. The omnipresent wail that keened on the mournful wind grew to a wounded shriek as thousands of plumes of illuminated smoke erupted from the ground. Forrix and his Terminators immediately formed a defensive circle, auto-loaders feeding shells into the breeches of combi-bolters.

‘Stand to!’ ordered Forrix. ‘Stonewrought!’

Through the plumes of writhing mist, Forrix saw the surviving crystalline statues throwing off their previous immobility. They moved stiffly, like sleepers awoken from an aeons-long slumber, and the gems at the heart of their bulbous heads bled vibrant colour into glassy bodies that suddenly seemed significantly less fragile. Kaesoron’s warriors had ruined many, but hundreds more remained in the plaza, not to mention the thousands still standing between them and the citadel’s walls.

Forrix felt his heart sink as he saw the titanic guardians of the portal were moving too. Light poured through their enormous limbs from the gemstones set throughout their bodies, and the sweeping, wing-like spines at their shoulders blazed with coruscating energies. Spumes of shimmering light washed from their fists, and the crack and grind of their flexing joints was like the splitting of a glacier.

‘Back to the strongpoint,’ he ordered. ‘Now!’

The lumbering Terminators moved as one, but before they had taken more than half a dozen steps, their way was blocked. Not by the glassy constructs stepping from their plinths, but by an army of spectral warriors coalescing from the emerald-lit mists. Thousands upon thousands of their shimmering forms filled the plaza, clad in form-fitting plates of armour and armed with long blades. White eyes shone through translucent porcelain helmets, and Forrix felt their intense hatred for him.

Though it ran contrary to every secular belief in his head, he understood exactly the nature of this army of wraiths.

These were the eldar dead of Iydris.

TWENTY-TWO

Half-Imagined Horizons
Wraith War
Fire for Effect

Whatever Perturabo had expected to find at the heart of the Sepulchre of Isha’s Doom, it wasn’t this. He’d expected an array of tombs, grave-markers or some other visible remembrance of the dead. Something literal. He’d expected to see great statuary, monolithic obelisks, grand records of deeds and legacies. Now he realised that was a very human conceit – the eldar remembered their dead very differently.

The last passageway had brought them out onto a walkway thirty metres wide above a vast domed space filled with the same green light that suffused the tombs and mausolea of the city. The ultimate source of that illumination was now revealed, a titanic geyser of brilliant emerald, pouring up in a column of radiance from the opening of an abyssal shaft in the centre of the cavernous space.

High above, instead of the underside of the golden dome they had seen from the outside, was a void of utter nothingness that was at once static and churning with motion. The blazing light from below thundered into its depths, swallowed without disturbing the blackness.

‘It’s like looking into the heart of a black hole,’ said Kroeger, entranced by the sight.

Perturabo nodded, his mind creating recognisable shapes within the fuliginous depths of the blackness: distant horizons, far-off lands and galaxies beyond imagination.

‘I think that’s exactly what this is,’ he said, tearing his gaze from the half-imagined horizons in the dark. ‘I think this has something to do with what’s keeping the planet from being dragged into the core of the Eye.’

‘Then let’s try not to do anything stupid in here,’ said Falk. ‘There’s still a war to be won once we finally get finished with this.’

The floor of the chamber was like a pearlescent seabed; a forest of slender towers, segmented, bulbous and tapering like stalagmites. Each was studded with glittering gemstones that winked in the spuming torrent of light, like barnacle growths on tidal rocks. Winding paths snaked between the towers, the shortest of which was still surely hundreds of metres tall. Though they appeared random, Perturabo immediately saw the pattern in the arrangement of the paths and roadways.

‘They all converge on the opening through which the light pours,’ said Fulgrim.

‘You noticed that?’

Fulgrim gave him a withering look. ‘Perfect patterns, recurrent geometry and naturally occurring Fibonacci sequences? Please.’

Perturabo smiled. ‘I forgot you would have read the Liber Abaci.’

‘Read it? I rewrote it.’

Perturabo gestured to the interior of the colossal chamber. ‘So is this what you expected?’

Fulgrim strode to the edge of the walkway, his white cloak billowing out behind him like the mane of his hair, which was held back from his face by a silver circlet of exquisite working. Perturabo recognised the same hand that had fashioned the cloak pin Fulgrim had given to him on Hydra Cordatus. He glanced down at the jewel set in the gleaming skull, its blackness now completely eclipsed by gold.

With the Iron Circle formed up around him and his triarchs on either side, Perturabo led them around the circumference of the chamber to where a tightly wound ramp led down to the floor like a coiled serpent draping over the edge of the walkway. Berossus brought up the rear, and as Perturabo descended to the bottom of the ramp, he watched the trailing warriors above him. They had entered the sepulchre with perhaps a thousand legionaries and a similar number of mortals, but now there were considerably fewer among Fulgrim’s followers.

Had the labyrinth claimed them without anyone noticing or had they succumbed to violent urges or carnal desires along the way? Perturabo cared nothing for their fate. Either way, they were as good as dead.

The floor of the chamber was warm like a jungle floor, humid and feathered by wisps of glittering fog that seeped from the towers like breath. Brought to their level, the vast scale of the towers became fully apparent – soaring sculptures that bore no hallmarks of a builder or craftsman. Stark black shadows danced on the ground and slithered over the towers, the cascading light from the chamber’s centre spilling between them like rushing water.

The Iron Warriors marched in lockstep, moving as a single column of martial power, while Fulgrim and his warriors spread out, moving between the towers with their heads turning in awed appreciation of their scale. Fulgrim walked with his arms outstretched and his head tilted back, as though basking in the light of the first dawn. What had begun as a military operation was rapidly descending into something else entirely.

‘Whatever these are, they weren’t built,’ said Kroeger, reaching out to touch one of the towers with his fist.

‘Don’t touch it, you idiot!’ snapped Falk.

Kroeger snatched his hand away, the lenses of his helm shimmering with reflected green light and hostility.

‘You don’t give me orders,’ said Kroeger.

‘Not yet,’ said Falk.

‘What does that mean?’ barked Kroeger, stepping towards him.

‘I don’t know,’ said Falk, as surprised by his words as Kroeger was angered by them. Perturabo saw Falk glance over at a tight, crystalline knot of gemstones encrusted to the tower at his side as though he saw something, something he wished he couldn’t see.

‘Falk?’ said Perturabo. ‘What’s wrong?’

Barban Falk didn’t answer until Perturabo put a heavy iron gauntlet upon his shoulder.

The triarch flinched as though struck and shook his head, throwing off his momentary lapse of concentration. Perturabo read the warrior’s biometrics through his visor and saw his pulse was spiking and his respiratory rate was unusually elevated.

‘I… thought I saw something,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Falk. ‘Nothing, I think.’

‘It’s this place,’ said Kroeger, flexing his gauntlet on the hilt of his sword. ‘Gets inside your head. Eldar witchery.’

Falk nodded and clenched his fists.

‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

Perturabo led them deeper into the chamber, following the looping paths through the towers. As they drew nearer to the centre and the tower of light, the green mist gathering around the towers grew thicker, like a toxic fog sinking through the thoroughfares of some industrial hive-sump.

Eventually, as he and Fulgrim had seen, the pathways spiralled in ever decreasing loops until at last they stood before the vertical river of light at the heart of the sepulchre.

It was not solid as they had supposed, more like a cascade of brilliant helices of pellucid light, as though a celestial loom at the planet’s core were gathering a billion times a billion radiant threads and weaving them together into one vast stream. The torrent was an intricate mesh of infinite complexity, and Perturabo was not surprised to see that the path they were on led towards the edge of the shaft from which the light rose.

The shaft was two hundred metres in diameter and like this world itself, perfectly circular, without so much as the tiniest imperfection to mar its ideal geometry. Its circumference was cut with cursive symbols, ancient runes beyond even his understanding of language, and Perturabo considered himself fluent in numerous eldar dialects.

Fulgrim marched to the very edge of the shaft, haloed in a corona of emerald light, with his cloak billowing behind him like ivory wings.

‘It’s so beautiful,’ said Fulgrim, turning on the spot to face Perturabo.

Before Perturabo could answer, he heard a cry of alarm. He spun on his heel in time to see a legionary snatched into the mist by an unseen assailant.

‘To arms!’ he shouted as the mist began coalescing around them.

Screams came from the cloying fog, mortal screams. Bangs of bolter fire sounded, muffled by the mist and weirdly distorted by the unnatural architecture of the chamber. More rattling shots followed, and more screams.

Perturabo saw a starscape of bright lights within the fog, spots of crimson, azure and jade that pulsed with angry illumination. At first he thought it to be nothing more than the gemstones encrusted on the towers reacting to what was happening, but then he saw the tower nearest him… move.

No, not move. Reshape.

The material of the tower surrounding a brilliant ruby gemstone set into its flank began to extrude a humanoid shape, like a figure pressed from a mould. It was taller than a Space Marine, but slender and with a bulbous, elongated head, the gemstone borne at its centre. The figure stepped from the tower, trailing lambent light from the residue of its birth. Its arms were clawed, and one bore a slender tube-like device that could only be a weapon of some kind.

Nor was it alone.

Wherever a gemstone was set, similar figures stepped from the depths. Like automata, but with a hideously organic feel to their movements, they were emerging in their hundreds with every passing second. They drew the mist to them, as though breathing it in, and Perturabo saw with a sinking heart that the chamber was now full of the things.

Thousands upon thousands of them.

‘Fulgrim!’ shouted Perturabo.

But his brother was nowhere to be seen.

Forrix smashed his fist through yet another of the eldar wraiths, its insubstantial form as vulnerable to damage as any body of flesh and blood. It broke apart in an explosion of light shards and a deathly cry that faded like a lost dream. But just as they could be wounded, so too were they able to cause harm. Forrix’s chest was icy cold where one of the wraiths had simply reached through his armour to clutch at his heart.

A backhanded blow had dissipated the ghostly essence, but Forrix had not forgotten the lesson. His ring of Terminators ploughed through the ghostly ranks of the eldar, crushing, swiping and tearing at their mist-formed bodies. Three of his warriors were already dead, left behind on the plaza without any obvious wounds upon them.

Julius Kaesoron fought at his side, a hateful presence, but a welcome additional fighter.

Kaesoron’s madness might have brought this about, but the man could kill like no other.

Gunfire from the battlements of the strongpoint surrounded them, battering the wraiths from behind iron walls. Mass-reactives were rendered impotent, passing through the ghostly bodies of their attackers and exploding on impact with the ground.

‘Fists only!’ shouted Forrix. ‘Save the bolter rounds for the constructs!’

The weapon systems of the Tormentor flensed the plaza, sawing arcs of lascannon fire and chugging barks of heavy bolters cutting down constructs by the dozen and vaporising wraiths with every bolt of laser energy. Forrix batted aside a sword blade of mist and light, punching his enormous fist through the shimmering helm of the eldar ghost before him. It vanished with a diminishing scream of loss, but more were there to take its place.

Thunderous streams of light blazed overhead as the Mortis engines duelled with the colossal guardians of the sepulchre. Streaks of cannon fire, plasma comets and flaming ordnance lit the sky in a furious borealis of weapon discharges. Void shield flares sent arcs of static leaping from every metallic surface. The entire strongpoint was wreathed in tendrils of lightning.

The ground shook as the Titans jockeyed for position between the nearby mausolea. The eldar war machines were faster and blurred with haloed streams of refracted light, but the Mortis engines were belligerent maulers who excelled in close-range brawls.

‘Incoming!’ cried Kaesoron, with relish.

Moving with spindly grace, the glassy constructs moved unimpeded through the spectral army, their arms blazing with blinding emerald bolts. The majority of them were tearing at the strongpoint, ripping sheets of armour from the walls with their bare hands or unleashing pulsing streams of energy at the warriors upon the battlements, but a vengeful group was rushing towards Forrix and his remaining warriors.

Kaesoron barrelled towards the constructs, his fists mashing into the nearest and breaking it in two. He took a blow to the head that almost toppled him, but he moved with a speed that astonished Forrix. Cataphractii armour offered a warrior many advantages, but speed wasn’t normally one of them.

Kaesoron righted himself and crushed his attacker’s head between his fists, laughing as he did so, as though now privy to the universe’s ultimate joke. He fought like a man possessed, his raw-meat face writhing in the throes of some miraculous transformation.

Forrix put Kaesoron from his mind as another of the smooth-skinned constructs charged him. He met its fist with his own, the two colliding with a searing discharge of polarised energies. He felt the fiery charge race up his arm, but the heavy plates and thick insulation of his armour kept the worst of the pain at bay. It had made the first strike, but that was all it was getting.

Forrix swung his other arm up and fired a stream of explosive rounds into its groin. Glass and light spewed from the wound as they punched through its vitrified body. The thing backed away, but Forrix wasn’t about to let it go. He stepped in and thundered his fist into its bulbous head. It staggered, and another blast from his combi-bolter tore the top of its skull off. Another came at him, but a stabbing blast of retina-searing light from the strongpoint’s battlements punched into its chest and blew it apart in a storm of molten glass.

Another of his warriors died, his head crushed by an overhand blow from one of the crystal giants. His helmet a flattened ruin, his skull a mass of pulped bone and blood, the body refused to fall – kept upright by the bulk of his armour.

‘Get to the gate!’ shouted the Stonewrought over the vox. ‘I’ll be ready to get you back in.’

A roiling fireball lit the air above the battle, and Forrix risked a glance up as he saw what looked like an enormous pipe or hive conduit fall through the layer of gunsmoke. It took a moment for him to realise he was seeing the shorn length of a Titan’s cannon. The weapon barrel slammed into the ground with seismic force and the deafening crash of its shattering structure echoed like the pealing of the Eternity Bell of Olympia on the day the Legion had first departed its mountainous glory.

Braying warhorns screamed in pain and the electric tang and flare of void shields made the plates of Forrix’s armour twitch.

‘Keep moving, damn you!’ growled Kaesoron, his capricious mood now enraged.

‘I need no lessons from you, Kaesoron!’ barked Forrix, angry it had taken a warrior of the Emperor’s Children to remind him of the fundamental rule of warfare in Cataphractii armour. Movement and momentum were the key. Keep lumbering forwards and there was little that could stop you, but lose that momentum and it would be nigh impossible to regain in the face of enemy fire.

‘I beg to differ,’ spat Kaesoron, punching through the middle of a construct and heading towards the sealed gate of the strongpoint. Forrix followed him, his fist pummelling and his combi-bolter roaring as he stomped forwards.

The last of his warriors was dragged down, overwhelmed by the spectral warriors and their ghostly touch of death. His screams over the vox were silenced in an instant, and Forrix cursed the Phoenician anew for bringing them to this place.

‘Damn you, Kaesoron, and damn Slaanesh!’

No sooner had the last name spilled from his lips than his stomach spasmed and his mouth filled with bile. Forrix unsuccessfully fought back a wave of nausea, and sour vomit spurted over his teeth. It pooled before him, choking and acrid, and super-efficient acids ate into his helmet’s systems. Fumes rose from the mechanisms, stinging his eyes.

Blinded, Forrix kept moving and swept his combi-bolter around with the last of his shells. He reached up and tore his ruined helmet free. The sounds of battle surged, booming reports of high-velocity solid rounds, the electric crack of energy weapons and the barking of small-arms fire.

Something enormous exploded nearby. He couldn’t see what. Heat washed over him and he saw the strongpoint silhouetted by a towering mushroom cloud striated with electric blue plasma discharge.

A hand gripped the edge of his breastplate and hauled him onwards. His eyes were streaming, but he saw Kaesoron dragging him to the gateway. Each Rhino reversed enough for them to squeeze through and a roaring blast of bolters and handfuls of grenades were lobbed back outside. The detonations were hardly audible over the crash of war-engine guns overhead.

‘Situational update,’ he demanded of the Stonewrought, spitting the last caustic mouthful of bile. Flashes of muzzle fire ringed the interior of the strongpoint as the army of wraiths fought to get inside.

‘It’s bad,’ said Soltarn Vull Bronn. ‘The fortifications at the wall are under siege on all sides. A mix of the statue creatures and these…’ He almost couldn’t bring himself to say it. ‘Ghosts.’

‘Any word from the primarch?’

‘None,’ said the Stonewrought.

Forrix nodded. ‘What about Toramino?’

‘No word of any hostilities,’ said the Stonewrought. ‘Looks like the citadel’s getting all the attention, warsmith.’

‘Then we might live through this yet,’ said Forrix, unclipping a vox-caster from the nearest Rhino.

Perturabo cursed taking his eye from his brother, but knew Fulgrim would have found a way to engineer his scheme no matter what he had done. The creatures oozing from the towers were growing ever more numerous, tightening the ring around the great plume of rushing light.

His Iron Warriors remained at his side, alongside a small cadre of Emperor’s Children who stood sentinel at the beginning of the ramp that led down into the shaft. At least the question as to where Fulgrim had gone was answered. The Phoenician’s mortal followers, with their bulky containers still strapped to their backs, stood at the very edge of the abyss, their faces alight with the passion of zealotry. He recognised the stuttering movements of Eidolon and the fluid grace of the scar-faced swordsman, Lucius. Scores of Emperor’s Children whipped them into place, though there appeared to be no need for violence as the mortals were only too happy in their tasks.

Perturabo had no time to wonder at their actions, and hauled Forgebreaker from his back, gasping at the sudden weight of it. Where he could normally bear it with the ease a mortal man might lift a dagger, its weight now seemed to be exponentially greater with every passing moment.

‘My lord?’ said Barban Falk.

Perturabo shook off his moment of weakness and held the weapon out before him.

‘From iron cometh strength!’ he shouted.

‘From strength cometh will,’ returned his warriors.

‘From will cometh faith!’

‘From faith cometh honour.’

Perturabo hoisted Forgebreaker onto his shoulder and completed the Unbreakable Litany as he charged the foe. ‘From honour cometh iron!’

Five died to his first hammerstrike, six to the next. With the Iron Circle formed up around him, Perturabo was a force of nature. His hammer was death’s instrument and he smashed the enemy to broken shards as it looped around his body in ever wider circles. The weapons mounted on his gauntlet blazed with fire, and he reaped a fearsome harvest of the eldar machine-things.

The Iron Warriors fought shoulder to shoulder, disciplined and unbreakable. Their locked bolters roared with relentless ferocity, smashing the brittle bodies of their enemies to glittering shards. Falk commanded the left, Kroeger the right, and the two flanks were the walls of an impregnable fortress fashioned from flesh and blood.

Berossus smashed the eldar creations apart with every blow, his blitzing cannon, crushing hammer and brutish body unstoppable. Streaking bolts of emerald fire glanced from his casket and flared upon his armoured flanks. Berossus had been a powerful warrior in life, but as a Dreadnought he had ascended to another level of ferocity.

Hundreds of the eldar creatures broke against the iron bulwark, hurled back time and time again until freshly extruded things emerged from the towers with glowing soulstones at their hearts. The Emperor’s Children on the far side of the shaft were under attack, and Perturabo saw that they were protecting the men and women standing behind them.

What was so important about those mortals?

Perturabo’s hammer smashed heads, his fist broke limbs, and his kill tally rose in geometric leaps. Falk and Kroeger fought their own private battles, each warrior in his element as they fought to keep the eldar creatures from their primarch.

Against such overwhelming numbers, Perturabo knew it was a losing battle, but what else was there to do but fight?

His gene-father had always said that a bad plan was better than no plan, and one began to form in his mind as he pushed the eldar ghost machines back again. The things birthed from the towers were relentless, but individually they were no match for the Iron Warriors. Bathed in the glow of the column of light, Perturabo saw they were insensate things, given animation but without direction other than to attack. They fought without strategy or a plan.

Their only remit was to kill these intruders, no matter how many of them were destroyed in the process. They could be held off for a time, but sheer numbers would eventually win the day for them. Even Perturabo could not fight so many and live, but he realised there might yet be a chance to save something from this debacle.

He stepped back from the fighting lines and, together with the Iron Circle, marched back to the edge of the plunging shaft at the chamber’s heart. The Emperor’s Children at the ramp lifted their guns at his approach, but Perturabo shook his head.

‘Kill them all,’ he said.

The robotic warriors of the Iron Circle opened fire, heavy cannons and plasma weaponry punching all but one of the Emperor’s Children from his feet. The broken bodies were snatched up by the curtain of light as though caught in the rapids of a fast-flowing river. Perturabo watched their bodies wink out of existence as they were hurled into the blackness above.

Perturabo shot the last warrior with a precise blast from his gauntlet-mounted weapon. He felt no regret at killing the legionary. He had made his choice to stand against Perturabo and that was a death sentence, no matter to which Legion you owed your allegiance. He strode to the edge of the shaft, feeling the almost irresistible power of the emerald light as it thundered through the air towards the singularity above. Fulgrim’s remaining followers stared at Perturabo with undisguised hatred, the need for masks of brotherhood shed now that their master’s final deception was in effect.

Below, the ramp spiralled down towards a vanishing point, and Perturabo could almost believe that it led to the very centre of the world. Even as the thought occurred, he knew it to be true. That was exactly where this would lead him. To the heart of an artificially wrought planet, where the secret of Fulgrim’s desire had been hidden from sight since a time before mortal memory.

Perturabo saw Barban Falk coming towards him, knowing what he was going to say before he even heard the words over the vox.

‘Save your breath, my son,’ he said. ‘Where I go, you cannot follow.’

Perturabo stepped into the light, feeling its raging power tugging at his armour as it sought to tear him from the ground. This was not physical force, but the immutable will of the lives that made up this light, for he now understood that this was no elemental energy or mechanically generated motive force, but the distilled essence of all those who had died here.

And who still remained imprisoned within the glittering gemstones.

This was no abandoned world, it was a repository of the never-dead. Limbo souls whose bodies were no more, but whose spirits endured a twilight existence of incorporeality.

He could think of no crueller fate than to be consigned to such emptiness.

Perturabo descended into the heart of their world.

The guns of the Stor-bezashk trailed streamers of ghostly green corposant, as though a storm were gathering in the clashing skies. Toramino watched his gunmasters and their crews hauling shells from sunken casements, working with machine-like efficiency to ready their weapons to open up.

Forrix had blurted his demand for a final protective fire mission over the vox with breathless haste; a corridor of shelling to link the strongpoint at the sepulchre and the walls of the citadel. A clear zone was to be established between the two fortresses for when the time came to fall back to the landing zone. Toramino recalled that the vox-link had been distorted with static, laced with the unending keening of the wind, thus rendering the triarch’s words open to wilful misinterpretation.

A tragic error of communications, but one familiar to any warrior on the battlefield.

He scrolled through the topographical representation of the citadel, its blocky buildings picked out in white, the location of the Iron Warriors strongpoints marked in blue. The points of impact and areas of effect were red dots that expanded into circles of orange then yellow and finally to green.

Red and blue overlapped at the fortification occupied by Forrix and the Stonewrought. Toramino had nothing particular against Soltarn Vull Bronn, and his loss would rob the Legion of valuable insights, but that was a price Toramino was more than willing to pay. With such precise target information, the gunmasters of the Stor-bezashk needed no ranging shots or spotters. Toramino stood at the edge of the battlements, looking out over the smoking outline of the citadel. The shimmering green haze he’d seen on the horizon earlier had bypassed the landing zone, much to his relief, leaving the contravallations untouched. The billowing cloud of swirling shapes and half-glimpsed forms had swept on with unstoppable fury towards the fortifications around the citadel’s wall, where pillars of smoke and leaping columns of fire attested to the ferocity of the fighting within.

The final readiness icon flickered green on his data-slate and Toramino turned back to the multitude of gun barrels raised to the sky. These were his guns, his warriors. The Stor-bezashk answered to him and him alone. Soon they would be the honour guard of a triarch, and with that thought uppermost in his mind, he tapped the blinking red icon on his slate.

‘Fire for effect,’ he said.

TWENTY-THREE

Voices of the Dead
The Glory of the Fallen
The Harvester

The light enfolded Perturabo and he felt the millions of spirits enmeshed in its dense wavelengths and spectra. At least Fulgrim hadn’t lied about one thing: a civilisation had ended here, though this was but a fraction of the lives that had been lost in that calamitous fall from grace. He neither knew nor cared what had happened to the eldar. Their doom was of an earlier age, its causes immaterial to him.

That they were declining to their eventual extinction was enough.

The dead of Iydris were still here and their spirits – though he disliked the supernatural connotations of that word – were woven into the substance of the light roaring up from whatever lay at the bottom of this shaft. The horror of their deaths was here too, and Perturabo felt their desperate hunger to imprint its tale upon him. He resisted, for he had other business to be about, but the farther he descended on the circling ramp, the harder they tried. His every step reverberated with echoes that lasted far longer and resonated far deeper than they had any right to, as though he no longer travelled on paths that could ever be mapped.

Though superficially obvious in its course, Perturabo understood that he was travelling a route not meant for humans, one where each downwards step bore no relation to distance in the world above. Glittering diamonds sparked in the walkway, skittering away from his footfalls like tiny crystalline arachnids. The wall next to him was utterly smooth, featureless save for the extrusion of the ground upon which he stood, though Perturabo saw hints of wraith-like forms swimming in its substance. They reached for him, but their essences were trapped within their crystal prison and could not escape.

All sounds of fighting from above had ceased, swallowed by the roar of the light and the susurration of billions of voices clamouring to be heard. Though he closed his thoughts to their touch, he couldn’t shut them out entirely. His mind was fashioned from the gene-structure of the Emperor, with perceptions and sensitivities beyond the comprehension of lesser minds.

The dead of Iydris could feel that and screamed at him with all their might.

Trapped in the heart of the Eye of Terror with only their fellow doomed souls around them, the chance to converse with a mind capable of listening was not to be missed. The dead of an entire world shouted their tales to him, a screaming wail of impenetrable sound. Yet in death, as in life, some voices were louder than others, and Perturabo perceived fragments of their lives.

They spoke of their loves, their dreams and their hopes. Of their loss, their aching loneliness, the fading hopes of their kin returning for them and the fear of that which pressed on the ever-shrinking borders of their doomed world.

But most of all they spoke of the unnatural desires that had driven them deeper and deeper into hedonistic indulgence, the wanton lusts and heedless descents into madness that had undone them. A lifetime of sorrow pressed in on Perturabo, but he fought against their maudlin laments.

‘You chose your path to destruction,’ he snarled. ‘Every one of you brought your deaths upon yourselves and I have no pity for you. You got what you deserved.’

Only as the voices of the dead kept pressing in upon him, telling him of the horror their lives had brought about and the route by which their doom had unfolded, did Perturabo come to understand they were not seeking his pity. They cared nothing for his understanding and his judgement was worthless to them.

The world of dead voices sought no boon from him.

They were warning him.

Beware She Who Thirsts…

Down, ever downwards.

An unending spiral towards a point of light that grew no brighter no matter how far he descended or how fast he strode. He began to doubt the wisdom of his course, but Perturabo had never given up on anything once he had begun, and this would be no different. He wondered how Fulgrim could have got so far ahead of him, but reasoned that time and distance held little meaning in this place.

He would find Fulgrim and he would kill him.

That fact alone sustained Perturabo as the voices of the dead became ever more insistent. He marched onwards, forcing himself into a kind of fugue state to keep his thoughts his own. His limbs moved mechanically; one foot in front of the other, ever downwards. Deeper and deeper.

The upper reaches of the plunging shaft were soon lost to sight in the haze of streaming light, but whatever lay at the bottom drew no closer. He thought back to the cliffs of Lochos, remembering a similar feeling as he climbed towards the unknown future at the top. But he had reached the top of that cliff, just as he would reach the bottom of this shaft.

He wondered if he would make that same climb again, knowing what he knew now, that only betrayal, bitterness and pain lay above him.

Might it not have been better to let go of the cliff and plunge to his death? Would it not have been easier to let his brains be dashed out on the rocks below? To be spared the cold, cheerless years to adulthood, without friends and kind words. Insulted by tutors whose teachings he mastered and surpassed in a matter of days, and mistrusted by a surrogate father who had cursed him the day he left his side to join his gene-sire in the stars.

Easier, yes, but easy had never been Perturabo’s way.

Long is the way, and hard, that leads out of hell and up to light.

The last remaining fragments of a proscribed book that had found its way into Perturabo’s personal library, but truer than even its lost writer could ever have known.

And from Olympia, what then?

A century and more of war, where his sons had broken their backs on countless worlds, bringing the strongholds of system tyrants and alien dominators to ruin. Campaign after campaign, battle after battle, each more gruelling than the last, each hope of a war of manoeuvre or a war of marching formations cruelly dashed by fresh tasking orders to resistant systems that knew the science of fortress-building better than most.

‘Perturabo throws men at walls,’ Dorn had once said of him. ‘If the Araakites so much as thought a wall he would pelt it with our legionaries as if there were no other way.’

The words had been said in jest, grim humour in the wake of a costly war of compliance in the Araaki Spiral, to imply shared adversity, but Perturabo hadn’t seen any of Rogal Dorn’s golden warriors up to their necks in mud and shit in the trenches. The Araakites had known their craft, and every stronghold was dug in deep around narrow passes, remote hilltops and natural barriers in the landscape. The system rock was bitter and hostile, the enemy warriors no less so, and it had taken many years for the IV Legion to regain its former strength.

Great works of art and heroic verse were composed in the wake of the victory, celebrating the courage of the Imperial Fists, the Dark Angels and the White Scars, but nowhere in the reams of poetry or artwork were the grim labours of the Iron Warriors judged worthy of note. Only in a predella to a larger work of Kelan Roget had warriors of the IV Legion even been shown, a lone Apothecary removing the gene-seed of a dying legionary as the flag of the Fists flew over a captured fortress.

The Glory of the Fallen it had been called, and Perturabo had sought out the artist so he could procure the piece for himself. Roget had been thrilled at his interest, but his pleasure had turned to dismay as Perturabo put it to the torch.

‘If my sons are not to be honoured properly then they will not be part of a record that glorifies another,’ Perturabo had told the horrified artist as the flames consumed the painting.

Perturabo heard afterwards that Dorn had offered a rich commission for the artist to repaint the predella, but Roget had declined. At least one mortal understood him. He hadn’t thought of that moment in decades, and knew that the voices of the dead were pushing his thoughts to days gone by, forcing him to relive his own path if he would not listen to theirs.

‘No man can buy back his past,’ he told the light. ‘So I’ll waste neither breath nor thought upon it.’

The journey downwards was never-ending, or so it seemed until it ended.

Perturabo had tuned out the dead, heeding their warnings while at the same time ignorant of their substance. Grim tales of their mistakes and follies did not interest him and only that curious phrase – Beware She Who Thirsts – had lodged in his mind like a buried splinter.

He had never heard of any such being, nor could he divine anyone who might fit such a description. Females had been few in number within his Legion’s expeditionary fleets, and virtually nonexistent since he had purged the remembrancers from his ships. Any woman worthy of such a title would certainly have been known to him.

The levelling-out of the walkway caught Perturabo by surprise, his steps faltering as he realised he’d reached the bottom of the shaft. He looked up, the vague diaspora of his thoughts cohering into his singular purpose in taking this downward path. He unhooked Forgebreaker from his back, not surprised to find that the physical geometry of where he had arrived bore no relation to the route he had taken to reach it.

He stood at the origin of a slender bridge that arched out to the centre of a spherical chamber of incredible, sanity-defying proportions. The footings of the bridge were anchored on the equator, and a score of other bridges reached out to where a seething ball of numinous jade light blazed like a miniature sun. Its dimensions were impossible to guess, for the chamber itself was beyond anything he had dreamed possible.

Iydris, it transpired, was a hollow world, its core this colossal void with the impossibly bright sun at its heart. The shadows of the bridges danced on the inner face of the void, in which were set innumerable gemstones like those that guarded the surface. This was the source of the light, and of the voices that had plagued him on his descent with their tedious woes.

The curving walls were of a smoky, fire-veined stone, hued green by the fixed sun. The gems set within the inner faces of this spherical realm formed a firmament of stars, billions of glittering points of light that surrounded him above and below. Perturabo took a step out onto the bridge, looking down past its edges to the shimmering stones in the gloom, like bioluminescent creatures of the deep ocean slowly rising to the surface. His step faltered as a previously unknown sense of vertigo seized him. He took a moment to regain his equilibrium, slowing his breathing and letting his sense of spatial geometry recalibrate to the sheer vastness of the space in which he found himself. Perturabo walked out onto the bridge, no more than a metre in width and no thicker than an insubstantial treatise. Like the others around the chamber, it sloped on a gentle upward arc, the curve corresponding to the outer edges of the golden ratio.

Like the walkway that had brought him here, his steps covered distance with no regard for the physical laws of the universe, and the enormity of the green sun became apparent as he drew near the exact centre of Iydris. Perturabo kept his eyes fixed forwards, seeing a wavering silhouette against the incandescence ahead of him.

Fulgrim stood upon an elliptical platform at the terminus of the bridge, basking in the radiance of the sun’s energy. Perturabo made no attempt to soften his tread, knowing Fulgrim would already be aware of his approach.

‘This is what you came here for?’ said Perturabo. ‘This is the Angel Exterminatus?’

Fulgrim turned and his smile of welcome was so utterly genuine that Perturabo briefly entertained the notion that perhaps he was mistaken in thinking he had been betrayed.

‘No, this is nothing,’ grinned Fulgrim, shaking his head. ‘Alien necromancy, nothing more.’

‘So there never were any weapons?’

‘Not as your stunted intellect would understand it, no.’

‘And the Angel Exterminatus? It doesn’t exist either, does it?’

‘Not yet, brother,’ said Fulgrim. ‘But with your help, it soon will.’

Fulgrim laughed at his bemused expression, cruel even in victory. ‘Even after the bleating warnings of the eldar, you still don’t understand.’

‘Then illuminate me,’ said Perturabo, hefting his hammer onto his shoulder.

‘It’s me,’ said Fulgrim. ‘I am to be the Angel Exterminatus.’

The strongpoint was an island of iron amid an ocean of ghostly green wraiths and their glass-limbed counterparts. For all that their bodies were insubstantial, some immutable essence of the life they once lived or some unknown quality of the Iron Warriors defences kept them from simply passing through the solid matter of the modular fortress.

Razorwire tore smoky matter from their bodies and physical trauma destroyed them as surely as a living foe. They could not penetrate the walls on their own, but the energy blasts of the wraith-constructs could put them asunder for the wraiths to breach. Their weightless forms could climb the riveted iron of the walls and storm the ramparts, and their hands could tear the heart from a warrior even through the protection of his warplate.

Forrix smashed his fist through the glass-domed helm of a tall construct as it clambered over the smoking, molten ruin of a destroyed Rhino making up part of the eastern wall. A blast of combi-bolter fire punched through the back of its head. He stepped back over the shattered remains of three of its brethren, letting Iron Warriors in power armour take his place.

Their guns shredded the gathering wraiths that pushed their way into the breach.

‘Stonewrought,’ he voxed, moving to stand in the shadow of Tormentor on its raised central plinth. ‘Eastern breach contained.’

The Shadowsword was confined to being a static weapons platform while the assault of the wraith army continued. The strongpoint would need to be dismantled before it could drive out, but with its many guns flaying the eldar attack, there was little need to expose it to the enemy’s close-range attention.

‘Some of those constructs coming for the gate,’ answered Vull Bronn. ‘Big ones.’

The Stonewrought fought from the upper hatch of the Tormentor, manning its cupola reaper cannon with steady traverses and directing the fire and deployment of the warriors on the ramparts.

‘Come on, Toramino,’ snarled Forrix. ‘Get those Stor-bezashk of yours breaking a sweat!’

Deafening blasts of warhorns and the slam of heavy glass limbs echoed from the walls of the citadel as the Mortis engines and the eldar Titans did battle somewhere nearby. Snatches of vox-echoes from nearby legionaries suggested to Forrix that only Mortis Vult was still in the fight, but he expected no aid from the Reaver unless it was somehow able to inflict engine kills on both eldar ghost machines.

On each of the strongpoint’s four walls, warriors in burnished iron, gold and jet fought the dead of Iydris with relentless, machine-like precision. Each warrior knew his role in the battle and with all of them working as one, their defence was unbreakable. Their bolters were firing down into the plaza in sequential volleys. As one warrior exhausted his magazine, he would step back from the firing line to reload as his brothers closed ranks.

For now, Forrix and a company-strength detachment were acting as a mobile reserve, plugging the gaps. Though he was all that remained of this detachment’s Terminator contingent, one warrior so clad was a force multiplier not to be taken lightly. So far he and his men had sealed five breaches and prevented twice as many line breaks.

Watching the indomitable fortitude of his Legion brothers on the ramparts, Forrix was reminded of the clockwork automata the Lord of Iron built in the early days of the Crusade. He remembered a golden lion that was to be presented to the master of the Dark Angels, but which had never been finished, a bronze horse that had been designed for a great centrepiece at Nikaea and never used and a celestial timepiece that Guilliman had mounted on the tallest tower of his Temple of Correction on Macragge.

The Iron Warriors made war a thing of beauty, a science that was as magical as any lurid tales of bloody courage and heroism told by the likes of the Vlka Fenryka or the riders of Chogoris.

Neon bolts of energy flailed around the fortress, battering its structure and punching through previously weakened points. The vehicles’ damage-reduction mechanisms fought to repair the impacts, but the onboard components for achieving full functionality had long since been expended. The inner faces of the strongpoint were heaped with Legion dead, their bodies punched clean through by the plasma weapons of the enemy or torn open by ethereal claws.

Yes, the Iron Warriors were fighting like a well-oiled machine, but its component parts were being worn down. At current rates of attrition, the last round would be fired from a bolter within the next three minutes.

Forrix lumbered over to the gateway of Rhinos as a blast of blue-hot energy punched out of the crew compartment of one. Metal exploded outwards, molten droplets of adamantium and plasma residue dribbling to the ground. The two Rhinos boomed and rocked back under a terrific impact. Another blow and the stricken vehicles slammed back as though they had been struck by a siege Titan’s wrecking ball.

The skidding tank spun around as though on ice, heading straight for him.

Forrix braced his shoulder and leaned into the impact.

The Rhino slammed into him, its momentum almost unstoppable.

Almost.

Terminator armour turned a warrior into a man-portable tank, and matched with the cold iron of Forrix, the Rhino was going to come off worst. The vehicle buckled, stopping dead, and Forrix pushed it back the way it had come. Two of the eldar constructs, each twice as tall as a legionary, punched through the gateway, their limbs ablaze with emerald fire.

One staggered as the Rhino crashed into it. The weight of the vehicle broke its legs and it went down beneath the Rhino. Forrix charged the other, his gait ponderous but inexorable. The construct saw him coming and levelled its arm at him, a slender limb ending in a long-barrelled lance-like weapon.

Forrix could not hope to avoid the blast and steeled himself to fight through the impact.

Pulsing streams of energy slammed into him and Forrix yelled in pain as the plastron of his armour was shredded by the quickfire blasts. Fiery heat enveloped his chest, and but for the rigidity of his battle-plate, he would have fallen. The backwash of searing heat from the weapon melted away his vulcanised cowl and dragged the air from his lungs.

Forrix gasped for breath, knowing he could not survive another blast.

The tip of the construct’s weapon powered up to fire again, but before it could kill him, a streaking white contrail flashed overhead and struck it in the centre of its elongated head. The Tormentor’s hunter-killer missile detonated with a thunderclap and the construct was burned to liquid in the blink of an eye, its death scream cut short.

Forrix turned his head and saw the Stonewrought with his shoulder bent to the auxiliary launch tube on the Tormentor’s turret.

‘Fine shot, Stonewrought,’ said Forrix, pointing over Vull Bronn’s shoulder as a towering shadow engulfed the strongpoint. ‘But there’s a better target for you.’

Emerging from the rogue thermals and swirling vortices of smoke on the northern side of the strongpoint was the last eldar Titan. Its upper carapace bled light from the damage it had taken, and one spine-wing hung broken at its shoulder. It limped from a wound that gushed light in its leg, and was surely on the verge of dissolution. Both Mortis engines must have been put down, but they had clearly given a good account of themselves. The towering machine’s one remaining arm was a monstrously oversized variant of the weapon that had almost killed Forrix a moment before, and he knew that one shot would wipe them from the face of the planet.

The Stonewrought dropped into the Tormentor and the enormous turret immediately began to grind around on powerful servos. The barrel of the main gun elevated, a Phaeton-pattern volcano cannon. A Titan-killer.

Forrix didn’t move. He saw little point.

Whoever fired first would kill the other; the brutal arithmetic of war at its simplest.

Before either the Titan or the Shadowsword could fire, Forrix heard the unmistakable sound of incoming ordnance. He spun around and saw arcing lines of massed artillery fire streaking through the lower reaches of the atmosphere before nosing over and heading towards the earth.

‘About bloody time, Toramino,’ he said.

‘You’re the Angel Exterminatus?’ said Perturabo, not knowing whether to laugh at his brother’s self-aggrandisement or stoke his rage with the arrogance of it. ‘You always did have an appetite for rampant narcissism, but this is the grandest delusion yet.’

Fulgrim spread his arms wide and let the seething tempest of the rising light billow his cloak out behind him. The light of the green sun haloed his head and limned his body in sickly radiance.

‘I don’t expect you to understand, brother,’ said Fulgrim, and it took Perturabo a moment to realise his brother was no longer standing on the ground, but slowly rising to float above it. ‘For the devotee of a long-dead man of feverishly inventive imagination and unquenchable curiosity, I imagine you would have made a poor pupil. You lack vision, brother dear, you always have. But what should we expect from a grubber in the dirt? Your nose always pressed to the mud, what chance did you have of grasping the rapturous horizons within our reach?’

Perturabo moved towards Fulgrim, but he had taken only a step when his brother spoke a single word. Its nightmare syllables tore at Perturabo’s brain like a barbed awl driven through his ear and into the heart of his skull. He stumbled, dropping to one knee as his nervous system shrieked in pain.

He pushed himself back to his feet, gritting his teeth against the grinding of his bones and the creak of every sinew as it threatened to snap.

‘Impressive, brother,’ said Fulgrim in surprise. ‘There are few who can resist the true name of the Profligate One.’

Fulgrim’s words made no sense, but Perturabo didn’t need to understand his brother to kill him. He kept on through the pain, each step a battle he wasn’t sure he could win. The weariness that had kept him aching and sporadically weak returned to stab him with draining force. Forgebreaker now felt like a dead weight on his shoulder and he had to fight for every breath, his lungs being crushed within his chest.

‘You are mighty, Perturabo, the mightiest of us all, perhaps,’ said Fulgrim with real admiration in his voice. ‘I suspect that is why it took the maugetar stone so long to drain enough of your strength.’

‘The… harvester?’ said Perturabo, his grasp of the eldar tongue fading and sluggish.

‘My gift to you,’ said Fulgrim, pointing a slender finger to Perturabo’s chest, where the golden gemstone at the centre of the skull-carved cloak pin now pulsed with its own internal heartbeat. ‘Your faculty with labyrinths was not the only reason it had to be you.’

‘Why what had to be me?’ hissed Perturabo, knowing his brother’s need to inflate his own ego would buy him some time.

‘A sacrifice is only a sacrifice if what is offered is valued greatly,’ said Fulgrim. ‘And your strength is valued very greatly. By me and the Warmaster. Horus will be angry, of course, but when he sees what I have become, he will realise the value of your death.’

‘You intend to kill me?’

Fulgrim gave him a faux-regretful grin. ‘That is rather the point of a sacrifice.’

‘Why? What do you think to gain by it?’

‘Ah,’ said Fulgrim, lifting his arms until they were outstretched to the glittering starscape of embedded gemstones. ‘Do you remember how I told you that many secrets had been revealed to me?’

Perturabo nodded, fighting to overcome the crushing lethargy wrapping his limbs in leaden weights. Fulgrim’s grin threatened to split his face, maniacal and hungry.

‘I told you I would share those secrets with you one day and that they would bring us closer than ever. Today is that day,’ said the Phoenician, and Perturabo sank to his knees as jolting pain surged through his body. It felt as though his heart had been pierced by a surgeon’s lance that was slowly draining him of his vital essence.

‘I am not the same person you knew, brother,’ said Fulgrim, drifting towards him through the air. ‘Even before Isstvan I was changing, though I did not know it. It began on Laeran, but I suppose that’s not important to you. The race that called that oceanic rock home worshipped beings I mistook for invented species memory from their earliest prehistory, but I was wrong, brother. Their gods were real. Very real.’

‘Gods?’

Fulgrim waved away the pejorative associations. ‘Entities so powerful they might as well be called gods. They are to mankind as we are to microbes: towering and immortal, magnificent and all-powerful.’

‘A microbe can still kill in great enough numbers,’ pointed out Perturabo, but Fulgrim ignored him.

‘Such entities dwell in the roiling depths of the warp and in return for power beyond imagining all they demand is devotion. One such being craved my body and, for a time, claimed it as its own to wreak great harm in my name.’

Fulgrim’s features twisted in distaste, as though an argument raged in his flesh all the way down to the cellular level.

‘As this creature learned of me, I too learned of it and discovered how to fight it. We struggled for mastery of my flesh, and eventually reached a form of… compromise.’

Perturabo heard the scorn in that last word, knowing any kind of half-measures were anathema to the Phoenician.

‘I regained control of my body, but the touch of a creature of Chaos is a wound that never heals, stigmata that forever bleed. Without its presence I could never reach the exultant highs of perfection. No matter what I did, a piece of me was always left… wanting. I was a vessel that could never be filled, an itch never scratched, a hunger never satisfied. So I resolved to become like it. And here we are.’

‘And where is that?’

‘Here,’ said Fulgrim, clenching his fists and drawing his arms back towards his chest.

Perturabo heard a million cracks of what sounded like splitting bone, and the shimmering lights above him shifted. It seemed as though the far distant walls of the chamber were moving, and moments later he saw why.

At first it was like an approaching fog, like the dimly perceived movement of the galaxy’s outer spirals, but then Perturabo saw that it was something infinitely worse. Every single gemstone that had been set within the walls was hurtling towards the green sun blazing at Fulgrim’s back.

The glittering stones sped towards them like bullets, but the instant before impact, Fulgrim extended his palms and they ceased their forward movement, forming a sphere of shimmering gems around the sun. Only the upper reaches of the sphere remained open, through which Perturabo could see only darkness.

Was it just his fading sight or was the light of the sun diminishing? Like a star that had exhausted its inner reserves of fuel, the green star was collapsing into its doom. Its surface raged as it fought for existence, but it was a fight Perturabo could see it was destined to lose.

He slid Forgebreaker from his shoulder and with its head resting on the ground, pushed himself upright once more.

‘On your knees or on your feet, it makes no difference to what is going to happen,’ said Fulgrim.

‘It matters to me,’ said Perturabo, though the effort of speaking was almost too much for him. ‘If I am going to die, then I’ll do so standing up.’

‘I will miss you, brother,’ said Fulgrim, reaching down to pluck the golden stone from the silver skull at Perturabo’s breast. He set it within a cavity worked into the eagle upon his own breastplate, and sighed, like a slave to narcotics experiencing the bliss of the needle.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Fulgrim as the first faint threads of black streaked the stone. ‘Yes, it could be no other than you.’

Fulgrim stepped close to embrace him, a dreamy smile on his lips.

Perturabo felt sick at Fulgrim’s touch, but he barely had the strength to draw breath, let alone push him away. Fulgrim kissed both his cheeks and looked up with a rapturous expression on his face.

A glittering rain of broken glass was falling into the sphere, shards of crystal torn from the bedrock of another world and dropped into the upper reaches of the plunging shaft. This was what Fulgrim’s mortal followers had carried into the sepulchre on their backs.

‘And he shall build a glorious city of mirrors,’ said Fulgrim, radiant tears spilling from his eyes. ‘It shall be a city of mirages, at once solid and liquid, at once air and stone.’

Perturabo could not speak as Fulgrim pulled him tight to his breast once again.

‘Come, brother,’ said the Phoenician. ‘Let us ascend!’

And, so saying, Fulgrim and Perturabo flew back to the surface like entwined shooting stars, with millions of screaming gemstones trailing behind them in a glittering comet’s tail.

TWENTY-FOUR

Iron on Iron
Legacy of Blood
A Hard Fight

The Tormentor fired first, but in the end it didn’t matter: the strongpoint was destroyed anyway. The volcano cannon’s ignition recoil hurled the tank back on its raised platform, breaking the restraint couplings holding it in place with whipping cracks of high-tensile steel. Flailing cables snapped out, slicing through Iron Warriors by the dozen, their warplate no protection against such force.

Designed as a Titan-killer, the Shadowsword’s main gun was the deadliest weapon capable of being mounted on a tank. Its powerful laser could smash through the thickest armour, batter down layered void shields and deliver kinetic impact and explosive force greater than any other weapon in the Imperial arsenal, save those of the Titans themselves or the mighty Martian Ordinatus.

At close range, with its holo-fields useless and its hardened carapace bleeding cracks of light from the brawl with the Mortis engines, the eldar Titan had no chance.

Its upper torso simply vanished in a blaze of streaming light and shattering crystal. Absolutely nothing was left of the soaring war machine above its rotating hip-gimbals. It rocked back on the ruins of its legs, which swiftly became opaque as it haemorrhaged light like the final artillery salute at the Triumph of Ullanor. Cracks spread through the glassy substance of its remains, which collapsed down into itself like a sculpture made of ash.

Forrix let out a shuddering breath, but his elation was short-lived as he heard the steelwork and reinforced supporting elements of the Tormentor’s platform buckle under the hideous stresses the volcano cannon’s recoil had inflicted. The structure had never been designed with any thought to the super-heavy’s main gun being fired, and now that short-sightedness was about to prove costly.

With a creaking groan of disintegrating supports, the back portion of the platform began to keel over, falling with exponential swiftness as each member failed in a cascade of collapse. The super-heavy tilted, its powerful engine revving and the tracks grinding to gain purchase as the driver fought to slow their descent.

The Tormentor slammed down, the tracks hitting the ground already in motion. The toothed edges ripped up the rock, hurling chunks of broken stone throughout the compound, but instead of burying itself in the ground, the motion of the tracks pulled it along, and the front end of the massive tank slammed down intact.

The prow of the tank slewed around, and Forrix saw what happened next in slow motion. Hitting at an oblique angle, the Shadowsword roared around in a tight arc, the armoured flanks rushing towards him like an oncoming wall. Though he knew he couldn’t possibly outrun it, Forrix turned to get out of the wild spin of the madly revving track units.

The collision was like being kicked by a Titan, and Forrix felt the plates of his armour crumple, his onboard systems smashed beyond useless. Forrix rolled, sky and earth trading place many times before he finally skidded to a halt at the end of a trench his fall had gouged.

He struggled to catch his breath. He couldn’t move. The enmeshed nervous system controlling the fibre-bundle musculature of his armour was shattered. Only his own strength would move the heavy plates of armour now.

Forrix looked up as he heard the unmistakable whine of artillery shells. Toramino’s barrage was inbound, but a lifetime spent in the trenches watching streaks of explosive ordnance passing overhead had given Forrix a sixth sense as to the trajectory of any fire mission.

‘Blood of Olympia!’ he swore, pushing himself onto his side with a desperate heave.

The first shells landed seconds later, slamming down with percussive booms of earth-shaking force. Forrix was knocked flat as the north-east corner of the strongpoint vanished in a crescendo of noise and fire. Bodies tumbled from the wreckage, Iron Warriors bodies, missing limbs, missing heads, fused into armour burned black or simply atomised.

Whickering shrapnel spanked Forrix’s armour and he spun away, keeping his head low and letting the buckled backplate take the worst of the blast. The shockwave almost knocked him to the ground, but he kept low and braced himself with his fists. The noise and air pressure was incredible, and Forrix’s eardrums ruptured instantly as the breath was sucked from his lungs by differential waves.

Yet more shells landed, this time obliterating the gateway and leaving a fifteen-metre crater between two broken stubs of wall section.

More corpses. Blood misted the air, body parts fell in a rain of blackened flesh. Broken plates of armour bounced and ricocheted like razored axe blades. The western walls vanished in a sheeting wall of flame, followed by the southern ramparts. Falling debris hammered down around him: a bouncing helmet with the ragged stump of a neck protruding, a mangled bolter and a chainsword with a blade of yellow and black chevroning.

His warriors were dying. Murdered.

Intersecting shockwaves pounded through Forrix’s body, shaking him like a ragdoll and churning his genhanced anatomy. Only the ablating plates of his ruined armour saved his internal organs from liquefying entirely.

‘Cease fire!’ shouted Forrix. His voice sounded very far away.

He had no idea if his vox was even functional.

‘Iron on iron! Cease fire! Iron on iron!’

But the shelling continued unabated.

More and more rounds were falling, a radial bombardment pattern Forrix knew was centred on the strongpoint. A huge shape loomed from the mist before him, a roaring iron monster of thunder and noise. The vox sparked at his gorget, but he couldn’t hear anything beyond the muffled ringing and deadened whine of the blast-deafened.

The monster was coming to kill him.

It was the great beast of iron he had always known would one day kill him, ever since the oracle of Lochos had told him so as a boy. A childish fear, put away as a man, now rekindled in the face of its truth. Its great black maw opened and swallowed him whole, taking him down into a red-lit belly that stank of oil and machinery.

The shelling pounded the plaza to destruction. It struck the ground before the sepulchre over and over again with unrelenting impacts, utterly obliterating everything living, dead or somewhere inbetween. Smoke and lung-blisteringly hot air tore through the shattered remains of the strongpoint until nothing was left standing.

No stone upon another, no iron bound to iron, no heart still beating.

Glowing shards of glass showered Kroeger as he swung his chainblade low through the legs of an eldar construct. The creature toppled onto its side, streaming light from its shorn legs and breaking into thousands of pieces as it fell. Kroeger stamped down on the gemstone that fell from its skull-helm, relishing the sense of finality in its destruction. He fought with rapid, controlled movements, his sword always in motion, his pistol stabbing out with every shot as though to give each round more force as it killed.

The fighting was all up close and personal, the eldar ghost warriors pushing them ever closer to the edge of the plunging shaft at the centre. Kroeger could feel the pounding pressure of the light geysering from far below, but kept his attention fully on the relentless horde of crystalline foes.

Though he had seen Perturabo issue no command, the Iron Circle had split themselves into two forces, one assigned to each of the two triarchs. Barban Falk fought to Kroeger’s right, with three battle robots protecting his flanks and rear, and Kroeger likewise had three of the Colossus alongside him. The automata were not fast, nor were they especially skilled, but their shields pounded the eldar machines to broken shards with every blow and the chugging, booming thud of their shoulder cannons was enough to keep all but the luckiest enemies at bay.

Behind him, on the far side of the shaft, the Emperor’s Children waged their own war, fighting as though they expected reinforcements at any minute.

Kroeger’s inattention almost cost him dearly. A searing beam of emerald light struck him on the shoulder, spinning him around and causing him to lose his balance. An enemy warrior took advantage of his momentary distraction and fell upon him with a clubbing fist. The blow slammed into the side of his helm, fogging his visor with red warnings and crazing his vision with crackling traceries. He emptied his pistol into its chest as another creature battered him into the air with a sweeping, underhand blow. Kroeger slammed down at the edge of the shaft, losing his pistol as it skittered over the edge. The torrent of light pulled at him, like the hands of drowned ghosts trying to drag him into their watery grave.

Kroeger fought them, rolling clear as a heavy, crystalline foot slammed down where his head had been. He stabbed up with his sword, the blade shearing along its inner leg to its groin. Revving teeth bit home, spraying Kroeger with glass chips, and he wrenched his sword back, knowing he wouldn’t get another strike before it hurled him into the light.

Enraged at the thought of dying at the hands of an artificial being, Kroeger loosed a primal, animal howl and sprang forwards, tackling the creature and grappling its torn-up limbs. One leg split, a crack gushing with howling light, but the other held firm. Before he could strike again, a blow from an energy-wreathed sword broke the creature in half at the waist. Kroeger pushed himself to his feet, a red veil of anger blinding him to everything except the need to kill.

He swept up his own sword and brought the screaming blade down upon the nearest skull, a steeldust grey helm with a chevroned visor. It split apart and a jet of blood shot out, half a ruined head shorn away in a wash of crimson and grey matter.

Harkor didn’t fall immediately, but stood frozen in the act of killing the eldar construct, his sword arm extended before him, his half-face almost comical in its expression of shock.

Kroeger didn’t care that he had killed his lieutenant. That he had killed was enough.

Another of his robots went down with a crash of inert machinery, its shield a molten mass of blistered metal, its chest a crater of burned plasteel, fused bio-organic polymers and boiled dribbles of coolant.

Twin blasts of alien energy punched into Kroeger’s chest, but he didn’t feel the pain of his seared flesh, the heat-detonation of two ribs nor the flash-burn of his inner anatomy. He swung his sword again, bisecting an eldar construct and carrying the blow onwards into the faceplate of another. Their inset gemstones cracked and died and Kroeger roared with savage joy to see them brought low. Taking hold of his sword in a two-handed grip, Kroeger waded into the eldar, hewing left and right. He saw Falk and Berossus, but paid their fights no mind; all that mattered was that his blade be red with blood, dripping in chunks of flesh and sated with the skulls of the vanquished. Kroeger’s heart surged with the rightness of this slaughter, the singing joy that filled him with every sword blow.

His body was wounded nigh unto death, but hideous strength filled him and the red haze before him was a glorious curtain to his killing. His vision blurred and for a moment it seemed as though he were suddenly elsewhere – a broken plain of black ash, the sky a brazen bronze overseen by black thunderheads.

No longer was he fighting soulless machines, but men clad in rough furs with heavy brows and matted hair woven with bone fetishes. They swung crude, flint-bladed axes, and Kroeger laughed as he gutted them one after the other. Dozens, then scores came at him, then hundreds more, each screaming guttural barks of some proto-language that meant nothing to him. He slew without thought, knowing there could never be enough to satisfy his need to kill. He felt as though he had been fighting for hours, but his sword arm was still fresh, his body filled with reserves of power he knew would sustain him for an eternity of slaughter among the stars.

Without noticing it, Kroeger realised he was no longer killing fur-clad savages, but men clad in uniforms, puffed silk and iron breastplates. They wore cockaded helms and fought with long spears and wooden-handled firearms. Nor was he clad in burnished warplate of iron, gold and jet; but in animal skins, feathers and warpaint. The ashen plain was replaced by a lush jungle of tall trees and rich vegetation, though many of the trees around him had been felled by men with long-handled axes and logging saws.

Epunamun – for as well as his IV Legion attire, he had shed his name – swung his macuahuitl at a conquistador raising a long wooden musket to his shoulder. The shark teeth embedded along the length of Epunamun’s hungry wood struck the man just beneath the steel of his helm and tore through the meat and bone of his neck. The man’s head parted company from his shoulders and the spraying blood bathed Epunamun with hot wetness.

He blinked away the sticky blood and was not surprised to find himself somewhere else, this time in a mud-filled trench. Splintered duckboards lined the width of the trench and sheets of corrugated metal shored up its sides. Smoke and screams filled the air, and Karl blinked away spatters of mud from his eyes as he heard the approaching roar of voices from somewhere beyond the lip of the trench. He didn’t understand them and felt a growing hunger as he looked left and right at the men emerging from concrete bunkers worked into the trench walls. These were his countrymen, but he felt nothing for them but a vague contempt.

Men were scrambling onto the raised firing step, lifting heavy machine guns into position or working the bolts of their rifles. A man ran towards Karl, dressed in the mud-covered uniform of an Oberst and a ridiculous helmet topped with a bent metal spike.

‘Move! The enemy are here!’ shouted the Oberst, but before he could say any more, the blast of a grenade detonation spun him high into the air, leaving most of his legs behind. More blood sprayed Karl and he fell to his knees as the sound of gunfire exploded from the lip of the trench. He ran towards the screaming Oberst, who lay against the muddy wall, his body a mass of gouged shrapnel wounds and burned meat.

The smell was intoxicating, just like the meat he had cut from the curious gypsy he’d enticed back to his house at the edge of the village all those years ago. The man had fought, of course, but that had only given the flesh an astringent flavour that made the sense of power he’d felt at every white-meat mouthful grow stronger.

‘Karl,’ gasped the Oberst. ‘Oh God, it hurts… Please God, help me.’

Karl just looked at him, making no move.

The life went out of his eyes, and Karl lifted a handful of scorched flesh from the Oberst’s mutilated legs to his mouth. He bit down, letting the warm blood and fatty meat slide down his throat. He closed his eyes, savouring the forbidden flavours as the sounds of battle raged around him. Men were driven back from the lip of the trench by the charge of the enemy, but the screams of the dying meant nothing to him.

Verdun was lost, but Karl knew it was irrelevant who won or lost.

That all blood – his or his enemies’ – was welcome.

He ate more of the dead Oberst, feeling the strength of the dead man’s flesh fill him.

The screaming around him grew in volume and he heard a cry of revulsion behind him. He spun around, reaching for his rifle, ready to kill anyone who learned of his secret hunger – he had done it before, and would likely do it again before long. Too late, he saw the enemy infantryman thrusting with his bayonet, and Karl’s belly exploded with pain as the blade thrust home in his vitals. The soldier kicked him from the blade and raised it to strike again. Karl saw the man limned in the light of fires and explosions. His face was so very, very old and his eyes had seen more bloodshed than any other man on this planet.

The man’s dog tags swung out from beneath his torn shirt, and Karl saw a name etched into the pressed steel. At least he would die knowing his killer.

Pearsonne, Olivier.

But before the soldier could deliver the deathblow, a wave of grey-uniformed soldiers crashed into the fighting from the reserve trenches and drove him away in a storm of gunfire.

Once again the trench was theirs, and Karl let out a shuddering breath as a soldier with a badge of the medical services pinned to his lapel approached him.

He knew this man. He was from the same town as Karl.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Florian, ripping open a field dressing and applying it to the wound in his gut. ‘You’ll live.’

Karl nodded as blood from a cut he couldn’t remember suffering ran down his forehead and into his eyes. He blinked it away and–

Kroeger opened his eyes, the full weight of a million lives of bloodshed filling him like a vessel he hadn’t known was empty. His body was alive with power, his every vein surging with energy and every nerve alive with the prospect of harvesting the skulls of the fallen.

The eldar constructs surrounded him, hundreds deep, and he was utterly alone.

Harkor lay beside him, his skull smashed and his body laid open by a frenzy of sword cuts. Falk and Berossus were far from sight, and the eldar ghost machines closed in on him with relentless purpose.

This was death, but Kroeger welcomed the chance to die in battle. A fragment of the last life he remembered returned to him, words said in a million different tongues throughout the ages of the world, but unchanged in meaning since the first rock split the skull of the first innocent.

‘I care not from whence the blood flows,’ roared Kroeger as he charged the ghost warriors with his sword raised high. ‘Only that it flows!’

Light surrounded Perturabo and enfolded him. He was helpless in the grip of his brother, a passenger on this blazing ascent to the surface. Closer than twin souls, they flew through the heart of a world that was not a world and everywhere he looked, Perturabo could see nothing but his brother’s reflection.

Polished shards of glass and crystal fell into the shaft from above, the plundered remains of a world that had once been known as Prismatica. How Perturabo knew this he could not say, but he knew it with the certainty of his own name. He and Fulgrim were like bullets from a gun, and their ascent through the void was dizzyingly swift.

And as they blasted upwards to the surface, bodies were falling past them.

Fulgrim’s mortal followers, their lives given willingly in service to their liege lord.

Most were dead already, but those who still lived were shrieking with mindless ecstasy as their lives were spent carelessly by Fulgrim’s lusts.

His brother laughed and screamed as he basked in the glory of his reflections, each one different from the last, and each more monstrous in its depiction of the Phoenician. In one, Fulgrim was a beauteous creature of pearlescent wings, white-feathered and hung with pearls and silver chains like Sanguinius. In another he was ram-headed, ruddy-skinned and dripping in blood. Yet another showed him a formless spawn of primordial ooze, a rejected mass of mutated flesh, fallen too far to ever live.

A thousand times a thousand imagoes were thrown back at Perturabo, and at first he thought he had stumbled in his thoughts. Images.

No, his mind affirmed. Imagoes.

Fulgrim threw his head back and yelled, ‘I can feel the power. The Dark Prince favours me with attention!’

Perturabo wanted to answer him, to curse him for his treachery, but he had no strength to give it voice. The maugetar stone now set in Fulgrim’s breastplate pulsed with sated hunger, a monstrous, hideous thing of soul-sucking horror that had stolen Perturabo’s life. Looking at it now, it seemed to be an ugly thing, a bauble crafted in a shadow-haunted city of treachery and betrayal, imbued with its power by those who spent their days crafting ways for the living to suffer.

‘Can you feel it, brother?’ asked Fulgrim, cupping his face like a lover. ‘Can you feel the fates aligning? The eyes of the gods are upon us!’

Perturabo could feel something, a sensation like the world breaking apart, like the colliding of realities or the end of all things. Was this what the end of the universe would feel like, the destruction of time itself? When gods took notice of the affairs of men, it brought about cataclysms of unimaginable fury, and this would be no exception.

‘I will always carry you within me, brother,’ said Fulgrim, reaching down to tenderly stroke the black-veined maugetar stone with fingertips that looked altogether too slender, too claw-like. ‘What you give to me this day, I will never forget.’

‘I do not give it to you,’ said Perturabo, the power of his bitter rage giving him strength.

Fulgrim’s eyes turned cold at his response, angered that this moment should be sullied by anyone’s voice but his own.

‘Freely given or ripped from your beating heart, the result will be the same.’

Perturabo didn’t answer, saving what little energy he had clawed back from the stone at his breast. He closed his eyes, shutting out the sight of his brother’s reflections in the tumbling glass, and concentrating on undoing what the alien stone had done to him. It fought him – of course it did, jealously holding onto that which it had stolen – but Perturabo was the master of breaking into places that sought to keep him out.

Some thought that to be a purely literal interpretation of his abilities, but that was ever the way with Perturabo. People were always underestimating his capabilities beyond what they ascribed to him.

Perturabo reached deep inside, to that inner core of his being where iron and flesh became one, the inviolable heart of himself that was his and his alone. He focused all his attention on it, gathering what strength he had left and filling it with his dreams of youth, his ambition and his hatred of what Fulgrim was inflicting upon him.

The heart of his hatred grew, fed by the trauma of what was happening to him.

And then, what even the alchemists of old had known: like attracts like.

A trickle at first, but then with ever greater force, the stolen strength in the maugetar stone began to flow back into Perturabo as through a dam with the thinnest crack in its heart.

Such a reversal could not escape the notice of the Phoenician, and Fulgrim turned his black eyes upon him with a mixture of shock and incredulous fury.

‘What are you doing?’ he demanded.

‘Taking back what is mine,’ snarled Perturabo.

Fulgrim shook his head and a gleam of golden fire appeared in his hand, the sword Ferrus Manus had crafted for him so long ago.

‘It’s mine!’ screamed Fulgrim, and rammed the blade into Perturabo’s stomach, tearing it up through his sternum and into his chest. The pain was incredible, the craft of the Gorgon ensuring the blade parted Perturabo’s armour like a plasma cutter through sheet iron. Rich blood flowed from the wound, bathing the Phoenician’s right hand in dripping crimson.

Perturabo threw back his head and loosed a bellow of rage and pain that echoed from the distant walls like continents colliding. He saw a shimmer of light above, a ring of flickering gunfire that could only mean they were near the surface. The black void above raged like the waves of a storm-wracked ocean.

Perturabo felt himself cast away like something unclean. His strength and blood were finite things, but with what he had clawed back, his hand reached out for the one thing he knew Fulgrim valued above all others.

He closed his fist and the world fell away.

Falk watched Kroeger charge into the mass of eldar constructs with disbelief, but he had no time to wonder what madness had possessed the headstrong triarch. The eldar creatures took advantage of the break in the Iron Warriors defensive line, and drove a wedge of their troops into the gap. Falk stitched fire over the chest of an alien, keeping his arm steady as the creatures’ bodies broke apart under his relentless barrages.

The Emperor’s Children were keeping to their own fight, holding their position as if expecting something to happen at any moment. They were taking no part in the fighting beyond that which was required to hold their position. An untenable strategy, so what did they know that Falk did not?

He put the III Legion from his mind as a glancing bolt of fire grazed his plastron. His Cataphractii armour was proof against all but the closest-range shots and none had thus far penetrated enough to cause him great harm. His power fist smashed through a flanking enemy, the return stroke batting another through the air like a toy. With every step he took, he fired his implanted weaponry and crushed the animation from his enemies.

Beside him, two of the Iron Circle took the brunt of the eldar fire with their shields. Both robots were dying, their ablative plates stripped away and their shields little more than ruined stubs of metal. Within moments they would be nothing but scrap.

Falk kept moving, never stopping to allow the eldar a clear run at him. A ghost warrior fell in front of him and he stamped down on its crystalline skull. It burst apart, and Falk was about to move on when he saw the hideous skull-face in the patterning of shards his boot had created. It leered up at him and Falk stood frozen in place for the briefest moment.

Brief as it was, it was all the eldar needed to bring their weapons to bear on him.

A combined blast of emerald fire slammed into his lower back and Falk staggered as the heat burned him through his battle-plate. A rippling blade of light stabbed up into his armpit, where the armour was thinnest. He roared in pain and hammered his fist down on his attacker’s helmet. A fountain of light erupted from the bulbous helm, and in the shimmer patterns of radiance, the skull grinned out at him again.

‘Get away from me!’ he yelled as the light died.

You are so close…

Falk heard the voice in every shred of his flesh, the voice that was not a voice resonating in his body from the smallest cell to the grandest element of his synaptic architecture. Once again, his enemies took advantage of his momentary distraction to concentrate their fire upon him.

‘Stay out of my head!’ cried Falk, wading through a knot of enemy warriors and striding back to where Berossus bludgeoned the eldar from his side with sweeping blows from his enormous hammer. The ranks of the Iron Warriors had thinned considerably – barely a hundred legionaries still fought within the sepulchre.

Thousands more remained outside, and Falk wondered if they were under so sustained an attack as well. The vox was dead, and none of his attempts to reach Forrix, Toramino or the Stonewrought had come to anything. Were these the last Iron Warriors left on Iydris? Had the Phoenician’s mad designs broken the IV Legion upon the anvil of his obsession?

Falk felt the resolve of the Iron Warriors strengthen at his presence.

He was the iron in the foundation, the bolt on the girder.

His presence would keep the rust from their hearts.

Berossus fought like one of the titans of Olympian legend, the creatures said to have sired the gods before falling to fratricide. His energised hammer broke the eldar apart with ease and though his rotor cannon had long-since fired itself empty, it served just as well as a heavy club. Falk took care with his approach; it wasn’t unknown for Dreadnoughts in combat to lose track of friend and foe.

A warrior with a bland, forgettable face and whose black hair was worn in plaited braids across the centre of his scalp fought at the warsmith’s side like his protector. Falk gave him an appraising glance before dismissing him as irrelevant. Berossus swung around to face him and Falk heard recognition in his voice.

‘A hard fight,’ said the Dreadnought.

‘It has had its moments,’ agreed Falk, firing off the last of his bolter rounds. ‘War as a Dreadnought suits you.’

‘Did you see that idiot Kroeger?’ said the Dreadnought.

‘I did,’ confirmed Falk, blasting a ghost warrior with a burst of fire.

‘Looks like there might be an opening in the Trident soon,’ said Berossus. ‘I might become a triarch after all.’

‘If we live through this, I’ll demand Perturabo elevate you,’ said Falk.

Before the Dreadnought could answer, a blast of energy erupted from the shaft behind him. Falk staggered, the force of the blast throwing him into the mass of eldar constructs. Even Berossus was knocked down by its power, and Falk struggled to regain his feet before the eldar creatures were able to close in for the kill.

Berossus struggled in vain to right himself, his weapon arms thrashing and his legs hammering the ground as he rocked back and forth. His carapace was split down the sides and his augmitters blared with angry frustration.

‘Damned eldar!’ bellowed the downed Dreadnought.

Falk finally managed to push himself onto his front and drag his legs into a position where he could brace himself enough to climb to his feet. With every passing second he expected a blast of emerald light to end his life, for the ghost warriors to finish what this new devilry had unleashed.

He raised his combi-bolter, though its magazine was now dry.

‘Get me up!’ roared Berossus. ‘I won’t die on my back!’

Falk looked around in wonder and shook his head.

‘I don’t think we’re dying today,’ he said.

All around the tiny island of Iron Warriors, the eldar ghost warriors had ceased their attack. They stood as silent and unmoving as statues, devoid of animation and the shimmering light that filled their skull-helms dimming like a battery-lumen running down. The tower of light that had blazed from the shaft at the chamber’s heart had vanished, snuffed out as though some great sluice had been sealed in the planet’s core. The blackness above them seethed and churned, as though its perturbations had somehow been kept in check by the river of light piercing its heart.

A dozen Iron Warriors manhandled the fallen Berossus back onto his feet, and the Dreadnought rotated his body through three hundred and sixty degrees.

‘What just happened?’ he asked, his voice patchy with damage.

‘I don’t know,’ said Falk, turning towards the shaft as he heard a rapidly building roar rising from its depths. The Iron Warriors turned their guns on the shaft as a geyser of the eldar gemstones erupted from it. Millions upon millions of the stones exploded into the air, filling the void above their heads with sparkling points of light.

But instead of falling to earth in a glittering rain, they filled the chamber like an impossibly complex map of the heavens, with every star, planet and point of light represented.

‘What–’ said Falk, but before he could finish, two figures shot from the mouth of the shaft like something vomited from the maw of a great beast; Fulgrim blazing and wreathed in heavenly fire, Perturabo held tight to his breast.

The primarch of the Emperor’s Children hurled his brother aside, and Perturabo fell in a languid arc to land with a crunch of metal and crystal at the edge of the shaft. Blood trailed the air in a streaming red arc from Perturabo’s chest.

Falk felt a sense of terror and unreasoning horror fill him.

The Lord of Iron lay unmoving, his body broken and lifeless.

TWENTY-FIVE

He That Was Dead
Dreams of Iron
The Eagle of the Tenth

Lucius sprang to his feet, the first of the Emperor’s Children to right himself in the wake of the shockwave from the shaft. His every sense tingled in anticipation, the promise of a new sensation that was beyond anything he had ever experienced. His sword danced in his hand, its blade flickering.

Even the air recognised that an event of great moment was in the offing.

The fight in the chamber of towers had tested Lucius. Not in skill – the eldar ghost warriors were no match for his bladework – but in his endurance of boredom. The orders Eidolon had been given by the primarch were clear, to keep the mortals bearing the bounty of Prismatica safe until their precious cargo had been emptied into the shaft. Why such a task required Eidolon to enact it, Lucius didn’t know.

Perhaps it had something to do with his having died once.

In any case, once the mortals had emptied their containers, they stepped into the green light and dropped away. Had that been part of Eidolon’s command? Lucius didn’t really care.

The fighting had become a series of dull, repetitious combats that tested him not at all. None of the eldar machines could match his skill and he had fought in every style he knew, simply to stave off the boredom of utilising the same killing move more than once.

But now Fulgrim had re-emerged, haloed by millions of the same gemstones as those that rested at the heart of each of the dull-witted constructs. So dense was the canopy of drifting stones that the outer reaches of the chamber were all but obscured. Lucius caught fleeting glimpses of movement behind the mass of gleaming stones, his warrior instinct telling him that he was seeing things there that warranted note.

But his attention was irrevocably drawn back to his primarch.

Lucius saw the Phoenician was no longer the same being as had descended into the planet. He floated in the air above the shaft, which no longer poured its green torrent up to the restless darkness above, but simply radiated a fading glow of dying light. Fulgrim’s armour was shimmering with vitality, as though the light of a thousand suns were contained within him and strained to break free. The primarch’s dark, doll-like eyes were twin black holes, doorways to heights of experience and sensation the likes of which could only be dreamed by madmen and those willing to go to any lengths to taste them.

Fulgrim’s cloak fell away and his features twisted as though his body were being wracked by twin extremes of pain and pleasure. Reluctantly, Lucius let his gaze slip from Fulgrim’s wondrous form to the rest of the chamber’s occupants.

Lonomia Ruen stood next to him, his envenomed daggers useless against the eldar creatures. His caustic features were alive with excitement at the sight of Fulgrim’s imminent transformation, runnels of purplish blood dribbling from his nose and ears.

Marius Vairosean stood just in front of him, his sonic weapon stilled in the face of such wonder, and Lucius wanted to tell him to loose some blaring cacophony, for surely this moment warranted acknowledgement. Vairosean wept at the sight of Fulgrim, his disfigured features pulled in what might have been an expression of adoration and spiteful jealousy. It was sometimes hard to tell, such was the impressive nature of the man’s devotion to his flesh-alterations. Krysander of the Blades stood immobile, his face twisted in a grin of pleasure, his hooked tongue sliding across his knife-cut lips.

The Iron Warriors at last seemed to have developed a sense of wonder and stood immobile in the presence of a godlike being at the height of his powers. Even the plight of their doomed primarch wasn’t enough to break the spell of Fulgrim’s coming glory, for none of his feeble-witted warriors had yet approached him.

Eidolon alone seemed unaffected by the stupefaction that had seized the survivors of the eldar attack, and he walked towards Fulgrim as the primarch drifted down to the edge of the shaft. As Fulgrim’s feet touched the ground, Lucius felt a shudder go through the world, as though it rebelled at his touch. It was as if two tectonic plates had ground across one another, deep within the earth, and the titanic force that their collision had unleashed was only slowly making its way to the surface.

Lucius wanted to move, to draw closer to his primarch, but he could no more move than he could still his own heart. His flesh understood what his desire did not.

This was a moment of birth, and like all such moments, it was a private thing.

Eidolon removed a blade from beneath his cloak – a grey, glitterdust-bladed weapon that Lucius recognised immediately. It was a weapon with which a warrior might slay a god, a weapon that in ancient times would have been called enchanted.

The anathame was a shadow of the longsword that had, rumour said, been stolen from the Hall of Devices on Xenobia. Its blade had been chipped and shaved, reduced to the length of a ranker’s gladius by a Chaplain of the XVII Legion, though no one knew for what purpose. Eidolon lifted the anathame to Fulgrim’s eye level and spoke words that Lucius couldn’t hear. The primarch nodded and Eidolon rammed the blade into Fulgrim’s side.

The Emperor’s Children cried out as one, but the awesome power blazing from Fulgrim’s beatific form held them fast.

‘He that was dead shall bring me to life!’ cried Fulgrim, the pain in his voice bringing tears to Lucius’s eyes. ‘He that is risen shall be the witness of my rebirth!’

Eidolon circled around and stabbed the primarch again and again, each time driving the blade in to the hilt. Blood poured from Fulgrim, and his face betrayed the agony he suffered with each penetration. Eidolon sheathed the bloodied weapon and stood before Fulgrim. With both hands, he reached for the first wound he had caused and pulled it open.

Fulgrim threw back his head and loosed a bellow of rage that would have shamed Angron with its violence. No butcher’s nail had ever drawn so agonised a cry from a living being, and Lucius swore that he would kill Eidolon for causing the primarch such torment.

But Eidolon wasn’t done.

He moved around Fulgrim, pulling each wound open with his blood-slick gauntlets until the primarch was swaying on his feet, barely able to keep from collapse. His wounds were not healing, his metabolism kept in check by a self-imposed act of will. What purpose this mutilation served, Lucius could not fathom, but whatever it was, it was nearing completion as he felt a burgeoning power swell the chamber. It was a power now free to make its presence felt on a world whose dead guardians had kept it at bay for centuries. His flesh responded to its presence; skin puckering, nerve endings bathed in tremulous bliss and revulsion.

A potent sense of anticipation built within him, as when the Legion captains had waited to ambush Fulgrim in the Gallery of Swords, only honed and distilled to razor keenness. It was the instant before a lightning strike, the heartbeat before a bullet impact, the fractional pause before a drop pod assault. At any moment, power unlike any that mortals, post-human or otherwise, had witnessed in all the history of humankind would be revealed in all its glory. Lucius knew with utter clarity that this was what had driven the eldar to virtual extinction. They had sought to embrace glory, but been found wanting.

‘Do it,’ said Fulgrim to Eidolon, his face a mask of tears.

Eidolon nodded and reached up his hand. A constellation of spirit stones detached from the mass of stones filling the upper reaches of the chamber and flew to him. He plucked them from the air and pressed them into the wounds he had gouged in the primarch’s flesh. Lucius felt tiny flares of terror and desperation, but each one was swiftly extinguished as Eidolon drew more and more to him and fed them into Fulgrim’s body. First ten, then ten more and more and more until it seemed impossible that any others could still be swallowed.

Fulgrim undulated with the souls of the devoured dead, but Eidolon kept summoning them from the air and pushing them inside the many wounds.

‘No more,’ begged Fulgrim, but Eidolon shook his head.

Fulgrim sobbed and wailed, but for each pleading cry for Eidolon to stop, there was a fervent look in his eyes that said, more.

But at last Eidolon was done and Lucius let out a long, juddering breath.

‘One more,’ breathed Fulgrim. ‘The maugetar stone.’

Eidolon hesitated, circling his wracked primarch, examining every bloodied crevice on his armour.

‘Hurry!’ cried Fulgrim. ‘It must be now! The final fuel for my ascent!’

‘I do not see it, my lord,’ said Eidolon.

‘It’s there!’ screamed Fulgrim. ‘Set within my breastplate.’

And then a voice cut through the chamber, grating and harsh, like stone on metal.

Perturabo swayed on the edge of the shaft, his stomach and groin red from where a deep wound bled profusely. The Lord of Iron’s face was sallow and gaunt, a corpse draped in dried parchment skin and given febrile animation. In his hand he held the maugetar stone, its surface a roiling chaos of warring gold and black.

‘Looking for this?’ he said.

Perturabo knew he should destroy the stone in his hand. He could do it easily enough. Just holding it he could feel the strengths and weaknesses in its latticed structure, how much pressure he would need to exert to crack it, to shatter it or to crush it into powder. He knew he should do it, but what would become of him without it? Would the strength it had stolen from him be lost forever?

‘You brought me here to kill me,’ said Perturabo, walking towards Fulgrim, keeping the hand holding the maugetar stone extended over the shaft. The light of the dying green sun shone from far below, and though Perturabo was no celestial engineer, he knew that whatever mechanism was holding this planet from being torn apart by the singularity at the heart of the Eye of Terror was coming undone.

This world’s life was about to expire, and he was confident that whatever forces were at work below would destroy the maugetar stone.

Was that a risk he was prepared to take to stop Fulgrim?

‘You’re wrong,’ said Fulgrim. ‘I brought you here to bring me to life.’

‘One man’s meat is another man’s poison, is that it?’

‘Something like that,’ agreed Fulgrim.

Eidolon stepped to Fulgrim’s side, his hand sliding beneath his cloak.

‘Lord Commander Eidolon, if you take one more step, I’ll kill you where you stand,’ said Perturabo. ‘Even like this, you know I can do so.’

Eidolon stopped and looked to Fulgrim, who gave a tiny, almost imperceptible nod.

Perturabo looked his brother in the eye for some hint of remorse, a sign that he regretted that things had come to this, something to show he felt even a moment of shame at plotting to murder him.

He saw nothing, and his heart broke to know that the Fulgrim he had known long ago was gone, never to return. He hadn’t thought it possible that anyone could plunge so far as to be beyond redemption. A man might sink to the lowest level, degrade himself beyond belief, but he might yet save his soul if he truly experienced even a moment’s remorse.

If only he could believe that of himself.

‘You don’t know the power, brother,’ said Fulgrim. ‘I will be able to do anything I desire in the blink of an eye. I will learn mysteries even Magnus does not suspect exist. I will become a god – a shimmering, diaphanous, beautiful creature. This is my apotheosis, where I become a general principle of Being, instantiated throughout all of the vistas of the galaxy.’

‘You don’t want to be an angel any more,’ said Perturabo. ‘You want to be a god.’

‘Is that so bad?’

‘Mankind has no need of gods,’ said Perturabo. ‘We outgrew them a long time ago.’

Fulgrim laughed, though Perturabo saw that the effort of holding his swelling body together was taking every ounce of his concentration. Beads of light, mercury bright, sweated from his skin, dripping from his cruciform stance in silver droplets.

‘Think you so? Then why are there still gods? Belief empowers them and we worship them in every act of slaughter, betrayal, depravity and quest for immortality we undertake. Whether we know it or not, we offer them fealty every day.’

Perturabo shook his head. ‘I worship nothing. I believe in nothing.’

The finality of this last utterance almost stopped him in his tracks. The force of it was like a blow, a bitter seed of truth he had never acknow-ledged or known until this moment. He saw the awareness of it reflected in Fulgrim’s eyes.

‘And that is why you live a stale, bitter life,’ said Fulgrim, contempt and pity dripping from his scornful words. ‘You let yourself be abused; crushed into slavery by a god who doesn’t even have the decency to admit what he is. Our once-father ascended to godhood long ago and denies others their place at the table. He promised us a new world to live in, but he was always to be above us, the master with his loyal lapdog slaves.’

‘It that why you sided with Horus?’ demanded Perturabo, standing right in front of Fulgrim, his enraged features so close that none could come between them. ‘Jealousy? Vanity? Such pettiness is for the weak, we were made for greater things.’

‘What would you know of greater things?’ sneered Fulgrim.

‘You don’t know the things I dream,’ said Perturabo. ‘No one does, no one ever cared enough to find out.’

Fulgrim’s head shot forwards and a musk of glittering vapour, pink and veined with arterial red, blew from his open mouth, enveloping Perturabo in its astringent reek; part perfume, part cesspit.

‘Then show me your dreams, brother,’ hissed Fulgrim. ‘And let me make them real!’

The world as Perturabo knew it was replaced by a city he had dreamed into being every night since leaving Olympia. He stood in the centre of a great boulevard of marbled stone, its width lined by tall trees and magnificent statuary. Clad only in a long chiton robe of pale cream and sandals of softest leather, he was garbed as a scholar and a civic leader. He was a man who lived for peace, not war, and the fit of that man settled upon him like a second skin.

The air was achingly clear, scented with mountain pine from the high glens and fresh water from the crystal falls. The sky was wide and blue, streaked with clouds like wisps of breath. Even knowing this was a lie didn’t stop Perturabo admiring his handiwork, taking in the rugged vistas of mountainous beauty, the snow-capped peaks and the clean lines of the city around him.

Lochos, the grim mountain fastness of Dammekos, remade in the mind of its adoptive son.

Buildings the likes of which had only ever been imagined filled the city, each one as familiar as a father’s sons, yet each one an impossibility, for none had ever been constructed.

Behind him was the Thaliakron, but fashioned from polished marble and ouslite, porphyry, gold and silver. All around him were the galleries of justice, the halls of commerce, the palaces of remembrance and the dwellings of the city’s inhabitants.

The people of Lochos thronged the boulevard, moving with unhurried grace and contented lives. Everywhere Perturabo looked, he saw men and women of peace, with ambitions and hopes, dreams and the means to make them real. These were the people of Olympia as he had always wished them, clean of limb, hale of heart and united in purpose. They welcomed him, each smile genuine and heartfelt. They loved him and their happiness was reflected in every kind word, every gesture of respect and every warm greeting.

This was his architectural library made real, a city of imagination, of harmony and light; and he moved through its many streets as its builder and its beloved father. It was a city of dreams. His dreams.

And though he could not see them, Perturabo knew that the twelve great city states of Olympia were all like this. Each one was built to his precise designs, logical and ordered, but built in the knowledge that these were places designed for people. No architecture, however grand, however lofty in ambition or scale, could ever call itself successful if one forgot that cardinal rule, and Perturabo had never forgotten it.

He walked the streets, knowing he was being manipulated, but not caring.

What man would not wish to look upon his dreams as reality?

The city opened up before him, its beauty and street plan intuitive and beguiling. It led him to wonders he had almost forgotten he had crafted on the pages of his many sketchbooks; youthful follies, adolescent vanities and mature structures that spoke of long apprenticeships served at the draughting table.

At length, his perambulations brought him to an octagonal space in the centre of the city, a place of gathering and chance encounters, a place where so often a wanderer’s footsteps would carry him without even realising it. Shops of craftsmen and vendors of pastries, fresh meat and produce lined the edges of the space, and at its centre was the towering statue of a warrior in burnished warplate, a lightning bolt in one hand, an eagle-topped sceptre in the other.

A god rendered in marble by the hand of a dutiful son.

Perturabo circled the statue, a curious mix of emotions churning within him.

‘I have to hand it to you, brother,’ said Fulgrim’s voice from the edge of the octagon. ‘When you dream, you dream grandly.’

Perturabo saw his brother seated at a wrought-iron table in front of a glass-walled bistro, dressed in an identical chiton. Two glasses carved from violet crystal sat on the table, one either side of a bottle of clear, honey-coloured wine.

‘You know, the Romanii people used to drink from amethyst cups in the belief that it would prevent intoxication,’ said Fulgrim, pushing back a chair with his foot and gesturing to the empty seat. ‘Come, sit, sit.’

Perturabo wanted nothing more than to wrap his hands around Fulgrim’s neck and snap it like a thin spar of wood. But in a place of illusions what would be the point? Instead, he took the seat opposite his brother as Fulgrim poured two glasses of wine.

‘Absolute nonsense, of course,’ continued Fulgrim, ‘but you can’t fault people for believing in things when they don’t know any better, can you?’

Perturabo said nothing and took a drink. A sweet wine from the vineyards on the slopes of the Ithearak Mountains to the south. His favourite, but of course it would be. Why would a dream of perfection be otherwise?

‘Just look at this place,’ said Fulgrim, leaning back in his seat and sweeping a hand around to encompass the octagon and the city beyond. ‘I never knew you had such vision.’

‘What are you doing, Fulgrim? We should be settling this like warriors.’

‘But we are not warriors, brother,’ said Fulgrim, brushing an imaginary speck from his chiton. ‘In your ideal world we are diplomats, and we settle our disputes with words, yes?’

‘I think it’s too late for that.’

‘Not at all. I look around this city and see I made the mistake I swore I would not. I underestimated you.’

‘I said you would.’

‘And I didn’t listen, yes, I know,’ said Fulgrim, waving a dismissive hand. ‘But look at this place, it outshines Macragge in its splendour! All the grandeur, but none of the starch, that’s no small achievement.’

‘It’s not real,’ said Perturabo. ‘It never was. And it never will be.’

‘You’re wrong,’ said Fulgrim, leaning forwards as if to whisper some seditious gossip. ‘I can help you make this real. All of it.’

‘Another empty promise?’

‘No, brother,’ said Fulgrim. ‘I think we’ve come too far for empty promises, don’t you? All we have left are cold, hard truths. And the truth is, if you give me the maugetar stone, I will breathe life into Olympia again.’

Perturabo searched Fulgrim’s face for the lie, but saw nothing but truth. Still, he didn’t believe him. He had been betrayed before by words he thought to be true.

‘I’ll die if I give it to you. You said so yourself.’

‘Isn’t that a price worth paying for Olympia’s rebirth?’

‘Of course, but I’d have to trust you, and…’

‘Yes, I have made it a little difficult for you to trust me, haven’t I?’ grinned Fulgrim.

‘“Impossible” is the word I’d use.’

Fulgrim poured two more glasses of wine. ‘Very well, let me put it like this – think of all the people who have scorned you. Dorn, the Khan, the Lion… They all look down on you, they all think you and your sons are nothing but diggers. You became nothing more than the Legion to call when there was dirty work to be done and they didn’t want to get down in the mud.’

‘You thought the same, as I recall,’ pointed out Perturabo.

‘True, but now I’ve seen this city, I perceive the error of my ways,’ said Fulgrim. ‘This is a perfect city, brother, one I myself might have conceived, but I did not. You did. Of course, you know that the others were repulsed by what happened here? They despised you for it, laughed at you for failing to hold onto your adopted home world. I can give you the power to rebuild it, to make it so that it might as well never have happened. All you have to do is give me the maugetar stone. Or not; I can do this without it.’

Perturabo heard the lie in Fulgrim’s words, sensing his brother’s fear that this moment might pass unfulfilled. Even in this fantasy, he felt the unique confluence of energies crossing in the sepulchre, a conjunction of the spheres that would never come again.

‘Think of it, brother. Together we can make Olympia rise from the ashes of its destruction like the phoenix of antiquity.’

‘Olympia is dead, Fulgrim,’ said Perturabo. ‘I killed it, and the dead stay dead, no matter what power you think you’ll get.’

Fulgrim leaned across the table and rested his hand on Perturabo’s arm.

‘Brother, think hard on all that you have lost, all that you have sacrificed,’ said Fulgrim, his dark eyes swirling with the light of distant galaxies. ‘I can give you all that you want.’

‘Maybe you can give me what I want,’ said Perturabo sadly, ‘but you can never give me what I need.’

‘And what is that?’ sneered Fulgrim. ‘Punishment?’

Perturabo pushed back his chair and tipped over his wine glass. ‘We are done talking.’

The amethyst wine glass rolled from the table and smashed to purple shards on the ground, the pieces scattering in a curious star shape, one arm for each side of the octagon. Fulgrim shook his head and the skin of the scholar and the administrator sloughed from him as a serpent sheds its skin, revealing the falsehood he was, a brazen liar in the guise of a friend.

Once again, they stood in the chamber of the sepulchre and his brother was as Perturabo had last seen him: naked and squirming with power and sweated light.

Olympia as he had dreamed it was gone, consigned to the past where its people were dead and burned and its future crushed beneath the iron boot-heel of the IV Legion.

‘You should have taken my offer,’ said Fulgrim. ‘Now all that is left to you is death.’

‘No,’ said Perturabo. ‘Not all.’

And so saying, he hurled the maugetar stone into the shaft.

The stone flashed gold and black, gold and black, spinning end over end as it arced out into the centre of the abyss. Fulgrim screamed a denial, and with that shrieking cry, the spell holding every warrior immobile was broken. Perturabo’s throw had been a poor one, much weaker than even a crippled old man might have managed, but it was enough.

He watched the stone begin its downward arc, relieved to be rid of the parasitic talisman.

His relief turned to horror as he saw a golden shape dive from the drifting dome of spirit stones and plunge towards the stone. He saw it was a mechanised eagle, its feathers rendered in shimmering gold, its body a wonder of clockwork automation and lost technologies. He recognised it as having sprung from the same mind as the machines he had built in his sanctum. It seemed he was not the only savant whose works were inspired by the long dead gentleman of Firenza. The bird loosed the cry of a hunting raptor, its legs extended before it and its wings booming as it lunged in the air to pluck the maugetar stone in its obsidian talons.

The bird banked around, its gimlet eyes alive with the hybrid technologies of its unique mind. Its wings beat with a clash of metal on metal, angling its flight back to the far side of the chamber.

A barrage of bolter fire punched through the screen of spirit stones and a handful of Emperor’s Children were pitched from their feet.

Perturabo saw the veil part, and didn’t know whether to weep or rejoice at the sight of warriors charging towards him.

Black-armoured and bearing a mailed fist upon their shoulder guards.

The Iron Tenth.

TWENTY-SIX

A Common Foe
The Sound of Madness
No Pleasure

Lucius was at the edge of the shaft in a heartbeat, but the golden-winged eagle was already too far away for his whip. He pulled his bolt pistol and drew a bead on its golden form. Almost immediately, the bird began jinking and weaving through the air, as though it somehow sensed it was being targeted. Lucius fired, but his shot went wide. Two more shots missed before a fourth finally clipped the edge of the bird’s wing.

‘Got you,’ he said triumphantly, watching as it spiralled downwards.

Falk felt the paralysing lethargy that had held him rooted to the spot fall away, and immediately moved in Perturabo’s direction. The Iron Hands were here, and they were advancing behind a screen of fire towards the primarchs. Their presence here amazed him. How had they come through the labyrinth? Had they found a secret way into the sepulchre that Karuchi Vohra had not known existed? Amid the charging Iron Hands, Falk saw a half-glimpsed shape at the edge of the chamber, a slight figure in a long black robe, and his pace faltered as he recognised Karuchi Vohra.

At first he assumed he was mistaken, but then he saw the figure again, and this time there was no mistaking the thin features. The eldar Perturabo had killed in the labyrinth, could he have a brother? It was surely the only explanation, but as he looked closer, he saw that the resemblance was more than just fraternal.

The eldar with the Iron Hands was identical in every way to Karuchi Vohra.

Falk threw off his shock and forced himself to concentrate on the important matters at hand. He had no understanding of the subtleties of this situation, only that the Lord of Iron needed at least one of his triarchs at his side.

‘To the primarch!’ he yelled, leading the Iron Warriors in defence of their liege lord.

The Emperor’s Children were mirroring his actions, rallying to Fulgrim’s side as coruscating loops of purple and gold lightning flailed from his body, as though he had become a vast, overloading generator.

An Emperor’s Children warrior with blades sheathed in the bare flesh of his chest came at him, swinging a giant, tooth-bladed chainaxe. His helm was an older mark, making him look like one of the techno-barbarians of the Unification Wars. Falk angled his shoulder guard to take the blow, and the screaming teeth bit only a finger-breadth before sliding clear.

‘Fool!’ cried Falk. ‘We have a common enemy!’

The barbarian paid his words no heed and raised his axe for another strike.

Falk punched clean through the warrior’s chest, the power fist obliterating his entire torso and leaving only a gory heap of dismembered body parts in its wake. He stamped the warrior’s helm flat as he continued, his combi-bolters blasting out the last of his twin magazines. Two black-clad warriors fell into the shaft, the bolter fire blowing them apart from the inside.

Gunfire roared all around as the Iron Warriors came with him, a hammer of righteous fury. Like Falk, they didn’t know what Fulgrim and his debauchers were doing to Perturabo, but that it was harmful was obvious. Berossus crashed into the Phoenix Guard forming a cordon around them, and three of Fulgrim’s elite praetorians were smashed to bloody ruin in as many blows.

The rest were not so easily felled, fighting with powered halberds that carved great chunks from Berossus’s armour. The struggle became a close-range firefight, the fighting warriors blasting at one another with pistols and clubbing with fists and feet.

‘Fight the Iron Hands!’ yelled Falk, but his words were falling on deaf ears.

He pulled up short as the skull face that had haunted him from the warp took shape in the blood spatter patterns on a smashed storm shield.

Speak with my voice… the glossiaic unspeech…

Falk’s anger brimmed over; anger at the Iron Hands, at the Emperor’s Children, but most of all at the sheer stupidity of disunity. This fight needed a warrior who could take charge, a warrior whose words would be obeyed.

‘Fight the Iron Hands!’ he yelled, and those warriors nearest him recoiled at the force of his words, seals popping on their gorgets and paint blistering on their armour. Those without helms staggered as their gag reflex brought up the oily, acidic contents of their stomachs.

For a fraction of the smallest moment, they stared at him in awe and fear.

And then they obeyed.

Kroeger put aside his heedless smashing of the motionless eldar constructs at the sight of the Iron Hands, feeling the red fog in his mind disperse enough for him to see that a greater enemy had presented itself. He stood atop a heap of shattered glass and broken eldar remains.

He could remember nothing of the slaughters that had seen them destroyed, and that complete loss of control shocked him. The Iron Warriors were hard fighters, but they were no screaming berserkers. Not for them the unshackled fury of Angron’s World Eaters – that way lay madness, and Kroeger would not surrender to such an irreversible course. He still felt the lure of complete surrender, but clamped down on it with a whispered recitation of the Unbreakable Litany.

‘From iron cometh strength. From strength cometh will. From will cometh faith. From faith cometh honour. From honour cometh iron,’ he said. ‘And may it ever be so.’

He took deep breaths, feeling the bonds of control clamping down on his beating aggression. It still lurked in the heart of him, but it was his to command, his to release or his to ignore.

For now.

Kroeger began running to where Barban Falk led a cadre of Iron Warriors and Emperor’s Children against the Iron Hands.

Marius Vairosean ripped his hand across the firing frets of his sonic cannon, playing the shrieking harmonics over the Iron Hands. They were advancing in the cover of the towers, but his weapon blazed through them with caroming detonations. One warrior was torn apart, the force of the impact vibrations ripping both his arms from their sockets and pulping his head like an eggshell. Another’s armour went into resonant frequency shock and reduced his flesh and bone to liquid paste.

He laughed to see such death, hammering his hand down again and again, sending out ripping chords of dissonant frequency blasts. Everywhere he aimed, the ground erupted in fissuring gouges. Enemy warriors were flung away by the screaming power. He and the few Kakophoni still alive paid no heed to the Iron Warrior with the booming voice, though the piercing violence of it had pleased Marius greatly.

More focused than Eidolon’s sonic shriek, but less painful, and therefore less stimulating.

Though his senses had been heightened in almost every way by the ministrations of Fabius, Marius had lost none of his tactical acumen, and saw that the Iron Hands had the best of this conflict so far.

They were fresh into the battle, whereas the Iron Warriors and Emperor’s Children had already fought a deadly enemy, and their ammunition stocks were depleted, their numbers diminished and their primarchs unable to fight. The black-armoured warriors were fighting in smaller kill teams, moving implacably forwards under the withering fire from a braying Dreadnought. Its bolter and flamer bathed the chamber in strobing muzzle flare and whooshing gouts of promethium. It advanced over a flaming avenue of broken eldar bodies, unstoppable and immense. Marius looked for the Iron Warriors Dreadnought, and grinned lopsidedly as he saw it fighting through the towers to reach its enemy twin.

A group of Iron Hands broke from cover, a leader and a combat cell with a bulky cannon weapon, and Marius stepped out into the open with his three Kakophoni. He played a shrieking burst of soundwaves and blistering powered chords. Three of the warriors went down, scattered but not dead.

A fourth rolled to his feet and aimed a long, custom-designed carbine at Marius.

The shot punched through the weapon Marius had fashioned from the instruments designed by Bequa Kynska for her Maraviglia, and a wailing explosion of clashing harmonics exploded outwards; the death scream of a living being. He hurled the dying device aside as the looming form of the Iron Hands Dreadnought hove into view.

A hurricane of shells slammed into him, punching him from his feet and ripping through his Kakophoni. They died screaming, revelling in the sounds of their own death. Blood pooled in Marius’s armour, but he welcomed the sensation. It had been too long since he had felt real pain, and orgasmic synaptic connections exploded in his cortex, stimulating him beyond all reason.

He surged to his feet, the muscles and bones in his jaw distending and reshaping in readiness. The warrior with the carbine flicked a selector switch on the weapon’s stock, but before he could fire, Marius drew breath and unleashed a shrieking blast of sound from his swelling lungs and altered trachea. The warrior, an Iron Father he now saw, fell back, clutching his helmet as the deafening, ear-bursting volume of Marius’s shout overloaded his battle armour’s auto-senses before they could protect him.

Even the Dreadnought rocked back under the sonic force, its aural receptors exploding in a shower of cascading sparks. That would disorientate it long enough for Marius to finish the legionaries under its protection and move on.

Marius’s face moved with grotesque, fleshy undulations, drawing a huge amount of air into his lungs for another sonic exhalation. One of the warriors climbed to his feet, his armour torn and scorched almost bare of paint. Reeling, the warrior staggered under the weight of a heavy volkite cannon. He struggled with the unfamiliar weapon, hauling on arming levers and charging cranks. The gun’s tip crackled with building energy, but such a powerful weapon took time to fire.

Time this warrior didn’t have.

Marius spread his arms and leaned into his screaming bellow.

The air between the two warriors fractured with sonic detonations, a jagged haze of noise that filled the chamber and shattered hundreds of spirit stones floating above the battle. Marius screamed until his lungs were emptied, the cathartic sound of madness setting his brain afire with blistering sensations of pleasure, pain and ecstatic joy.

Incredibly, impossibly, the warrior remained standing.

‘What?’ said Ignatius Numen grimly. ‘I didn’t catch that.’

Marius ballooned his lungs for another shriek of power.

Deaf to all sound, the Morlock triggered the volkite cannon.

The searing ray punched through Marius Vairosean’s breastplate, and explosively boiled his flesh and blood in the blink of an eye.

He didn’t even have breath to scream.

Picking his way between the knots of fighting legionaries, Lucius spied the struggling form of the golden bird. It lay in a pile of broken crystal twenty metres away, its wing shattered and one leg bent back at an unnatural angle. The black and gold gemstone Fulgrim coveted lay beside its crumpled beak, and Lucius took a moment to wonder whether such automata could feel pain.

A scuffle of boots on loose stone and crystal sounded behind him, careless and club-footed. Lonomia Ruen dropped into the cover of a collapsed pillar with him, a dripping dagger held in one hand, a needle pistol in the other.

‘What is that stone?’ asked Ruen.

Lucius didn’t bother to hide his irritation at Ruen’s presence, and ignored the question.

He didn’t know what was so important about it, but that Fulgrim desired it was enough for him. A darting shape moved through the shadows before him, and Lucius squinted through the misty haze of green fog and gunsmoke. Something was out there, but he couldn’t see it properly. Even his genhanced acuity, further sharpened by the spatial rewiring of the sensory centres of his brain, couldn’t pick out what it was.

It was a shadow where no shadows should be, a ghost out of place on a world of ghosts.

Lucius smiled as comprehension dawned.

‘Ruen,’ he said, nodding in the direction of the downed eagle. ‘You see that?’

‘What?’ said Ruen, scrambling to the edge of the pillar and peering round its broken stub.

‘There,’ said Lucius. ‘Quickly.’

‘I don’t see anyth–’ said Ruen before a tiny thip, thip sounded and the back of his helmet blew out. He slumped over onto his side, both eye lenses shattered and scorched.

‘Idiot,’ said Lucius, swinging his bolter up over the pillar and aiming at the point where he’d seen the tiny, telltale flash of the needler. Most observers wouldn’t have seen the weapon’s las-flare, concealed within a shadow and shrouded by fallen debris.

But Lucius wasn’t most observers.

The Raven Guard would already be displacing, but Lucius could give him something to force his head down: bolt shells stitched a percussive path through the shadow. He kept firing as he vaulted the fallen pillar and ran towards the eagle. Solid needle rounds puffed the ground behind him in a blitzing series of innocuous-sounding impacts.

Lucius dived over the fallen remains of an eldar construct and scooped up the gold and black gemstone. It was heavier than it looked, the weight in his palm considerable, and the heat that it exuded made it feel like it had been left in an oven overnight. That heat flowed through him, and the feeling of immortal vitality that saturated his flesh was so intense that he almost cried out.

‘No wonder Fulgrim wants this,’ he said, holstering his pistol and drawing his sword.

As soon as the blade was in his hand, a black shape streaked from the shadow of a nearby tower on a near-silent plume of whooshing jet-flame.

Shots hammered Lucius’s chest, but failed to penetrate. He dived to the side and brought his blade up in a slashing motion that sheared the barrel from the weapon in a cracking shower of non-reflective ceramite. The Raven Guard twisted in mid-air, dropping lightly to his feet and throwing aside the ruined halves of his weapon.

‘You bring a needle-carbine to a sword fight?’ sneered Lucius.

Once again his opponent triggered his jump pack, shooting forwards to deliver a thunderous kick to the centre of Lucius’s breastplate. Lucius was hurled back, hearing the crack of splitting plasteel. The Raven Guard sprang at him with his twin black swords extended before him. Lucius rolled aside and sprang to his feet in time to block a downward cut, and scissored his body to avoid a disembowelling slash to the gut. His own sword lanced down to the Raven Guard’s neck, but a burst of thrust carried the warrior away again.

Lucius unhooked the whip he’d taken from dead Kalimos, letting the barbed length of it uncoil like a hungry snake.

‘Just me and thee now,’ said Lucius, removing his helmet and tossing it aside. He reached up to a raised weal on his cheek, a scar that should have long-since healed, but which had been kept raw and marked with caustic powders. ‘You cut me before, and I will always treasure that wound. But that’s all you’re getting, Raven Guard.’

‘Sharrowkyn,’ said the warrior.

‘What?’

‘My name,’ said the Raven Guard. ‘It’s Nykona Sharrowkyn. Just so you know who it is that’s killed you.’

‘Nykona Sharrowkyn,’ said Lucius, rolling the name around his mouth as though experiencing a new flavour. ‘No, that’s not the name of a man that can kill me.’

‘You don’t get to decide,’ said Sharrowkyn, one sword held high over his head, the other extended low. They circled one another warily, each aware of the other’s skill, and knowing they were well matched. Neither paid heed to the battles raging around them, the life and death struggles being played out in the ruins of a dying race’s tomb. All that mattered was the purity of the duel. All other pretenders to this fight were dead, and all that remained to be decided was which of them would walk away.

Lucius attacked first, lashing his whip at Sharrowkyn’s head. The barbed tip scored a line through the faceplate and left eye lens. Lucius followed up with a low cut to the thigh, redirected at the last instant for the groin. Sharrowkyn read the move and blocked with crossed blades, spinning on his heel to hammer his elbow into Lucius’s head.

But Lucius wasn’t there, rolling forwards beneath the blow to thrust his blade at the base of Sharrowkyn’s spine. More flame from the Raven Guard’s jump pack carried him away from the paralysing strike, and he spun as he landed to face Lucius once more.

‘You’re fast, son of Corax,’ said Lucius.

‘Too fast for you, traitor.’

Lucius smiled. ‘You won’t goad me into foolishness.’

Even before Lucius finished speaking, Sharrowkyn gunned his jets again. Instead of dodging, Lucius leapt to meet the Raven Guard, his whip slashing and his sword stabbing. The lash cracked around Sharrowkyn’s neck, constricting and drawing blood before releasing. Lucius rammed his sword up, but Sharrowkyn’s blade turned it aside at the last second, its edge scraping a finger-deep furrow in the ceramite.

They landed badly, the stuttering jets of Sharrowkyn’s jump pack skidding them along the ground towards the edge of the shaft. All skill was irrelevant, only brute ferocity as the two swordsmen grappled and kicked at one another. Too close for sword-work, Sharrowkyn rammed his helmeted head into Lucius’s unprotected face.

Blood burst from his broken nose and his cheekbone shattered under the force of the impact. Lucius blinked away bloody tears and pushed himself away from Sharrowkyn. He saw the black outline of the Raven Guard coming at him and stabbed his sword into where Sharrowkyn’s throat would be.

His blade struck only empty air, and the shock of that almost cost him his life.

Somehow, impossibly, the Raven Guard wasn’t there.

A blade plunged into his side, and Lucius twisted away from the fiery, unexpected and exquisite pain. He shook his eyes clear of blood and felt the Raven Guard behind him – he spun and thrust low with his sword, but once again his blades cut air and not flesh. Another lancing blow plunged into his back, and this time the pain was an unwelcome sensation. Lucius could see the Raven Guard, but he moved like nothing he had ever seen before, faster than any mortal man could possibly move, like a wraith or a being out of step with time.

A black blade licked out and laid his cheek bare to the bone, a matching wound to the one Sharrowkyn had given him the last time their blades had crossed.

Lucius spun, feeling suddenly helpless as the Raven Guard slipped around him with dizzying speed, his blades stabbing again and again. Lucius felt his sword tumble from his hand, the whip wrapping itself around his wrist as though unwilling to be parted from him, even in death.

Then the Raven Guard was at Lucius’s back, pushing him to his knees, blades pressed down through his gorget into the hollows either side of his neck.

‘It gives me no pleasure to do this,’ said Sharrowkyn. ‘You are nothing to me, simply a rabid dog that needs to be put down.’

Lucius tried to speak, to say something to mark his death.

Sharrowkyn’s blades stabbed down behind Lucius’s collarbone, tearing through his hearts and lungs, severing arteries and wreaking catastrophic damage that not even a Space Marine’s post-human physiology could undo.

And all thoughts of a worthy valediction died with him.

Brother Bombastus had a fist that could crush Cataphractii armour, tear open the hulls of Baneblades and rend the steel of hive towers. His flamer burned the Emperor’s Children, melting their warplate and roasting them within their ceramite armour.

On any civilised world of the Imperium, Bombastus would have been labelled a psychopath, a dangerously unstable individual who would most likely have ended up in an execution cell after who knew how many brutal murders. Yet those very tendencies that marked him out as dangerously aberrant in human society rendered him perfect clay from which to mould a Space Marine.

Decades of conditioning, training, discipline and brotherhood had wrought as honourable and devoted an Iron Hand as could be expected, but that had all come to an end at the hands of a hybrid alien creature on the inverted deck of a crippled Diasporex vessel as it plunged down into the Carollis Star.

Isolated from the fraternity of his brothers, the psychopathic tendencies that had attracted the attention of the Iron Hands recruiters crept back in like squatters into the mind of Brother Bombastus.

He relished battle. He endured the long sleeps between war and bloodshed, and was first to wake when the machines were empowered and the words of activation spoken. The combat on the Sisypheum had been fierce, but short, and fought against monsters. This fight, against fellow legionaries, was exactly the kind of fight he craved. Not for Bombastus the horror and tragedy of fighting his once-brothers. He welcomed it. They came at him again and again, insects against a Titan. Only the warrior Numen had killed with his volkite cannon had come close to doing any real damage. Without his external aural pickups, he fought in silence, which was proving to be more of an inconvenience than he’d expected.

The screams of the dying were as much part of the experience of killing as seeing it happen.

Then, from behind one of the strange, gem-studded towers, he saw something that sent a jolt of electrical excitement around his iron body. A Dreadnought, one marked with rank bars his internal database identified as a warsmith, no less.

Bombastus strode through the mass of fighting, ignoring everything else in his path as he fought to reach the one opponent that might challenge him. The heavier machine moved with a ponderous grace, its waist gimbal moving in dimensions his could not. Its hammer arm was crackling and lethal, but its main gun was silent.

No ammunition! roared Bombastus, though the words were only rendered as text on the inner face of his casket-visor. He could no longer hear the bellowed challenge.

The Dreadnought turned to face him, and Bombastus read the flurry of activations throughout its armoured shell. Automated weapon loaders sought and failed to find ammunition in the rear-mounted hoppers.

Bombastus sprayed the warsmith Dreadnought with a wash of blazing promethium, dousing its carapace from head to foot. He knew the damage would be minimal, but humiliation was the first part of any killing. He loosed an impudent blast of bolter fire across its carapace. Most of the rounds ricocheted, but one lucky shell caromed from the upper edge of its carapace and blasted a chunk of armour plating free. Sparks flared from a tantalising tear in its upper surfaces; a wound to be torn wider.

Then the time for guns was over and the two Dreadnoughts slammed together with a noise like starships colliding. A fight between Dreadnoughts was not a subtle affair of feints, counters and ripostes – it was a brutal, tearing, barging grapple where the victor was the war machine that offered the fewest openings to its foe.

The Iron Warriors Dreadnought was the heavier machine, but Bombastus quickly realised he had the edge in experience. Whoever had been interred in this burnished sarcophagus was a recent implantee, his skill and knowledge of the weapons, balance and moves available to him limited by his lack of experience. A thunderous uppercut paralysed his enemy’s cannon arm, tearing out the vulnerable servos beneath the curve of its shoulder guards. A body blow rocked Bombastus, but he rode the force of it, spinning around and stepping in to deliver a punishing ram.

A hammer blow pummelled his upper carapace, and a dozen damage indicators flared to life on his casket-visor.

Your height and weight advantage, he bellowed. I will not forget that again.

Bombastus pushed hard, slamming his fist down on the Dreadnought’s frontal section and driving it back. Momentum was the key. Pounding blows raining down. One after another.

Bombastus caught a flicker of motion to his side, but ignored it as his auspex registered a lone legionary. An Iron Warrior, but one without any discernible weapons capable of causing damage. Once again he pummelled the Dreadnought, breaking its armour open and exposing areas a Dreadnought ought never to expose.

Pinkish fluids and steaming oil poured from his foe’s carapace, its machine lifeblood.

A sudden threat indicator spiked at Bombastus’s rear as his auspex detected a thermal bloom from a damage-capable weapon. The Dreadnought was still reeling, no threat for now, so Bombastus spun round his central axis, feeding shells into the breech of his bolter.

Overkill for a single warrior, but immensely satisfying.

The melta blast took Bombastus in the centre of his casket, instantly vaporising the ablative layers of ceramite and melting through the armour protecting the fleshy remains that empowered his battlefield divinity. Bombastus mind-screamed within his fluid-filled sarcophagus as life-preserving gels boiled and delicate bio-synaptic receptors were flash-burned in an instant. His motors spasmed in response to his agonies, and his body tilted on its axis as he spun back round.

The Iron Warriors Dreadnought’s hammer pistoned directly into the ruin of his casket, crushing the last remains of Bombastus to a pink mulch smeared on the inner face of an empty shell. He did not fall, his body was too immense and too heavy simply to topple over. Instead he sagged with his arms limp at his side, stinking bio-fluids pouring from his ruptured sarcophagus.

‘Gratitude,’ said Berossus, his augmitters crackling and gapped with interference.

‘I am your loyal bondsman,’ said Cadaras Grendel, turning the meltagun over in his hands with a newfound admiration.

The noose of battle was closing on the two primarchs at its centre – Perturabo locked on his knees, and Fulgrim hovering in the air as though bound to his brother by ties not even the call of war could break. Sharrowkyn kicked the swordsman’s body from his blades and swept up the stone the dead warrior had been so desperate to recover.

Its substance was a shifting thing, black and gold threads intertwined, swirling around in a complex pattern, like an eternally deadlocked yin and yang. Sharrowkyn had no idea what the gemstone might be; all that mattered was that Fulgrim desired it, and must therefore be denied it. Hideous as it might be to contemplate, it seemed his purpose and that of Perturabo were aligned.

The Iron Hands were mired in battle with the Emperor’s Children and Iron Warriors, zipping streams of fire blasting back and forth between them. Sharrowkyn saw Bombastus die as Vermanus Cybus and his Morlocks fought against a group of Phoenix Guard. Sabik Wayland coordinated the fire of supporting warriors and Cadmus Tyro circled around the shaft to come up on the flanks of the Iron Warriors.

He read the ebb and flow of the battle and knew the Iron Hands could do without him for now. He placed the gemstone on a flat piece of debris and pulled the bolt pistol from the holster at the swordsman’s hip. The grip was oddly textured, with an unpleasantly organic feel, and Sharrowkyn quickly checked for a round in the chamber.

The sooner he could throw this weapon away the better.

He aimed the muzzle at the gold and black stone.

Sharrowkyn pulled the trigger, and the maugetar stone exploded.

Perturabo felt the sudden release of power like a drowning man breaking the ocean’s surface just as his lungs were fit to burst. A torrent of iron-edged energy coursed through him; a seismic shockwave of his incredible power returned to him in a flash flood of rebirth.

He roared in the pain of it, for no rebirth was ever painless.

Golden light haloed him, his eyes afire with it and his veins burning with the molten fury of a primarch’s very essence. Such raw potency was never meant for such instantaneous transference, and his back arched as his weakened frame flexed to accommodate the sudden, shocking influx of power.

Fulgrim’s body arched in sympathetic resonance, for the maugetar stone contained more than just the strength stolen from Perturabo. It contained their mingled essences, a power greater than the sum of its parts, a power to fuel an ascent so brutal that only the combined life-force of two primarchs could achieve it.

Armour burned from Fulgrim’s body, flaking away like golden dust in a hurricane, leaving his monstrously swollen body naked and his flesh blazing with furnace heat. Spectral flames of shimmering pink and purple licked around his body, a hungry fire waiting to consume him the moment his focus slipped.

Perturabo slumped forwards onto his knuckles, holding himself erect with the iron in his soul and little else. Even as his strength returned, he felt the weight of it settle in his bones, like a burden he hadn’t realised was his to shoulder.

He pushed himself upright, his mastery of the power flooding his body growing with every second. His muscles surged with blood and golden energy, his heart beating with the strength of a forge-hammer. For the first time in what seemed like a lifetime, Perturabo felt as he had when he had first laid eyes on the Emperor.

All-powerful and all-knowing, privileged to know who he was.

Much had changed since that moment, but enough remained the same for him to relish the sense of rightness as he lifted Forgebreaker onto his shoulder. He flexed his fingers and took a moment to admire the craftsmanship. Horus had given him this weapon as a symbol of their unity, but had he ever expected Perturabo would use it to kill one of his brothers?

Fulgrim saw his death in Perturabo’s eyes and grinned, silver light spilling from his gullet as he said, ‘You know you have to do it.’

‘It didn’t have to end this way,’ said Perturabo.

‘You know it did,’ said Fulgrim. ‘So make it quick.’

Perturabo nodded and hefted Forgebreaker like a headsman at an execution.

The steel and gold head of the hammer’s killing face swung in a geometrically perfect arc, splitting the Phoenician’s body wide open.

And it was done.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Apotheosis
The End of the World
Into the Black

But it wasn’t done, not by a long way. Fulgrim’s body exploded under the impact of Perturabo’s hammer, and the cry of release was a shrieking birth scream. An explosion of pure force ripped from the Phoenician’s destroyed flesh, filling the chamber of towers with a blinding light that was too bright to look upon, too radiant to ignore. Like a newborn sun, the wondrous incandescence was the centre of all things, a rebirth in fire, new flesh crafted from the ashes of the old.

Perturabo backed away from the light as it grew more intense.

The head of his hammer dripped the white phosphor of unleashed matter and he knew the glorious power he had felt at the destruction of the maugetar stone was but a shadow of what was being wrought.

Every eye in the chamber was turned to the light, though it would surely blind them or drive them to madness. Through slitted fingers and shimmering reflections, the survivors of the fighting bore witness to something magnificent and terrible, an agonising death and violent birth combined.

Screams issued from the heart of the light, the most awful screams imaginable. They spoke of loss, of pain, of despair and of things forgotten, never to be remembered. In their diabolical cadences of anguish, Perturabo heard the fear of the newborn emerging from its mother’s womb, the terror of being ejected into a new and pain-filled world, but also the anticipation of that world’s exploration. It carried the rapture of a fleshsmith who knows nothing of the principles of his art, only that he is exalted by it.

Just when it seemed that the agonised, euphoric screaming could go on no longer, the light began to unfold, like the petals of a night-blooming flower or an illuminated chrysalis being unwrapped by the metamorphic entity within.

A figure floated in the midst of the light, and it took a moment for Perturabo to recognise the impossibility of what he was seeing.

It was Fulgrim, naked and pristine, his body unsullied by any of the mawkish ornamentations with which he had defaced his flesh, as perfect as the day the Emperor had first conceived him. The greatest sculptors of stone would have thrown away their hammers, awls and rasps at the sight of the Phoenician, knowing they would never be able to render anything so beautiful.

No trace of the wounds Eidolon had inflicted was visible, and as Fulgrim lowered his arms, his eyes shone with the doom of extinguished worlds. He threw his head back and the millions of spirit stones that had followed his ascent from the heart of the world split asunder with a booming thunderclap. Their incineration spilled sacrificial energy into the light, bolstering it and multiplying its power a millionfold; a flickering web of silver with Fulgrim at its heart.

‘I am the whisper of a god that the warp has turned into a shout!’ said Fulgrim.

Fulgrim’s back arched and his bones split with gunshot cracks. His flesh, once so perfect, now ran fluid and malleable, his form moulding and remoulding as though an invisible sculptor pressed and worked him like clay upon a wheel. Fulgrim’s legs, extended like the man of Vitruvius, ran and lengthened, fusing together in a writhing serpent’s tail, the skin thickening and sheening with reptilian scales and segmented plates of chitinous armour.

Perturabo took a step towards this thing being born from the death of his brother, all the while despairing that this was his brother.

‘Fulgrim, no…’ he said, but what was done could not be undone.

All around this world of the dead, a world left in the wake of a stellar cataclysm in the hopes that one day its makers might return to claim the last remnants of their ancestors, every spirit stone in every tomb and every crystalline statue screamed in terror as the life bound within it was devoured by the hungry god whose appetite could never be satisfied.

She Who Thirsts…

An offering and a sacrifice, a feast and a fuel source, it was all these things and more, and Fulgrim was offering it all in return for this apotheosis.

Fulgrim’s torso split apart and swelled with writhing muscle as nubs of flesh pushed their way from his ribs. Writhing and gelatinous, they grew from his warping flesh like withered, atrophied limbs before gradually assuming the semblance of muscular arms. The new flesh was hued a mottled purple, and hissing venom dripped from the ebony claws.

But worse was yet to come; as Fulgrim was bent double by this agonised transformation, the light drew back into him, veining his body like cracks in the surface of a sun, before exploding from his back in two enormous wings of membranous mist. Insubstantial and threaded with dark energy, they gradually attained solidity, flesh wrought from energy, the stuff of the warp shaped into a form that could be pressed into the material world.

This was no body of bone and blood; Perturabo had destroyed Fulgrim’s mortal shell. This was an immaterial avatar of light and energy, of soul and desire. What was being done here was an act of will, a creature birthing itself through its own desire to exist.

An immaculate conception, a creature that was its own mother and father combined.

It was the coniunctio, the alchemical union of spirit, soul and body.

Fulgrim’s face was a mask of agonised rapture, a pain endured for the pleasure it promised.

Two obsidian horns erupted from Fulgrim’s skull, ripping through in the exact place that the sniper’s shot had struck him in the Thaliakron. They curled back over his skull, leaving his perfect face as unsullied as the most innocent child.

‘I ascend in Chaos,’ said Fulgrim, his voice musical and repellent. ‘A prince of the neverborn, a lord of the Ruinous Powers, the chosen of the Profligate Ones and beloved champion of Slaanesh!’

‘What have you done?’ said Perturabo, feeling the last dregs of life on this world rebel at the damned syllables of that name.

‘What none other dared before me,’ said Fulgrim, or whatever it was that Fulgrim had become. ‘I have been rewarded by my rebirth in the fire of sacrifice.’

Perturabo had nothing else to say. His brother was dead, and this monstrous creature was all that was left of him. Nothing remained of the once mighty and noble primarch the Emperor had crafted to be his perfect warrior, and Perturabo felt an all-consuming grief that what had begun in such glorious hope an age ago had been so perverted.

‘I see it all now,’ said Fulgrim, his gaze sweeping the chamber while the light around him began to fade as every spirit stone was finally drained of life. ‘The past and the futures, the present and the neverwas. The time we waste here is but a mote in the eye of the universe, a prelude to things infinite and things fleeting.’

Perturabo felt a tremor in the rock, the widening fault lines originating from the planet’s hollow core now rising to the surface. The floor of the cavern split apart with a booming crack and the last light of the dying green sun flooded the chamber.

‘Farewell, brother,’ said Fulgrim. ‘We will meet again, and we will yet renew our bonds.’

Fulgrim lifted his hands and a curtain of azure light rose up from the ground like a flare of teleportation energy. It was blinding and momentary, and when it cleared, Perturabo saw that Fulgrim was gone, and with him every one of the Emperor’s Children.

His Iron Warriors surrounded him, each one changed by what they had witnessed – some for the good, some for ill, though it was too soon to tell which was which. They stood ready for his command, his loyal sons all. Dust and a rain of debris fell from above, the cracks in the floor spreading to the great dome like fracturing glass. A zigzagging fault line ripped through the centre of the chamber and segments of the floor were thrust upwards as jets of pulverised rock geysered plumes of green dust.

Iydris was tearing itself apart. The force at the heart of the world was no more. The strength of the dead that had kept it safe was failing, and soon this planet would be swallowed by the unimaginable force of the supermassive black hole.

Across the chasm, the remaining Iron Hands gathered up their wounded and fell back from the spreading fissures and heaving ruptures opening in the floor. They looked upon Perturabo with hatred, and he could not say it was ill earned. Had he desired it, Perturabo could destroy them all single-handed. With his regained strength, there was not one of them that could resist him, and they knew it.

Perturabo slung Forgebreaker over his shoulder.

‘This world is dying,’ he said to his warriors. ‘But we will not die with it.’

Perturabo turned from the Iron Hands and walked away.

Cadmus Tyro watched the primarch of the Iron Warriors leave, and let out the breath it felt like he’d been holding for years. He knew there was no way they could have fought the Lord of Iron and lived, though it would have been a battle worthy of Medusan legend had anyone been left alive to speak of it.

‘They’ve gone,’ said Vermanus Cybus, his weapons held limply at his side.

‘You sound disappointed,’ replied Tyro.

Cybus shrugged. ‘I expected to die at Perturabo’s hand. Any other death will feel small.’

Another crack burst the ground nearby and more of the sickly light spread from whatever lay at the heart of this planet. Debris fell from above, and slivers of the bruised sky above the sepulchre were visible through the disintegrating structure.

‘Then don’t die,’ said Tyro, gripping the veteran’s shoulder. ‘Live forever.’

Cybus nodded and turned away to gather his few surviving warriors. The Iron Hands fell back to the walls of the chamber, towards the dark, secret passages of the sepulchre through which Varuchi Vohra had led them. The eldar guide knelt by the walls, his hands sifting the knee-deep dust that was all that remained of the vast array of gemstones immolated by Fulgrim’s transformation. Tears streamed down the eldar’s face, grief at the passing of a world, or something else.

‘We need to go,’ said Tyro as another violent shockwave bubbled up from the planet’s core. ‘This place will not last much longer.’

‘The maugetar stone…’ whispered Vohra between wracking sobs. ‘That should have been enough for him. Not this… this was too much. Now we have nothing.’

‘We are alive, eldar,’ said Tyro. ‘We faced enemy primarchs and yet we live. Be thankful for that. And whatever weapons they sought here, they’re not leaving with them.’

Vohra looked up at him, his face transformed from the bland scholar Tyro had always doubted he was into something cruel and inhuman, a monster that revelled in the suffering of others and the myriad pains he could craft.

‘The lords of Commorragh do not look kindly upon failure,’ said Vohra. ‘You upstart ape-creatures were only supposed to divert them, to keep the fallen ones from understanding the true prize of Iydris.’

‘The true prize?’

Vohra held up his hand, letting the grey, inert dust spill through his fingers.

‘All is dust,’ he said mirthlessly. ‘This was to be our salvation, a world’s worth of spirit stones to stave off the hunger of She Who Thirsts, but it’s all gone… The power to reclaim our birthright. I return to Commorragh to my death.’

Tyro had no understanding of the eldar’s words, but appreciated enough to know that he and his warriors had been deceived from the very beginning. This mission had never been about denying the traitors world-cracking weapons – most likely no such weapons had ever existed, and the tale Fulgrim had told Perturabo on Hydra Cordatus of the Angel Exterminatus was a grand lie constructed to bring the weapons and talents of the Iron Warriors to bear on this doomed world.

Just as Vohra’s words had been crafted to bring the Iron Hands to this place, to keep the Emperor’s Children and Iron Warriors from realising what was truly at stake. But something had gone awry and now the eldar’s plan was in ruins.

‘You brought us here to die,’ said Tyro. Spears of light spilled from above and he looked up at the opened roof, its circumference ringed by broken slabs of stone that spilled rivers of debris into the chamber.

‘It’s all you are good for, mon-keigh!’ snapped Varuchi Vohra, drawing his hands round and above him in an elaborate circle, as if defining the outline of a gateway around him.

Tyro drew his pistol and aimed it squarely at the eldar’s skull.

‘My brothers died for your lie,’ said Tyro. ‘Now you will too.’

The eldar spoke a grating word in his native tongue and a crackling violet light flared from the gate he had described around his body. Tyro squeezed the trigger, but his bolt blasted through empty air. He fired again and again, but Vohra was gone.

Sabik Wayland jogged over to stand beside him, Nykona Sharrowkyn at his side. Both bore grievous wounds and their armour was red with blood. Tyro nodded gratefully to the Raven Guard as he saw he carried the broken remains of Garuda. The golden eagle’s metal body was badly damaged, but he suspected Frater Thamatica would relish the challenge of making it fully functional again – assuming they could escape without the eldar guide.

‘What are you shooting at?’ said Wayland. ‘We need to get out of here.’

‘Vohra’s gone,’ said Tyro.

‘Gone?’ said Wayland. ‘Where?’

‘I don’t know. Some kind of personal teleporter, I think,’ said Tyro. ‘He must have a hidden starship in orbit.’

‘But he knew the way out,’ said Sharrowkyn. ‘I tried to map it as we made our way in, but it was impossible. The paths were all wrong.’

‘Then we go out a different way,’ said Wayland, detaching a personal transponder from a cavity within his backpack. A winking green light shone from the bulky technology.

A roar of engines sounded from above and an aircraft descended on shrieking jetblasts. A Storm Eagle in the colours of the Iron Hands spiralled down through the shattered roof to hover on screaming pillars of rippling air. Thunderhawks and Stormbirds hovered in the air above the sepulchre, buffeted by storm-force winds.

Through the canopy of the Storm Eagle, Tyro saw Frater Thamatica, who sketched a wry salute through the polarised armourglass panes. As much as Thamatica had earned every punishment and more, Tyro had never been happier to see the wayward Iron Father. The assault ramp lowered on the Storm Eagle and Atesh Tarsa jumped down onto the heaving floor of the chamber.

‘Get the wounded and dead on board right now,’ he commanded. ‘The Sisypheum is on borrowed time to break orbit, but we leave no man behind.’

Whatever artifice the labyrinth once possessed to confound the senses was lost with the demise of the power at the heart of the world. Perturabo could feel its embers dying and knew they had little time until the singularity dragged Iydris into its black maw. He led the Iron Warriors through the inert maze and out into the plaza beyond, where it seemed the fighting had been no less fierce. He saw the shattered remains of an Iron Warriors strongpoint, but no sign of any of his gene-sons. The plaza had been laid waste by a merciless bombardment, the kind designed to wipe an area clean of life and leave no stone upon another; an Iron Warriors bombardment.

He ignored the questions of his legionaries as he led them through the cratered wasteland, back through the citadel of the dead that now truly deserved the name. The tombs were all empty, the few remaining statues utterly lifeless and every hint of the shimmering green light that had suffused each building now vanished.

The fortifications at the wall were gone, the Rhinos shattered and broken by shell-fire and the wall itself flattened for hundreds of metres in both directions. The few tombs and mausolea that had clustered near the wall on either side were gone too, pounded flat by a walking barrage that had cleared a path from the citadel back to the landing zone.

They saw no sign of the Emperor’s Children and no sign of the Iron Hands. Iydris was coming apart at the seams, deep fissures opening in the landscape and billowing clouds of dust and smoke pouring from the wounds in the planet’s surface. Fading green light suffused the dust, and a tortured groan sounded from deep below as impossible stresses cracked apart the planetary structure crafted by the long-dead eldar.

At length their brutal march pace through the obscuring, sound-deadening dust clouds brought them within sight of the fortifications around the landing zone, and Perturabo was relieved to find that they appeared to have escaped assault.

The walls were cracking from the base upwards, and on any normal world the life of the warsmith in command of such a fortress would have been forfeit. But this was no normal world and the earth upon which these walls had been built was, like the race that once dwelled here, untrustworthy and unreliable.

The gates of the fortress opened and an armoured squadron of iron-sheened Land Raiders emerged, chevroned in gold and jet. Their weapons were live, and riding in the topmost hatch of the lead vehicle was the master of the Stor-bezashk.

‘My lord,’ said Toramino. ‘You live! When Warsmith Forrix called in a final protective fire mission we feared the worst.’

Perturabo nodded, but before he could issue any orders, the weapons of Toramino’s Land Raider swung up to bear, their charge capacitors building power to fire. Perturabo spun around, hearing a muffled roar through the banks of churned dust. Toramino’s Land Raiders manoeuvred into a firing line, but a familiar tenor in the sound made Perturabo raise his hand.

‘Hold your fire,’ he ordered as a hulking, battered shape emerged from the smoke.

The Tormentor, cratered, holed and pummelled almost to destruction, limped towards the line of Land Raiders. The Shadowsword’s main gun had been torn off at the root. Every one of its sponson guns had been blasted from the superstructure and its rear quarters were ablaze where its engine and fuel stores had ignited. Great gashes torn in its side flapped sheets of thick plasteel, and it trailed its mechanical innards behind it in a glistening river of oil.

The engine gave one last bang of internal reaction, and the super-heavy ground to a halt, never to move again. Its side hatches fell open, clanging against its ruined hull and spilling roiling banks of thick, tar-black smoke.

A warrior in armour the colour of soot and bare metal fell from the vehicle’s interior, dragging a figure in Cataphractii warplate behind him. The burden was too great for him and he collapsed in a broken heap, tearing off his helmet and drawing great gulping breaths. Both warriors were drenched in blood and scorched by the flames of the super-heavy’s demise, but Perturabo recognised the Stonewrought and Forrix almost immediately.

‘Falk, Kroeger, attend to your fellow triarch,’ ordered Perturabo, before turning back to Toramino. ‘Evacuation protocols. All craft and personnel are to return to the fleet immediately.’

Perturabo’s warriors hastened to obey him as he marched back to the landing fields.

Perturabo stood watching the final death throes of the eldar crone world. He had seen planets die before, cleansed of organic matter by the life-eater virus or bombed to extinction by cyclonic torpedoes. He had even seen one consumed by a rogue stellar flare, burned black in minutes by the raging violence of its star. But he had never seen a world die from within. The surface of the pearlescent globe was darkening by the second, its once pristine surface now sullied by clouds of ejected matter reaching up into the troposphere. Any structures remaining on the surface had long since been obliterated by the growing seismic force of the core-deep earthquakes or had sunk into the vast, continent-sized fissures tearing through the upper reaches of the artificial planetoid’s structure.

The Iron Blood strained to break orbit, but the force at the heart of the Eye of Terror was reasserting its grip on reality with a vengeance. Many of the smaller vessels of the Iron Warriors fleet had already been dragged within its embrace, swallowed by the black hole’s powerful energies.

Only the capital ships had engines large enough to resist the inexorable pull, but even they were only delaying the inevitable. The vessel’s Navigators could find no trace of the Paths Above that had led them to this world, and their desperate search for a way out was bearing no fruit.

Behind him, Forrix, Kroeger and Falk awaited his command, but he had none to give.

He was a primarch, crafted to be a god amongst men, but what was he in the face of such cosmic power? Could he demand the black hole release his ships, or turn back the course of time with a wave of the hand? He had great power, but even he was subject to the laws of the universe.

The Iron Blood groaned, hyper-stresses deforming its implacable superstructure with shear and torsion it had never been designed to endure. The ship was crying out in pain, its machine spirits filling the command deck with frightened static.

The Emperor’s Children fleet had vanished completely, taken up along with Fulgrim in his ascendance. Even Julius Kaesoron, who Forrix and the Stonewrought swore blind had escaped the barrage at the plaza with them in the Tormentor. Perturabo did not know where his duplicitous brother had gone, nor did he care. His betrayal had turned the last of Perturabo’s heart to stone, cementing his conviction that there was only one man whose orders he could trust.

One warrior who spoke without guile and with only noble intentions at his heart.

From now on, he would trust only Horus Lupercal.

‘My lord?’ said Forrix. ‘What are your orders?’

Perturabo turned to face his triarchs, each one of them scarred by the battles they had fought to reach this place.

Barban Falk stood taller, somehow fuller, as though imbued with a presence he had not possessed before. His armour was darker, almost black in places, and when Forrix had spoken to him by name earlier, Perturabo had heard Falk say, ‘I no longer know that name, I am simply the Warsmith.’

Kroeger too had changed, as though some secret part of him had unlocked and could never now be closed off. His killer’s swagger was still there, but it was distilled, honed, now directed into serving a higher purpose than simply the thrill of battle.

Forrix alone seemed to have been diminished by this campaign, the fire that had driven him into the most terrible battles smothered by bitterness. Perturabo knew that feeling well; it was the horror of betrayal, the crushing weight of knowing that there was no one worthy of your trust.

‘My orders?’ said Perturabo, turning back to the viewscreen, where the monstrous black hole seethed with dark energies. Perturabo looked into its heart, thinking back to the celestial myths and legends surrounding such phenomena, the scientific facts and suppositions of their origins and the wild theories of what might lie on the other side of such a thing.

‘I never go back,’ said Perturabo. ‘Only forwards.’

‘My lord?’ asked Forrix again. ‘What are your orders?’

‘We go in,’ said Perturabo.

‘Into the black hole?’ asked Kroeger in horror. ‘That’s suicide.’

‘No, my triarch,’ said Perturabo with sudden insight. ‘Fulgrim promised we would meet again, and I believe him. We are not meant to die here, and there is only one way onwards.’

Perturabo stared at the black hole, as if daring it to contradict him.

‘This is my order,’ he said. ‘Carry it out. Now.’

Theogonies – IV

He was born in fire.

Or was that reborn?

Lucius felt it on his skin, a killing heat that consumed all before it. Fuelled by chemicals and accelerated by an almost sentient desire to devour. His eyes opened, and Lucius felt thrilling pain surge around his body. He was alive, which was something to be savoured, especially in the wake of what had gone before.

Sharrowkyn.

The Raven Guard had killed him.

And yet he was clearly alive.

Lucius remembered the twin black swords plunging into his body in the traditional manner of the executioner. The pain of the blades sliding down through his chest to pierce his hearts and puncture his lungs was a memory to cherish. It sent pulses of shivering pleasure through him even now.

He sat up, touching his hands to his shoulders and finding no trace of the killing wounds, only a smooth layer of skin that felt wondrous to the touch. He sat on a metal gurney in an apothecarion that looked like a madman’s laboratory, the walls hung with heavy tubes of gurgling fluids that bubbled and steamed in the heat pervading the chamber.

Fire blazed throughout its length and breadth, a raging inferno set by deliberate hand. Pools of toxic chemicals burned on the walls and floor, spilled from smashed beakers and poured from ruptured vats of highly toxic, highly flammable liquids.

He was not dead.

Nor was he alone.

In the centre of the laboratory a life or death struggle was under way. Two monsters of immense proportions fought with their creator and the master of this abode of the damned, Apothecary Fabius. One of the terata was a broken abomination of crooked limbs, its body swelling with mutant growths and hyper-evolving anatomy. The other sprouted new limbs with every breath, fresh organs and innumerable unfathomable body parts.

Yet amid all their hideous deformations, Lucius saw Legion markings on their flesh, swollen and twisted by their nightmarish transformation. Whatever these terata were on their way to becoming, they had both once been Imperial Fists.

Fabius fought the terata with a spike-topped rod and a wide-bore pistol that fired streaking rounds. Each impact detonated with virulent toxins, but each one seemed only to make the mutating beasts stronger. Only the flames were hurting them, and their supra-engineered flesh was potent fuel to the fire.

‘Lucius!’ screamed Fabius. ‘Help me! Save the gene-samples!’

Lucius had no interest in obeying the orders of the likes of Fabius, but reasoned that being owed a favour by someone with the Apothecary’s talents might be no bad thing. He swung himself from the gurney and scanned the workbenches lining the walls for the most useful-looking piece of apparatus, something that might fit the description.

At length he decided upon a silver cryo-storage case fixed to the wall by a series of coolant pipes and monitoring cables. Lucius fought past the flames, his armour proof against the worst of the heat, but he wore no helmet and the skin of his scarred face was blistering. What little hair remained on his skull was burned away, never to return.

The pain was sublime.

One of the terata fell, pierced through by Fabius’s lethal maul, its body collapsing under the weight of its uncontrollable mutations. The other was aflame from head to foot, the flesh running from its twisted bones like hot wax. Fabius shot it in the head, and its spine cracked as an evolutionary spurt broke it apart.

Lucius took hold of the storage case and ripped it from the wall. Hot fluids sprayed him from the severed feed lines and the biological stink of it was a combination of ammoniac piss and organic waste. The sides of the box were red hot, and he roared in pain even as his mind lit up with pleasure.

‘Go!’ shouted Fabius, pushing through the laboratory as the flames spread to the drums of explosive elements. Thudding blasts from deeper in the apothecarion shook the chamber and sheets of billowing flame roared towards them.

Lucius turned and ran for the exit, following Fabius out into the corridor beyond.

Fabius hammered the door mechanism, and the armoured shutter slammed down. Even through the blast-shielded plasteel, Lucius could feel the intense heat and the percussive detonation of chemical vats.

‘Quickly!’ snapped Fabius. ‘The gene-samples, give them to me. They need to be kept frozen or they become non-viable.’

Lucius set down the cryo-storage case and disengaged the hermetic seal. Vapour spilled from the case as the upper half of the container slid clear. Fabius worked feverishly on his heavily modified narthecium gauntlet, opening a cylindrical vacuum flask capable of holding a number of sample tubes.

Lucius saw a row of twelve zygote tubes, some misted with heat damage and others cracked and leaking. Illuminators ran the length of the case, one for each tube. All but one glowed an angry, useless red.

‘Give it to me!’ shouted Fabius. ‘Now.’

Lucius unsnapped the last tube, its smooth metallic surface scorched and warped, yet the genetic material inside it miraculously still viable. Fabius snatched the tube from his grasp and twisted the pressure cap onto the receiver socket of his narthecium. The mechanism hissed with pressure differential and the containment level dropped until the zygote tube was emptied.

‘Only one,’ said Fabius in bitter disappointment, hurling the zygote tube down the corridor in frustration. ‘All that work, all that time spent, and only one survives.’

‘What happened in there?’ asked Lucius.

Fabius waved away his question. ‘Nothing of any concern to the likes of you, swordsman. I could ask you the same thing. When the Phoenician brought you to me you were cold and dead. How is it that you live?’

Lucius shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Death doesn’t want me yet.’

Fabius gave a short bark of laughter, grim and humourless.

‘Perhaps I could learn something from you then,’ said the Apothecary, staring at him with predatory malice. Lucius rose to his feet, sensing that to remain here would be dangerous. He walked away from the burning ruin of the apothecarion without looking back. By the time he reached a junction in the corridor, he felt stronger and more powerful than ever before, a dark prince among men.

Something crunched beneath his boot and he reached down to lift the empty zygote tube Fabius had thrown away. Its surface was black and yellow with heat damage, but a line of text could still be seen etched onto its side.

Lucius held it up to the glow of the lumens, but whatever had been written there was mostly illegible.

It looked like a name, but one he could only partially make out.

‘Hon… Sou,’ he read.

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 Primarchs

Warmaster Horus Lupercal, Primarch of the Sons of Horus

Angron, Primarch of the World Eaters

Lorgar Aurelian, Primarch of the Word Bearers

Magnus the Red, Primarch of the Thousand Sons

Roboute Guilliman, Primarch of the Ultramarines

The XII Legion ‘World Eaters’

Vorias, Lectio Primus, Librarius Division

Esca, Codicier, Librarius Division

Khârn, Captain, Eighth Company, and Equerry to Angron

Kargos, ‘Bloodspitter’, Apothecary, Eighth Company

Jeddek, Standard bearer, Eighth Company

Skane, Sergeant, Skane Destroyer squad, Eighth Company

Gharte, Sergeant, Marakan Tactical squad, Eighth Company

Delvarus, Centurion, Delvarus Triarii squad, 44th Company

Lhorke, ‘The First’; Dreadnought, Contemptor-pattern

Neras, Dreadnought

The XVII Legion ‘Word Bearers’

Argel Tal, Gal Vorbak, Commander of the Vakrah Jal

Erebus, First Chaplain, Dark Apostle of the Word

Eshramar, Vakrah Jal, Sergeant, Eshramar Immolation squad

The XIII Legion ‘Ultramarines’

Orfeo Cassandar, Legatus of Armatura

Fleet Personnel

Lotara Sarrin, Flag-Captain of the XII Legion warship Conqueror

Ivar Tobin, First Officer of the XII Legion warship Conqueror

Feyd Hallerthan, Officer of the XII Legion warship Conqueror

Lehralla, Scrymistress of the XII Legion warship Conqueror

Kejic, Vox-master of the XII Legion warship Conqueror

The Blessed Lady, Confessor of the Word

The Martian Mechanicum

Vel-Kheredar, Archmagos Veneratus, representative of Kelbor-Hal

The Legio Audax ‘Ember Wolves’

Venric Solostine, Princeps Ultima, and Princeps of the Command Titan Syrgalah

Toth Kol, Moderati Primus, Command Titan Syrgalah

Keeda Bly, Moderati Secundus, Command Titan Syrgalah

The Ninth, Mechanicum Adept, Command Titan Syrgalah

Audun Lyrac, Princeps Penultima

The Legio Lysanda ‘Sentinels of the Edge’

Maxamillien Delantyr, Princeps, Titan Ardentor

Ellas Hyle, Moderati Primus, Titan Ardentor

Kei Adaras, Moderati Secundus, Titan Ardentor

Non-Imperial Personae

Tybaral Thal’kr, Praxuary, Imperial Magnate of Nuceria

Oshamay Evrel’Korshay, General of the Thal’kr Kin-Guard

Damon Prytanis, Perpetual

‘Because we couldn’t be trusted. The Emperor needed a weapon that would never obey its own desires before those of the Imperium. He needed a weapon that would never bite the hand that feeds. The World Eaters were not that weapon. We’ve all drawn blades purely for the sake of shedding blood, and we’ve all felt the exultation of winning a war that never even needed to happen. We are not the tame, reliable pets that the Emperor wanted. The Wolves obey, when we would not. The Wolves can be trusted, when we never could. They have a discipline we lack, because their passions are not aflame with the Butcher’s Nails buzzing in the back of their skulls.

‘The Wolves will always come to heel when called. In that regard, it is a mystery why they name themselves wolves. They are tame, collared by the Emperor, obeying his every whim. But a wolf doesn’t behave that way. Only a dog does.

‘That is why we are the Eaters of Worlds, and the War Hounds no longer.’

– Eighth Captain Khârn,
from his unpublished treatise The Eighteen Legions

PROLOGUE

Isstvan III

Skane was the one to find the body. He stood knee-deep in the dead, next to the wrecked hull of a Land Raider battle tank, his armour stained black by the sin of the weapons he wielded.

‘Kargos,’ he voxed. His voice was tinny, laden with static. One of the enemy had caught him in the throat during the battle, and it had jarred his augmetic vocal cords. They’d need retuning once he returned to the Conqueror.

‘Kargos,’ he said again, across the tomb-quiet vox-channel.

‘What?’ His brother’s reply was also flawed by static, but from more traditional vox-corruption rather than a bionic trachea.

‘Track my locator rune,’ said Skane. ‘Get over here.’

‘I’m busy. Look around you, sergeant. You think you’re the only one that needs my help at the moment?’

Skane didn’t bother looking. He knew where he was and what he’d see – he was at the heart of it all, and the dead numbered in the thousands. Most here wore armour the green of shallow oceans, cracked and shattered by the treachery of their former kindred. These were Horus’s former Sons, betrayed by their brethren and slain for their disloyalty. Among their number, armour of bloodstained white stood out like pearls amongst seaweed. Too many World Eaters had fallen here, though victory was undeniable. The city was dead in every direction, reduced to ash and rubble.

A shadow fell across Skane, blocking out the weak sun as a Legio Audax Warhound passed with its rattle-clank stride, shaking the tortured ground. He lifted a hand to the war machine, receiving no acknowledgement beyond dull sunlight glinting on the Titan’s ursus claw spear. It stalked onwards, splayed feet grinding ceramite and bone and twisted iron into the earth, its wolfish cockpit lowered as it hunted for life signs and scanner-scents among the dead and the dying.

Skane turned back to the ruined tank, kneeling by its front end where the minesweeper plough was decorated in scratches and gore. A body impaled on the dozer blade’s spikes twitched in uneasy repose, its fingers still scraping in futility across the metal. Skane wasn’t sure how the pinned warrior still lived, and doubted the trembling, bleeding figure would survive being pulled from the blade. Nevertheless, he spoke again.

‘Kargos,’ he said for the third time. It took the Apothecary several seconds to answer.

‘I told you I’m busy. Fix your own damn throat, or shut up and wait until we’re back aboard the ship.’

Skane disengaged the seals at the dying warrior’s neck, lifting the helm free with a hiss of released air pressure. The revealed face was pale, bloodstained from the lips down, the eyes open and blind while the mouth worked in silent, wordless pain.

‘I’ve found Khârn,’ Skane voxed.

This time, there was no delay in Kargos’s reply. ‘I’m on my way.’

I
Last Words

‘Any who hear these words, I implore you to carry them across the Imperium. I am Vice Admiral Tion Konor Gallus of the Andarion Fleet, stationed in the Quintus Spread of Ultramar. My personnel clearance numericals are: three-three-Via-nine-one-K-O-L-five-one. We have come under intentional and malign attack by a fleet flying the colours of the Twelfth World Eaters Legion. Our escorts are already dead. Our remaining capital ships are suffering boarding actions. Most were destroyed outright. The Fulgentius Shipyards are lost to treachery. Get word t–

‘Variano, they’re still strangling this signal. I don’t care how you do it, break through this jamming or I’ll shoot you myself–

‘This is Admiral Gallus of the Andarion Fleet. Get word to the muster at Calth. Get word to Lord Guilliman. We are betrayed. We are betrayed.’

– Admiral Tion Konor Gallus, Aboard the Ultramarines battleship Legate,
stationed at Latona

‘Theodos to all remaining forces, maintain defensive formation above the arctic circle. Deny them bombardment until the astropathic cry is sent. Any unengaged support frigates in the seventeenth grid allocation, target the Word Bearers vessel identification: Deadsong. Kill it before it brings its lances to bear on the arctic bastion.

‘All Aequitas crew without sacrificial oaths, to the escape pods.

‘Theodos to the fleet: we’re crippled and aflame, all non-essential crew abandoning ship. Disengage from any attempts to defend us. Repeat: disengage from any attempts to defend us. Use your guns elsewhere.

‘How is this not working? Why are the astropaths silent?

‘Put me through to the Deadsong. I don’t care if they answer.

‘I know you hear me, Seventeenth. We are your brothers. What madness has taken you? What mad–’

– Fleetmaster Gaius Theodos, Aboard the Ultramarines warship Aequitas,
stationed at Ulixis

‘Still no word from the Calth muster. The signal may not even be reaching them.

‘One of us has to get out of here alive…

‘This is the flagship to the Azureus: break free by any means necessary. The Tears of Kyanos and the Immortal Patriarch are to move in support, executing a Seven Rises Manoeuvre to take any and all punishment inbound for the Azureus. All escort squadrons, form up around the Azureus in a Deniquo interception pattern. Igitur, break off your attack and bring your guns to bear in the third grid to support the Azureus. I want you to peel that Twelfth ship off her tail. We’ll only have one shot at this.

‘Azureus, in the name of the Emperor and the Five Hundred Worlds, run and do not stop. Run to Armatura, and give my regards to Orfeo.’

– Commander Krios Cassan Captain of the Ultramarines warship Vinculum Unitatis,
stationed at Espandor

ONE

The Archpriest and the Sorcerer
Armatura
Warpsong

The Peregrinus Basilica was an armoured fortress jutting from the flagship’s spinal battlements, commanding a view of the warp above the entire spread of the warship Fidelitas Lex below. The cathedral itself would be a palace on any world, the size of a city sector in its own right, built in relative humility as a modest echo of the Imperial Palace on Terra.

Lorgar Aurelian was in the domed observatory atop the central spire. He stood calmly, this Lord of the Word Bearers, armoured but unarmed while his sons prepared for war on the hundreds of decks beneath his feet. The ship was alive with chanting and shrieking, yet Lorgar was at peace, watching the mists of madness crashing against the dome.

‘Brother,’ came a voice from behind.

Lorgar’s features – pale, godlike and inked with golden scripture – dawned into a warm smile. Breaking the serenity of his heavenward vigil, he turned, his boots echoing on the mosaic deck as he did so. An image of his brother Magnus greeted him.

If Lorgar’s skin was gold-inscribed marble, Magnus was an effigy of burnt copper. Both primarchs were reflections of their father, each of them made in the Emperor’s image, but where Lorgar was like an aesthetically pleasing statue, etched with intricate runes and swirling mandalas, Magnus was more akin to a red-skinned heathen idol – a Sun God’s avatar of the sort worshipped by primitive cultures in less-enlightened ages. His skin was the red of flayed muscles; his armour a suit of golden scales edged in ivory, and with a bronze helm crested with a lion’s mane of bristling scarlet hair. A fist-sized gem of volcanic glass, carved as a black scarab, held his cloak over one shoulder. Lorgar couldn’t be certain where his brother was in truth, but the projected essence standing before him was perfect in every detail.

‘Magnus,’ he said, still smiling. ‘Tell me you’ve made your decision.’

As ever, Lorgar wore his emotions as openly as a soul could, and his genuine gratitude at his brother’s arrival shone from his eyes. Even so, Magnus ignored his brother’s words.

‘I can hear your sons making ready for war,’ he said instead.

Lorgar’s smile didn’t fade. ‘A sound to chill the blood, isn’t it? They’ve changed so much since Isstvan.’

‘As have you,’ said Magnus.

The Word Bearer’s smile faltered at last and he looked back to the turbulent heavens. ‘Strange. From Angron those same words come as a compliment, or as close to one as our brother could ever manage. From you, though, they seem more of a curse.’

Magnus shrugged.

‘I wouldn’t trust Angron if he swore to me that water was wet. Our brother is blind. Blind and lost.’

‘You underestimate him,’ said the Word Bearer. ‘He too is changing. We all are. Ah, Magnus, you will see how my Word Bearers make war now. Even a handful of years ago, I’d never have imagined it…’ Lorgar smiled once more, then shook his head. ‘But you came to tell me of your decision, did you not? Please, brother. Speak it.’

The sorcerer gave a slight shake of his head. ‘First tell me of Calth. The Great Ocean’s tides crash at the edges of the Calth System, Lorgar, and death emanates from the place in sickening waves.’

‘Regrettable, but necessary.’

Magnus snorted, though Lorgar wasn’t sure whether it was with amusement or derision. He turned to gaze back out to the roiling chaos of the warp, staring unblinkingly into its poisoned depths of manifest emotion.

‘I’m glad you came,’ he said at last. ‘I’ve missed you.’

Magnus gave a low, rumbling chuckle. ‘Am I to assume Angron does not offer the brotherly companionship you’d hoped for?’

Lorgar’s radiant smile dawned for a third time, but he didn’t reply.

Magnus came to stand next to his brother. The Crimson King’s image gave off no scent, though his psychic projection made Lorgar’s skin itch. No matter how strong the Word Bearer grew, merely standing close to Magnus was enough to set his teeth on edge. His taller sibling exuded a palpable force against the meat of his mind. Nothing physical. Nothing so unsubtle. This was the raw power of a soul, felt in the moment when psychic minds met.

‘Where are we?’ Magnus asked.

‘Close to where we need to be,’ Lorgar replied.

‘So it is a secret?’

‘A surprise, not a secret. There’s a difference.’

Magnus hesitated. ‘And where is Kor Phaeron? Where is Erebus?’

The Word Bearer tilted his head to regard his brother again. ‘All that death you sensed at Calth? That is their work.’

Magnus grunted, noncommittal.

‘The Legions are at war,’ Lorgar pressed gently, ‘and the galaxy burns. Accept it. End your seclusion in the Great Eye. Get back into the fight. You’ll be part of Horus’s plans, and won’t need to ask me what’s happening, or where, or why. You’ll know where the playing pieces stand on the board. You’ll be moving them yourself.’

This time Magnus was the one to break contact with his brother’s sun-flecked eyes; eyes as divine as his smile.

‘You’ve still not decided, have you?’ Lorgar asked.

‘I will. Before the end comes, at least.’

Lorgar did not press him further. Instead they just stood there, listening to the warp screaming against the observatory’s warded glass and the Word Bearers continued chanting in the decks far below.

‘Tell me something,’ said Lorgar at last. ‘Do you feel shame that Russ broke your back over his knee?’

‘Aurelian.’ Magnus used the name as a warning.

Lorgar waved a pacifying hand and changed the subject.

‘You once warned me not to rely so heavily on Erebus and Kor Phaeron.’

‘You’re not gifted at following advice,’ Magnus pointed out.

Lorgar laughed – a gentle exhalation through a smile. ‘True, but you were right.’

‘Of course,’ said Magnus, then: ‘Tell me of Argel Tal.’ He made no attempt to hide the intensity of his interest.

‘He is aboard the Conqueror as we speak, with his Vakrah Jal elite. Of my three closest sons, he alone remains devoted to my vision. And yet, brother, he is broken. As for the other two… I love them for their pride and ambition, yet the warp curdles around them, ripe with the sickness of their souls. They play their own games now. Erebus plays them at the behest of the gods. He is a slave, believing himself king. Kor Phaeron plays them for his own reasons.’

He paused, almost reticent to continue.

‘And Ahriman, he is… similar?’

Magnus rested a hand on his brother’s shoulder, causing no tangible sensation as he did so. The ethereal hand hovered against the parchment bound to Lorgar’s armour.

‘He is. A sickening thing for us to share in common, isn’t it?’

Lorgar nodded and released a soft breath, not quite a sigh. ‘I know I’ve been a coward, at times. For all my passion, my zeal, I faltered at the final hurdle. I should never have sent Argel Tal into the Eye before I entered myself. Of all things, I regret that the most. He has become a haunted creature, plagued by the ghost of a single life he failed to save. Worse, he’s caught between what he was and what he is destined to become.’

The ghostly hand lifted. ‘No fate is sealed, Lorgar. Change it while you still can.’

‘I mean to do just that. He is the best and worst of my sons. The strongest and yet the most broken. I’ve learned a great deal from what the Pantheon has done to him.’

Magnus turned his face to the Great Ocean’s tides breaking over the ship’s Geller field. ‘I dislike you referring to those sentient storms as a pantheon.’

Lorgar’s sideward glance made his armour joints whirr. ‘One word is as good as any, Magnus. And I cannot change the truth of what they are.’

‘Words have power, Lorgar. I scarcely need to remind you of that.’ The sorcerer grinned suddenly. ‘And stop gawping at me, brother! Especially at my eye.’

His smile didn’t quite rob his words of their hardness.

But Lorgar didn’t obey. He stared openly at the constant metamorphosis of Magnus’s visage: a warlord with a missing left eye, the wound sewn closed; a cyclops with one great orb in place of human eyes; a sorcerer with smooth flesh where a right eye had never existed.

When the Word Bearer finally spoke, his tone was completely devoid of the halting doubt that had marked his life for so many years before Isstvan V.

‘It has always unnerved me how you look the most like Father.’

Magnus raised a scarred eyebrow. ‘I? You were made to mirror him, Lorgar. Not I.’

‘I did not mean physically.’ Lorgar brushed a scriptured hand across his equally tattooed face. ‘I’m speaking of your… facelessness. You are as powerful as him, and your face dances in the same way.’

It was Magnus’s turn to chuckle. ‘I am not as strong as our father. Would that I was.’

Lorgar waved it aside. ‘Have any of us even seen your real face? Did you ever have two eyes?’

Magnus tilted his crowned head. ‘Didn’t you hear the story of how I tore the right eye from its socket in sacrifice for knowledge?’ Magnus smiled. ‘I like that one. It might be my favourite.’

‘I’ve heard them all,’ Lorgar replied, eager to learn more but letting the matter drop. He knew too well that his copper-skinned brother could not be tempted into spilling revelations when he didn’t wish to. ‘I need your counsel, Magnus.’

‘It’s yours, as always. Though I’ll remind you what happened the last time you asked my advice, only to ignore it.’

The Word Bearer didn’t laugh at the bitter jest; he didn’t even smirk. ‘You mean when I found that Father was lying to the entire Imperium and that the universe is not the godless place he insists it is? Yes, I have a vague recollection of those events.’

‘That is one way of looking at it. Not the right way, of course.’

Lorgar shook his head. ‘I have no wish, and no need, to debate such matters. What troubles me is something far closer to home. Watch, brother. This was last month, when we assaulted some meaningless Throne-loyal world that Angron couldn’t just leave in peace. His World Eaters couldn’t be recalled. They massacred the populace.’

He gestured with his empty hand, and a misty image formed before both brothers. Magnus recognised it at once: a figure, armed with two heavy, brutal axes, and armoured in the stylised bronze finery of a gladiator-king. The figure threw back its scarred head, roaring in silence to the sky. Cables thrashed from his skull as a mane of cybernetic dreadlocks. Most were plugged into the power feeds of his armour. As usual, several had torn free in the heat of battle.

‘He’s dying,’ said Lorgar.

Magnus looked at the silent image of Angron facing down a charging Chimera transport. It struck him and ground to a halt. The primarch lifted it by the front ramming bars, flipping it onto its back. Its treads raced in futility the entire time.

‘He looks in fine health to me.’

‘No. He’s dying. The implants are killing him.’

Magnus turned to Lorgar. ‘So?’

‘So.’ The Word Bearer stared at the image. ‘I’m going to save him.’

Magnus didn’t ask how. He was silent a long moment, before cutting to the core. ‘You have always been a fey creature, Lorgar. Sentiment guides you. You know the value of loyalty to those few who have been loyal to you. I admire that. Truly. But would the galaxy really miss Angron’s tortured soul? Would his Legion even mourn his loss? Is his life really worth saving?’ As his questions trailed away, Magnus turned his attention to the warp once more. He smiled.

‘Something amuses you, brother?’ asked Lorgar, his golden eyes glinting in the warp’s hateful light.

The sorcerer nodded. ‘I have just sensed where we are.’

The Fidelitas Lex burst into existence, ripping its way back to reality on shrieking engines. The wound that gave birth to it was a tear in space and time, pulsing in the darkness, bringing the impossibility of sound to the vacuum of space. A terrible screaming heralded the warship’s arrival, and erratic, maddened laughter followed it through.

Kinetic generators along the warship’s belly and backbone groaned as they woke, charging the nothingness around the Lex, bringing its void shields into being. Along its flanks and battlements, domes opened in a rattling ballet and blast shields lifted from gun ports as cannons juddered out into the void.

The arcane drives gifting the vessel with warp flight cycled down, relinquishing control of the ship to its physical engines. Deep in the vessel’s armoured prow, a man with three eyes and a bloody cough surrendered control of the Lex back to the strategium, where hundreds of crew members were securing themselves into their thrones, bathed in the flashing lights of a battle stations alert.

Smaller ships ripped into reality behind the Lex, filling its wake with hungry iron children – all bladed, all battlemented. The escorts and destroyers burned their engines harder and hotter than the battleships, powering ahead to establish the first semblance of attack formation.

A shadow filled the wound, a reflection of the Word Bearers flagship. It shivered through into the material realm – a thing of crude, martial beauty, scorched and scarred from fighting at the heart of every battle it had ever seen. Just as the Lex had immediately readied for war, the Conqueror lit its shields and ran out its countless guns. Unlike the Lex, it didn’t slow to allow its armada to take shape in formation. The flagship of the World Eaters pushed ahead, forcing lesser ships to drift aside from its gathering momentum.

‘An ugly ship,’ Magnus said, ‘to match Angron’s ugly soul.’

‘You underestimate him,’ Lorgar said again.

From the warded safety of the basilica, the Thousand Sons primarch watched the fleet manifesting above, below and in every direction besides. Ahead of them lay a world of pleasant skies, rocky grey continents and sparse, deep oceans turning in the life-giving radiance of an ideal sun. A handful of small cities shone in the night, their cobweb of linked light forming the unmistakable image of civilisation: an image graven on the human mind ever since mankind’s first voidnauts saw Old Earth from the cold comfort of low orbit.

‘Armatura,’ Magnus whispered. ‘You cannot mean to do this.’

His brother continued to watch his fleet translating from the warp, and the utopian world hanging in space beyond them.

‘The year’s journey from Isstvan was more eventful than I’d anticipated. Angron and his Legion delayed us, pausing to murder world after world on their wrathful whims. Our brother’s mutilated psyche makes planning anything something of a chore, but at last, here we are. The beginning of the end.’

‘Where’s the rest of your fleet?’ Magnus asked, caution threading his tone.

Lorgar could now smell the salt of his brother’s sweat and hear the muffled thunder of the sorcerer’s heartbeat. Truly, the incarnated image of his brother was a masterpiece of psychic projection, becoming ever more real by the moment.

‘Ulixis. Espandor. Latona. Elsewhere. They’re killing their way across Ultramar, now Guilliman’s sons are crippled at Calth. The Five Hundred Worlds have suddenly found themselves rather starved of protection. A shame, I’m sure you’ll agree.’

Magnus didn’t match his brother’s smile. ‘You can’t attack Armatura with a fraction of your fleet.’ The sorcerer narrowed his lone eye. ‘There’s some ploy you’re holding back, some nasty little surprise hiding behind your words.’

‘Yes,’ Lorgar said. ‘There is indeed.’

‘You’ve foreseen all this,’ Magnus accused him.

‘A great deal of it. The gods whisper of what will come. They speak, and I hear them.’

Magnus’s shadow stole over him in a slow spread. ‘I told you, you shouldn’t trust their whisperings.’

‘I never said I trusted them, I said I could hear them. There’s a subtle difference.’ He laughed again, a sound ripe with honest amusement. ‘Is there anyone you don’t underestimate, Magnus? You’ve been here no more than a few minutes and already you’ve insulted both Angron and me several times.’

‘Do you hate Guilliman this much?’ Magnus asked suddenly. ‘Do you despise him so much that crippling his Legion at Calth isn’t enough? You’ve already won. Why must you reach out to annihilate his peaceful and prosperous empire?’

Lorgar’s smile faded, but didn’t die. The scripture inked across his face smoothed into neat rows once more. ‘I don’t hate him, brother. At one point, I was jealous of him. But that was fifty years ago, and I was a different man. I have since learned that the warp is a song, Magnus, a symphony, and I am the only one willing to play it. That’s why we’re here.’

Ahead of them, the World Eaters elements within the fleet began to diverge, to lose all sense of cohesion. Lorgar’s irises were a soothing gold-brown, somewhere between the shades of amber and earth. He watched impassively, neither surprised nor annoyed. If anything, he seemed rather charmed by the disunity on display. By contrast, the Word Bearers ships sailed in smooth, effortless formation.

‘The warp is not a song. I fear for your sanity, Lorgar.’

The entire basilica fell dark as they sailed beneath the curve of Pila, Armatura’s lone moon. Spotted by the million lights of forge-fires and foundries, its smoggy bulk blocked the idyllic sun; a monument to human industry, eclipsing the light. Lorgar’s divine features darkened in the spreading shadow.

‘I imagine you do, Magnus, but you’ve always been gifted at criticising others for the sins you share with them so blithely.’

Magnus’s smile was a snide, superior curl across his face. ‘There’s your overactive imagination at work once more.’

Lorgar stepped closer to the sorcerer, his once-warm eyes now colder than fool’s gold. ‘Tell me, brother, whose Legion is trapped in the Great Eye, devolving into maggots while the god of Change laughs into infinity? Tell me whose physical form was broken over Leman Russ’s knee because he decided at the last moment that he wouldn’t accept his punishment like an obedient son after all? You didn’t commit to the fight, nor did you surrender and come to heel. Instead, you wasted your Legion and your life’s work in half-hearted capitulation. You think I act in madness? Look to your own sins, hypocrite. And look to your sons, while there is still something left of them.’

He shook his head, taking joy in what he was saying. ‘Mark my words, Magnus, if you do not act soon, your Legion and all that you worked so hard to create will be dust.’

‘My Legion–’ Magnus’s face creased with rising anger ‘–was backed into a corner. My Thousand Sons died because of your treachery, because of the venom you whispered in Horus’s ears to start this insanity. He calls it his rebellion, but we both know the first heart to turn traitor was the one beating in your chest.’

Lorgar laughed again, the sound one of unfeigned delight. ‘See? The blame always lies with one of us unworthy souls. Never with you for making the wrong compacts with the gods that you deny are even real!’

The parchments on Lorgar’s armour flapped in the sudden wind of Magnus’s ire. The Word Bearer stood unfazed, his serene smile boiling his brother’s blood. The sorcerer’s skin quivered, beetles writhing beneath it as witch-lightning danced across his coppery flesh. Magnus moved, his body forming from the air itself, shaped out of the poison behind reality’s veil. Anger drove him into true incarnation.

‘That is enough, Lorgar.’

Lorgar nodded. ‘It is. I’ve no desire to trade insults. We’ve all made mistakes, it’s how we deal with the aftermath that matters.’ He gestured to the fleet around the flagship. The World Eaters vessels, as always, abandoned the armada’s formation in favour of a more aggressive vanguard assault. In the year since Isstvan, Lorgar had slowly come to abandon any attempt at reining in the XII Legion’s independent streak. They couldn’t be collared, even for their own good.

‘Watch,’ he said.

‘I’m not sure I want to watch two Legions die in the skies above Armatura.’

Lorgar didn’t make eye contact. ‘Trust me,’ he said. ‘For once, Magnus. Trust me. Both Legions will make planetfall in a matter of minutes.’

The Word Bearer closed his eyes and lifted his hands – a conductor before an orchestra in those tense, edged moments before the first note is struck.

‘The warp is a song, brother. Let me play a verse for you.’

The word ‘fleet’ didn’t quite do it justice. In truth, an armada thundered across the silent sky towards Armatura: dozens and dozens of vessels, yet a mere fraction of two Legions’ strength.

Armatura turned in the heart of Guilliman’s perfect empire. Neither the crown jewel that Macragge claimed to be, nor the future capital Calth had threatened to become, Armatura matched both in importance, and vastly eclipsed them in population. If Ultramar was reduced to crude metaphor, Macragge beat as the heart of the astral kingdom, while Calth served as its soul – a sign of a bright future, now consigned to fire. Armatura was a war-world, feeding the other planets the way bone marrow feeds blood into the body. It fed the Legion with recruits; it fed the void with damaged warships reborn from its docks; it fed the Imperium with hope that the largest Legion would forever be the largest, and even if the XIII was reduced to a single warrior, as long as Armatura turned in the night, the Legion would live on.

Its close-orbit played home to immense shipyards, populated by thousands upon thousands of workers, servitors, archimechs, enginseers, serfs, thralls and technographers. It took an army of souls to breathe life back into the great warships of the Imperium, and here several million of them did their finest work. Orbital bastions of linked gantries and docking maws drifted above the placid world, crawling with insectile shuttles, lifters, loaders and tugs. Imperial warships limped here, scarred from the Great Crusade, and left months later in resurrected perfection.

Above and beyond the shipyard was the first concentric ring of void defences. Here, weaponised satellites and fire platforms bristled with turrets, alongside independent landing decks for fighter craft in lockdown.

Beyond those, the true defences began. Castles in the sky: great fortress-stations with their own racks of fighters and entire battlements given over to plasma batteries, laser broadsides and ship-killing lance arrays.

In highest orbit, the outer sphere of satellites was a three-dimensional spread of solar panels, clockwork engines and slaved servitor brains all connected to vast long-range weapons arrays.

Amidst that outermost sphere waited the Evocati fleet. While the Legion mustered at Calth, the XIII Legion’s war-world could never be left undefended. The Evocati was comprised of several thousand Ultramarines drawn from a dozen Chapters, awarded the highest honour of all: overseeing the operations of Armatura and the training of new recruits, commanding an Imperial fleet to rival any other.

The vessels moved in a perfection of militaristic motion that even their enemies found beautiful to behold. As the Evocati rose into a defensive formation, the combined Word Bearers and World Eaters armada altered to compensate; a shifting dance across a battlefield no different from the rearrangement of regiments marching in ancient eras.

Battleships and cruisers, frigates and destroyers, all resplendent in XIII Legion blue, silver and gold, rising to defend the perfect empire.

‘Do you hear it?’ Lorgar asked, rapt in distraction. ‘Do you?’

Magnus watched the first killing beams illuminating the Conqueror’s void shields, the impacts spreading with the greasy luminescence of oil on water. He sensed… something, as the fleet powered to its inevitable demise. A sensation not unlike the world itself holding its breath, the way Tizca’s air was charged before a storm.

The Word Bearer tilted his head back, eyes closed as he let the flashing colours of the Conqueror’s shields dapple his face.

‘Calth is the syncopated back-beat to the song. The rhythm beneath the rhyme. That much fire, that much misery, that much pain.’ He smiled, his eyes still closed. ‘Suffering has always fuelled the warp in random stains and stigmata. Now we learn the virtue of control. Can you hear it? Can you hear the pain stirring the tides? Can you hear the crash of those waves, Magnus? Can you hear how those black tides beat, a million hearts bursting out loud, as rhythmic as drums in the deep cold?’

He lifted his hands higher, gesturing with subtle relish, directing his invisible choir. ‘The tides of the Sea of Souls can be altered by mortal hands, brother. Listen. Listen. We’re reordering the warp itself, Magnus, changing it through pain. We’re rewriting the song.’

Lorgar drew in a shivery breath as he continued. ‘There, a ship burns in Latona’s atmosphere, the cries of the doomed souls echoing into the empyrean. And there, a warship ploughs into the surface of Ulixis, digging its own grave, taking a hundred thousand souls shrieking into the afterlife. Do you hear them dying, Magnus? Do you hear the song shifting in time to their extinguished essences?’

He was laughing now, raising a hand to the heavens, weeping as he whispered.

‘Every life. Every death. Every cry of pain across these burning worlds thins the veil between reality and the first-realm. Call it Hades or Hell, Jahannam, Naraka or the Underworld. Call it the warp… call it whatever you will. But I am bringing it forth onto the material plane. Calth was the genesis of the storm, Magnus. I will make an entire sub-sector suffer enough that the curtain falls and the Five Hundred Worlds drown in the warp.’

He turned at last, eyes aflame with psychic fervour. ‘Tell me you feel it. Tell me you can hear the million, million daemons shrieking and baying, desperate to be born upon these burning worlds.’

Magnus felt it, as real as the wind he’d never again feel against his flesh. A pulling, a tightening, of the weave behind the physical universe. Far from the impassioned sensation his brother described, the sorcerer felt it with clinical distraction, no different from an equation written on parchment and begging to be solved. Lorgar, in his madness, was doing more than breaking the natural order. He was rewriting the code of the universe.

‘You cannot kill Armatura,’ Magnus said. ‘You can shred the curtain between reality and unreality all you like, Lorgar. You can even call it a song, if you wish. Your life is still measured in minutes.’

The fleet began to dive in earnest above and around them. When the Fidelitas Lex took its first hit, the lights across its many decks flickered once, twice, then settled stable. Lorgar looked back to the black heavens.

‘To break Armatura, we’ll need a vessel to rival anything humanity has ever wrought.’ He seemed thoughtful, a painting with unfocused eyes, brushing his fingertips over the scripture tattooed across his cheek. ‘We had one, you know. Zadkiel’s folly, the Furious Abyss.’

Magnus watched the combined fleet beginning to burn. ‘And what happened to it?’

‘Oh.’ Lorgar shook his head, focus returning. ‘It died days ago, close to the same moment Kor Phaeron struck at Calth. Its corpse is probably still a shadow in the skies above Macragge – a monument to the Word Bearers failure. Another inscription on Zadkiel’s legacy of little idiocies. I told him he was a fool to attack Macragge, but he was so keen to bathe in glory, and all he ever heard were the whispers begging for revenge. I indulged him.’

‘Why did you let him? Are your sons so disobedient?’

Lorgar laughed again, ignoring the ship shaking around him. ‘Harsh words, from the primarch whose sons defy him in the grandest ways. Your Legion didn’t bare their throats to the rampaging Wolves as you wished them to, did they?’

Magnus conceded that with a nod. ‘Even so. Your fleet is dying, brother. What will you do without the Furious Abyss?’

Lorgar looked back to the embattled skies. ‘This is what I meant when I said you underestimated us, Magnus. To you, this war is something shocking and new. Yet it is something I’ve been planning for half a century. I spent a quarter of the Great Crusade preparing for the moment when our father’s sad cravings of eminent domain would end, and the true holy war would begin.’

The sorcerer swallowed, sensing the onrushing presence of something pressing against reality from the tumult of the warp. Something out there, about to make itself known.

‘Ah! Now you hear the song,’ Lorgar said. His laugh echoed around the basilica. ‘You hear the rhythm at last! But we need more control. So we summon new instruments to enliven the chorus.’

Lorgar exhaled, gesturing to the deep void, past Armatura. Reality opened. Though Magnus’s ethereal incarnation was immune to such weakness, instinct made him shield his eye. A warp-rift formed in space, far from both closing fleets. Something was coming through, something vast: a trident of dark metal immediately familiar to the sorcerer.

The ship grinding into reality was a reflection of the slain colossus Lorgar had spoken of. A city of monasteries and cathedrals rose from its back with the reverence of clawed hands sculpted to clutch at the stars. Where most Imperial battleships were spears of crenellated intent and iron-ridged might, this was a fortress in space, borne on the back of a great trident. The central tine served as the vessel’s core: dense at the stern, encrusted with massive engines and tapering towards the prow, where it formed a pointed ram the size of lesser vessels. The trident’s adjacent tines formed smaller blade-wings, each one barnacled with broadsides and cannon batteries.

If one were to clad the concept of spite in iron and set it sailing amongst the stars, it might approach the image of what burst back into the universe in that moment. It was, in every way, the Furious Abyss reborn.

‘That,’ Lorgar smiled, ‘is the Blessed Lady.’

Magnus released an unnecessary breath, watching as a ship too vast to exist left the wound in the material universe. It easily eclipsed even the Gloriana-class flagships of the combined Legion fleet, and the warp’s cloudy tendrils lashed at its spires, shrieking into the silence, seemingly reluctant to let the vessel back into reality.

‘You built two,’ the sorcerer breathed.

‘Oh, no.’ Lorgar didn’t even open his eyes. He raised a hand to point into the void, where a second warp-slice ripped across the stars. ‘I built three.’

TWO

Barely Human
Warriors and Crusaders
Broken Upon the Same Anvil

The two warriors were human only in the loosest sense. They’d been human children, but time, excruciating surgery and extensive gene-therapy had seen them grow along less natural paths.

There they stood, the sons of two worlds and two Legions, embodying the ideals and flaws of their birth worlds and bloodlines. More than any of their brethren, they exemplified their Legions’ triumphs – and their fathers’ sins.

The Conqueror’s primary hangar platform was already shivering with the first barrage from Armatura’s guns. Flags and victory banners swayed in the false wind of the ship’s shaking bones. Several of them were scorched, ragged standards pulled from the dead hands of Raven Guard and Salamanders on the killing fields of Isstvan V. Trophies to inspire the legionaries of the World Eaters in the final moments before they made planetfall.

The first warrior’s ceramite armour plating was cast in the same white as clean marble, from churches that should never have been built. The suit’s reinforced edges were the same blue as a winter sky back in the impious ages of Old Terra, before humanity burned the world’s surface and drank the natural oceans dry. His skin was as pale as any consumptive, a legacy of the pain machine inside his skull. It pulsed even now, teasingly erratic, sending fire tick-tocking through the meat of his mind.

The helm he carried under his arm was a slant-eyed, snarling thing of red eye lenses and a Sarum-pattern mouth grille. An officer’s crest of white horsehair rose, sharkfin-like, to mark him out from his men in the heat of battle. The etching on his shoulder guard, written in the mongrel tongue called Nagrakali, named him as Khârn of the Eighth.

A technological ballet was taking place around both warriors – an industrial performance of gunships and drop pods being craned and winched and towed into position. Khârn tried and failed to ignore the pain knifing through his head. When it became almost too much to bear, as it so often did, he pressed both hands to his face, digging armoured fingertips into his temples, seeking veins and pressure points. It occasionally helped.

Not this time, though.

He’d never prayed in his life, but he looked very much the part in that moment.

‘The Nails?’ his brother asked. The other warrior spoke in a voice made rancid by empathy. Khârn felt him rest a gauntleted hand on his shoulder, and moved away from the unwelcome grip.

‘Don’t touch me,’ Khârn told him, as he’d told countless others, countless times. Being too near other people always gave him headaches.

The other warrior was long-used to Khârn’s awkwardness. Colchisian runic lettering on his armour named him as Argel Tal, Lord of the Chapter of Consecrated Iron, and he was known to all as Khârn’s brother by deed, not by blood. Standing in arterial crimson plating, edged by silver the same shade as pewter relics unearthed from an old tomb, Argel Tal’s dusky skin spoke of birth on a world of sand and ever-present thirst. No pain machine crackled in his brain, for he was of the XVII Legion, not the XII. Instead, a faith he wished was untrue had left his soul deformed.

He spoke with two voices: the man he’d been, and the thing he was becoming. The latter underlaid his human voice in a bestial snarl – every word he spoke came out in both voices at once.

‘Armatura,’ his voices said. ‘This world is suicide. The Armaturan Academy Guard. The Thirteenth’s barracks-cities, for its initiates and Evocati overlords. The Titan Legio Lysanda. We’re going to die down there, you know.’

Khârn wasn’t sure he disagreed. He’d read the analytics and studied the reports. He’d led half a dozen briefings himself, outlining the expected resistance to other World Eaters centurions and sub-commanders.

And damn it, his skull ached today. The headache to end all headaches. Argel Tal always had this effect on him. The Word Bearer was as bad as Esca or Vorias.

‘The numbers are exaggerated,’ Khârn said with a pained grunt. A billion human soldiers. A billion. Not even counting Titans or Mechanicum skitarii. Not even considering the tank battalions stationed down there. Not even adding in the thousands of Ultramarines Evocati. The numbers had to be exaggerated, or they were all dead.

Argel Tal gave a bitter laugh. ‘You don’t actually believe that, do you?’

No. He didn’t. The geo-conflict analytics came from Ultramar’s own census archives. A handful of years out of date, certainly, but they were still facing a billion soldiers. Even if a tenth of them were teenage youths in the earliest stages of gene-implantation, there was no sense pretending this was going to be a bloodless triumph.

Khârn didn’t answer. Even his eyes were starting to hurt now. The Nails were running hot. He looked back at the Dreadclaw assault pods – gifts from the Warmaster to suit the World Eaters way of warfare – being craned into place. Each of their hulls was a spiked and ridged testament to their lethal intent, a reflection of the vicious machine-spirits within. The number of ‘accidents’ due to Dreadclaw malfunction was on the wrong side of hilarious. Spiteful things, and that made them useful as often as it left them useless. Most Imperial commanders preferred to deploy using more reliable, less hateful machine-spirits.

Khârn liked them immensely. Not from any real affection, but from honest – and perhaps amused – sympathy. He liked them not out of admiration, but a sense of kinship. They’d never steered him or his men wrong.

Tech-priests moved between the raised pods, chanting and whispering last-minute invocations. A particularly spindly priest, walking on five stalk-like legs of burnished black iron, oversaw the preparations. His red robe stirred in the hangar’s false wind, rippled by the shaking deck and the hot wash of gunship engines cycling up to launch.

‘Archmagos,’ Khârn greeted Vel-Kheredar, representative of Sacred Mars.

The robed cyborg turned three green eye lenses down towards them as it passed, speaking toneless greetings from a mouthless iron face. ‘Centurion Khârn,’ it said. ‘Commander Argel Tal.’

The priest walked on, its eye lenses whirring and adjusting as it breathed a continual stream of orders in Martian binaric code. Soon enough, his calculated complaints were drowned out in the din. Was there anything louder than a warship’s deployment hangar in the minutes before planetfall? Khârn had fought at the heart of cities that fell with less assault on the eardrums.

He turned to Argel Tal. ‘This world would be suicide without the Abyss-class warships. With them? It might be easy. The Seventeenth Legion is too dour, brother.’

‘Ah.’ Argel Tal smiled. ‘This again.’

Khârn wasn’t jesting this time. ‘You’re right, Armatura will be suicide for skitarii and your levies of zealots. The rest of us will bleed as we always bleed.’

‘I dislike the relish in your tone.’

He always did. Khârn gave a small smile. ‘Do you fear death?’

‘We are the Legiones Astartes,’ said the Word Bearer. ‘We know no fear.’

Khârn met his brother’s eyes. His silence served to ask the question again.

‘Yes,’ said Argel Tal. ‘I do. I’ve seen what waits for us on the other side.’

The sincerity in the other warrior’s voice made Khârn shiver. ‘We survived Isstvan III,’ he said. ‘We’ll survive this.’

Argel Tal’s features were very calm, almost aesthetic; the innocent face of a battlefield priest or a warrior-poet. Smiles didn’t suit him – they depleted what dignified handsomeness remained to any Legiones Astartes warrior – yet he smiled often. Very few souls knew him well enough to see how false those smiles were. Khârn was one. His primarch was another. All the others were dead.

‘You survived Isstvan III,’ he said. ‘I survived Isstvan V.’ He hesitated, hardly blind to the pain-tics that were now making Khârn’s face twitch in weak spasms. ‘Be careful down there, Khârn.’

That really was too much. Khârn snorted before replying.

‘Such warm words from a man with a devil in his heart.’

Argel Tal smiled again. Khârn loathed that smile, because this one wasn’t false. It was the smile of a murderer, not a warrior. Fanatics smiled like that.

They walked the length of the hangar, watching over their warriors assembling before embarkation. While the Legions’ differences were as distinct as night and day on the battlefield, they were no less stark beneath the harsh glare of emergency lighting.

The Word Bearers of the Vakrah Jal stood in neat, organised rows: blades sheathed, weapons deactivated, oath papers bolted to red armour plating. Several hundred soldiers, fresh from their months of training in the Conqueror’s gladiator pits and swearing their oaths of union with Khârn’s own oversized Eighth Assault Company. As the two commanders passed, every Word Bearer went to one knee. They lowered their heads and chanted prayers drawn from the Word of Lorgar.

Khârn couldn’t help but cringe. His skin crawled to hear such strange rhymes and benedictions vox-whispered by so many throats.

‘I will never understand your Legion,’ he told Argel Tal.

The Word Bearer watched his men and their reverences, their silver helms tilted down in contemplative repose, before looking over at Khârn’s forces. Where the Word Bearers were a kneeling phalanx, the XII warriors were a disorganised mob – laughing, sharing last-minute taunts between squads, with the continuous background whine of chain-blades being triggered in twitching fists.

Argel Tal raised a dark eyebrow as two World Eaters banged the foreheads of their helms together, with the unmistakable dull ring of ceramite on ceramite.

‘And I will never understand yours,’ he replied. His tone said it all.

‘Understanding us is simple,’ said Khârn. ‘You just have to realise that there are some warriors who actually enjoy war. War, and the brotherhood that comes with it. I know that must be difficult for you to understand.’ He gestured to the kneeling, praying Word Bearers. ‘You come from a serious breed.’

Argel Tal muffled his answer in the emotionless mask of a crested, silver-faced helm.

‘I’ve seen into the hell behind reality,’ he said. ‘It stole my sense of humour.’

Hard to argue with that.

‘Good hunting,’ Argel Tal told him.

The two commanders grasped each other’s forearms. No lingering words; they simply clashed vambraces and went their separate ways.

Khârn’s command squad waited in a shallow illusion of discipline. Esca loosened his wrists, cutting through the air with both of his blades. His psychic hood was an armoured half-dome over the back of his head, with its cables bonded to his temples. He was the only man in Eighth Company to lack the Butcher’s Nails, and therefore the only man who didn’t look on the edge of spitting in irritation or howling in impatience. Kargos, by comparison, was already helmed, checking the drills and bonesaws deployable from his narthecium gauntlet.

‘I killed Harakal in the pits last night,’ Kargos said. He drawled the words through the mouth grille of a Mark IV helmet. His accent was thick enough to be almost impenetrable. He came from the plains of Sethek, where the Imperial Gothic tongue was no more than a memory. Hypnotic implantation had given him mastery over other languages, but nothing could shake his accent free.

Khârn smiled, devoid of mirth. ‘I liked Harakal.’

‘Everyone liked Harakal. Didn’t stop his head from rolling across the deck, though.’ Kargos mimed the final blow in slow motion, sweeping a chain-blade through Harakal’s neck. The others could hear the grin in his voice. ‘The look in his eyes was priceless, Khârn. Even you’d have laughed, you miserable bastard.’

Khârn doubted that. ‘I heard you and Delvarus went to third blood.’

‘Delvarus.’ Kargos fairly spat the word. ‘I’ll get him, one day.’

‘No,’ Khârn shook his head. ‘You won’t. No one will.’

Kargos tsked. ‘What do you say, Esca? Any prophecies for me? Will anyone ever beat that whoreson Delvarus in the pits?’

Esca shook his head, a refusal rather than a disagreement. ‘You don’t still assume I can see the future, do you?’

‘No,’ Kargos admitted. ‘I was just trying to make you feel useful for once.’

Esca bowed. ‘I appreciate your efforts, Apothecary.’ He was scarred, even by Legiones Astartes standards. His face was a smeared mess of pebbled scar tissue – all part of the legacy of the Death Guard chain-sword that had torn his features away on Isstvan III.

Isstvan III. Khârn remembered precious little of it. They told him he almost died that day.

‘Angron is taking his time,’ Kargos muttered. ‘There’s a war waiting for us.’

As if on cue, Esca coughed once. He tried to hide it, to bite it back, but all nearby caught the scent of blood flecking his gauntlet as he coughed into his hand. Darker, thicker blood ran in a slow trickle from his ear.

The World Eaters fell beneath a pall of sudden silence. All laughter ceased, all baiting quieted. They turned as one, falling into loose ranks as the western door rolled open on its grinding tracks.

The figure beyond moved in a hulking sway, its bronze armour stained by the stern stare of the hangar’s illumination strips. Poets, remembrancers and war archivists often made a habit of drawing crude parallels between a battlefield’s heroes and the false gods those heroes resembled. No such comparison ever worked for Angron the Conqueror, Lord of the XII Legion. His lethality defied comparison, for everything about him spoke of contrast.

His armour plating was layer upon layer of Mechanicum ingenuity crafted to resemble archaic gladiatorial worthlessness. His movements were feral, without any of the natural grace seen in the hunting cats stalking jungles of worlds still healthier than distant Terra. And if he could be called a god, he was a wounded one, scarred in flesh and mind. His over-muscled movements, coupled with the tidal grind of his armour joints, turned his stride into a lumbering threat. He could be swift, but only when the Nails hissed hot. Outside of battle, he was a ruined thing, a shadow of what could – and should – have been.

Khârn and the World Eaters stood straighter. This was their father, and he’d remade his sons in his image.

He breathed through the slit of his mouth, through the rows of replacement iron teeth whose tips almost touched. Mouth-breathing came naturally now; he was too used to his sinuses being clogged by fast-scabbing trickles from his bleeding brain.

‘Sire,’ Khârn greeted him, using the one honorific Angron tolerated with even a modicum of grace. He still rebuked those who fell back on traditional forms of address, but most of the time, he tolerated sire.

‘I was on the bridge.’ The primarch’s voice was a guttural, sticky snarl. His teeth clacked together as his facial muscles twitched to the Nails’ tune. ‘I saw the Word Bearers new battleships. Each one is a rival to Dorn’s precious Phalanx.’

As Angron turned to regard the Word Bearers in their orderly ranks, a nasty smile split his lips. He sensed their ardency, their efforts at propriety, and it amused him.

‘You’re smiling,’ Khârn said, more a weary accusation than a question.

‘It entertains me no end to see them masking the sickness inside their souls with such zeal.’

Khârn’s men gave dutiful chuckles at their primarch’s words. All but Esca, who’d retreated back from the ranks, back from Angron, and meditated in an attempt to stem his bleeding nose and ears.

‘Lorgar has been planning this war for decades,’ Angron said to his sons. ‘The mere sight of those ships is evidence of that. Remember it, all of you. Remember it whenever you feel tempted to trust one of those serpents in red.’

The primarch’s pupils were pinprick specks in the depths of his sickly eyes. A stalactite of saliva trickled its way down his scarred chin. Khârn merely inclined his head in acknowledgement of his lord’s words. Arguing with Angron was never wise, even when it was necessary. Disagreeing with him now, when the Nails were so clearly singing in his skull, would be suicide. A great many World Eaters knew that from experience.

‘Creature,’ Angron growled. ‘Creature, get over here.’

Somehow, his voice carried over the hangar’s settling din, for Argel Tal crossed the deck to stand before the master of the XII Legion. The Word Bearer didn’t bow. Argel Tal had learned the hard way that Angron loathed all signs of obsequious respect. Nothing irritated him more than polite submission. Only two things should prostrate themselves: frightened animals and dying men. Anything else was surrender, and no filthier word existed in any human tongue.

‘Primarch Angron,’ the Word Bearer greeted him with a neutral salute, fist over his primary heart. Khârn swallowed. He already knew where this was going.

‘Creature,’ the primarch said again. ‘You have your orders?’

‘I do.’

‘Very well. Then be ready to execute them.’

Argel Tal saluted a second time, and started to turn away.

‘Creature,’ the primarch said a third time, smiling now. He enjoyed the way the insult tasted.

‘Yes, sire?’

‘I saw your lord’s pretty warships lighting up the skies, just now. The Trisagion and the Blessed Lady, reaving their way through Armatura’s defences. We owe this assault to them, eh?’

Argel Tal betrayed no response, merely waiting impassively, his silver faceplate staring with its crystal blue eye lenses. Khârn willed him to silence, to manage his composure. His brother may have been a Bearer of the Word, but Argel Tal had a XII Legion temper.

Angron’s teeth clacked together again, in sympathy with another facial tic. ‘The Blessed Lady,’ he said. ‘That name. She was your whore-priestess, was she not?’

‘She was our Confessor.’ The Word Bearer’s armour joints gave a low thrum as he tilted his head and bunched his muscles. Angron didn’t miss the telltale signs of rising aggression. He broke into a grin.

‘Dead though, eh? Entombed on Lorgar’s flagship. Is that the same shrine, or have you poor zealots been praying to more than one dead girl?’

A hesitation, this time. Argel Tal took a slow breath. ‘It is her.’

‘Is it true that fanatics pulled her bones from the coffin? They stole them as holy relics, like the heathens of old?’

Khârn watched Argel Tal’s fingers flinch and curl. ‘It is true,’ the Word Bearer replied.

‘Angron…’ Khârn warned his father. Angron ignored him, as Khârn had known the primarch would. He was enjoying himself too much to heed any advice.

Khârn shook his head. Here it comes.

Angron’s chuckle had all the charm and warmth of an avalanche. ‘This is the same whore-priestess you failed to protect in life. Now you can’t even guard her bones from human thieves. Lorgar must love you, creature. Why else would he stomach your failures?’

The Word Bearer spoke through clenched teeth. ‘If my lord Lorgar finds fault with my service, he is free to offer punishment.’ He was turning away now, regardless of the disrespect he offered. Angron baiting him was an old game, though this time it risked going further than ever before. ‘And you, Broken One, are not fit to speak of the Blessed Lady.’

Angron’s laugh was a wet landslide. ‘Did you ever recover her bones, creature? Or are they still in the hands of your unwashed cultist slaves?’

Argel Tal, like all ranking Legiones Astartes commanders, had a personal armoury that would put any collector to shame, but now he carried two weapons sheathed across his back – his finest and favourite trophies. Both were crafted on Terra, in forges forbidden to all outside the Emperor’s own inner sanctum. Both were gene-locked, and could never be activated without the original owners’ genetic imprints on the reactive palm grips along both blades’ hafts. Argel Tal had broken that technological law, though he’d never shared how.

The first weapon was a guardian spear, with an ornate boltgun forming the tip, bonded to an underslung power blade. Its name, etched in acid-eaten lettering along the priceless blade, was Shahin-i Tarazu, and it was once the blade of Sythran Kelomenes Astaga Meren Virol Uhtred Mastaxa Cyrus Shenzu-Tai Diromar of the Legiones Custodes. It was the weapon that killed Xaphen of the Word Bearers, one year ago.

The second was a cousin to the spear – a two-handed sword forged in the same fires as Shahin-i Tarazu, and shaped by the same hands. Its crosspiece was an eagle of gold – the Emperor’s Palatine Aquila – spreading its wings, and its blade also bore the weapon’s name: Iktinaetar. It was the blade of Aquillon of the Legiones Custodes – a warrior of many, many names earned in glorious service. It was the weapon that had murdered Cyrene, Confessor of the Word, an unarmed woman who’d lost the use of her eyes.

Brave, brave Custodians, thought Khârn. He had to wonder if they’d sung any victory songs after that battle.

Both weapons required two hands to wield with full skill. In battle, Argel Tal switched between them, moment by moment, foe by foe, using whichever served best.

In the hangar now, standing before Angron, he drew Iktinaetar. He pulled the blade in one smooth motion, and launched himself at the primarch. The stolen sword whined, the metal of its blade pure enough to sing as it cut the air.

Angron caught the Word Bearer in one fist, his fingers wrapping around the warrior’s torso. It was over in a heartbeat. Argel Tal was hurled back before the blade could even come close to landing.

The primarch laughed, that same sound of sludge and gravel. ‘Amusing as always. Back to your men, creature.’

But Argel Tal was no longer Argel Tal. He twisted in the air, disgustingly graceful, and struck the deck in a crouch. Huge and beautifully ugly black bat’s wings rose from his shoulders. His silver faceplate was distorted in a snarling, wolfish maw of bent metal.

‘Back to your men,’ Angron told the thing again. He was already walking away.

This time, it obeyed. Argel Tal rose to his feet, the great wings folding back with the sound of wrenching metal, the helm smoothing over into emotionless Mark IV sterility.

Khârn sighed, purely theatrical, wanting the primarch to hear it. Angron’s slice of a smirk tore a notch higher, and he did nothing but chuckle as he made his way to the nearest Dreadclaw.

‘See you on the surface,’ he said, and sealed himself away from his sons.

Khârn turned back to his men. ‘You heard him. Squad by squad, into the pods. Armatura awaits.’

The World Eaters obeyed.

+He is no primarch,+ came Argel Tal’s voice in Khârn’s mind. The centurion’s first instinct was to shudder. The Nails bit harder, hotter, in the wake of the psychic whisper; they hurt more every time. Khârn looked back to his brother, where Argel Tal was directing his own men into their own gunships and drop pods.

He is my primarch, Khârn replied, with no idea if Argel Tal could hear him. Sometimes the silent speech worked, sometimes it didn’t.

+A primarch should be inspiring. Our genetics should react at the mere sight of them. Think of the moments you laid eyes on Horus, Dorn, or Magnus. I’ve seen Sanguinius and Russ with my own eyes, as well. Close enough to touch their armour. Think of when you stand before Lorgar: the awe and reverence that beats through your blood. The feeling of our genetic coding reacting to the pinnacle of the human process. I’ve never felt that instinctive respect for Angron, Khârn. Not once. He is a broken thing. Devastating, unrivalled in war, but broken.+

Khârn didn’t answer because there was nothing to say. He boarded his drop pod, ascending the ramp and waiting for a robed Legion slave to secure his restraint harness.

+You feel it,+ Argel Tal said. +You feel it, too.+

In psychic silence, Khârn confessed something he’d never said outside his Legion.

Yes, we feel the same. The World Eaters, each and every one of us, knows what you know.

Argel Tal’s voice was laced with cold, seething anger. +Why do you tolerate it?+

What can we do? Murder our own father? Did you destroy Lorgar when he led you into worshipping the Emperor? Or did you tolerate him in patience, hoping that eventually he’d find his way to equalling his brothers?

A pause. A long, long pause. Khârn took it as Argel Tal’s capitulation and pushed on. It’s our shame to bear before the other Legions, brother. Angron was broken long before he ever reached us. Why do you think we let him beat the Nails into our heads? We hoped that by breaking ourselves on the same anvil, we’d finally feel unity with our father.

There was nothing of mockery in the Word Bearer’s reply. Only sympathy. Khârn’s skin crawled. He’d have preferred mockery.

+It didn’t work?+

The drop pod’s sides closed in, armour plating locking to block all view of the hangar beyond. Khârn’s last sight was of Argel Tal ascending the gang-ramp into a red XVII Legion gunship.

‘No,’ he muttered, as much to himself as to the distant Word Bearer. ‘It didn’t.’

THREE

Lost to the Nails
Void War
Sacred Red, Faithless White

The one thing war stories always forgot was the dust. Khârn learned that early, and the lesson stayed with him through the years. Even two men kicking up sand in the gladiator pits was a distraction. Two armies of a few thousand souls on an open plain would turn the air thick enough to choke on. Scale it up again, and a few hundred thousand warriors locked in conflict would darken the sun for a day after the battle was done.

But the realities of pitched warfare rarely made it into the sagas. In all the stories he’d heard, especially those woeful diatribes from the remembrancers, battle was reduced to a handful of heroes going blade-to-blade in the sunlight, while their nameless lessers looked on in stupefied awe.

It took a great deal to make Khârn cringe, but war poetry never failed.

Two Legions fighting through a city was beyond anything else. Tank engines exhaled fumes in an oil-smelling smog. Gunships roared down on heat blurs and air washes, while those shot down fell from the sky to crash and roll across the ground as burning husks. Titans striding through the streets bled fire and smoke in equal measure – wounds that gouted pollution tenfold when one of the colossal war machines finally died.

The tens of thousands of soldiers grinding rockcrete and earth beneath their tread, and the last sighs of habitation towers bursting their dusty innards into the air as they came apart – they all added to the pall. Each spire that fell, every monument that toppled, every bunker that broke apart breathed a cloud of strangling ash in every direction.

Fighting in a ruined city was one thing, but fighting during a city’s ruination was quite another. Visibility was a myth. It simply didn’t exist.

In ages past, when bronze swords had formed the pinnacle of humanity’s capacity to wage war against itself, mounted scouts tore through a battlefield’s dust clouds to relay information and orders between officers whose regiments were blinded in the thick of it. That was another truth that rarely survived to make it into the archives.

War had come a long, long way from those ancient days. Mankind’s capacity to fight blind had not. Khârn’s retinal display responded to his irritation, auto-cycling through vision filters. Thermal sight was a worthless smear of migraine colours when half the city was aflame. Tracking by echolocation auspex was unreliable with any atmospheric interference, and the dense clouds of particulates coupled with burning buildings all around most definitely counted as suboptimal conditions.

He didn’t stop running. He had no idea where he was any more, but he didn’t stop running. When in doubt, move forward. The old adage brought back his grin.

Khârn remembered the landing. The teeth-rattling descent in the Dreadclaw’s dark confines, and the burst of sunlight that followed when the pod’s doors blasted open. He remembered that first charge out into the city, pulling his weapons free, feeling the wasp-stings of lasgun fire failing to pierce his armour plating. They’d come down in a barracks district, amongst the entrenched battalions of Armaturan Academy Guard. Young warriors under-going the process to become Ultramarines, alongside the hosts of uniformed, disciplined soldiers that were proud to serve the XIII Legion.

Damn Guilliman and his empire within an empire. Armatura, the war-world, was merely one globe in the Five Hundred Worlds. How did one man raise such vast armies? How did one Legion command such might?

He knew the answer, unwelcome as it was. Here was the gift of an unbroken primarch. Here was an unflawed genius at play, unburdened by a pain engine. While Lorgar wasted time with the mysteries of the aether and Angron tasted blood from his malfunctioning mind, Guilliman of the Ultramarines had reshaped an entire subsector into the Imperial ideal. Not even Horus had managed that.

A bolter shell had severed his irritated musing, crashing against his chestplate and throwing his stride into a ragged stagger. Khârn had roared without realising – an instinctive vocalisation of the pain drilling into the back of his head – and charged into the first platoon of Academy Guard holding the barricade at the road’s end. Their Evocatus leader fought with an energised gladius, proving himself a swordsman of consummate skill. He lasted nine seconds before he collapsed, painting the avenue’s stones red with his innards.

The city was still standing at that point. The dust hadn’t had a chance to occlude everything under the sun.

That changed soon enough. Mere hours later and the cityscape was choking on its own breath. Now he’d lost Kargos and Esca and the others, and he was alone in a dying city, somewhere behind enemy lines. He remembered the Academy Guard breaking; remembered chasing them with spit thick on his tongue, crunching his axe into their fleeing backs, and the Nails ticking hotter, washing his vision red.

He remembered nothing more, until he’d come back to his senses a few minutes ago.

Shadows drifted from the smoke, becoming shapes, becoming warriors in armour the same blue as Terra’s sky at sunrise. Khârn didn’t slow down. He went through them in a roar of laughter and rending blades, saliva stringing between his teeth. His boots pounded across the rockcrete road.

‘Lotara,’ he voxed.

Her image pulsed into being, just her head and shoulders, in a crackling, distorted hololithic window to the right of his targeting array. As usual, her long hair was bound back in a ponytail to keep it from her face. Her features were in profile, with the imagifier attached to the side of her command throne.

‘Khârn?’ Her voice was a buzz, all quality savaged by the temperamental vox. It made a mess of her usual measured, spire-born eloquence. ‘Are you smiling?’

‘Give me the orbitals, flag-captain.’

‘As you wish, not that there’s anything to see. What are you doing down there, anyway? The city is drowning in dust. Even by your sloppy standards, this is a mess.’

Secondary image windows bloomed into being on both sides of his flickering retinal display. Each one showed the city from above, blanketed in clouds of choking smoke. Towers peeked from the very top of the ash cloud, but the cityscape itself was lost beyond hope.

‘You should have let me bombard the city from orbit,’ Lotara added. ‘I’m sure the two Word Bearers king-ships would have loved to do the same. You never got to see the size of them, stuck in your little drop pod. Quite a sight.’

Khârn’s smile was dangerously close to a sneer. ‘You mock me and my men, flag-captain, but at least we know when our enemies are really dead. We finish the fight.’

He approached a dead tank, an idle and silent shape manifesting from the choking dust. His retinal display locked onto it, spilling out a screed of data he didn’t need to see. Maximus-pattern armour was a technological marvel, but the autosenses took a great deal of tuning to meet a warrior’s personal preferences. Khârn usually ignored most of what his armour tried to tell him. As if he cared what forge world had churned out any particular Rhino chassis. As if he cared about the density of the alloys making up its hull, and how they differed by point-one per cent from others.

A great XIII emblem marked the slain tank’s sealed doors. He strained to hear anything within, but with the city falling down around him, that was always going to be a forlorn hope. Instead, he tapped the edge of his chain-axe against the vehicle’s armour plating.

‘Knock, knock.’

Silence answered from inside, no fun at all. Rather than climb the sloping sides, he vaulted up to its roof in a smooth leap. Both boots thudded on the top with a resonating clang. Any hope that a higher vantage point would help his vision was laughable, but he was willing to try anything.

He spared a glance back at the useless orbital imagery scrolling across his left eye lens. ‘Intensifiers?’ he prompted.

‘I have servitors working on scrubbing the pict-feeds.’ Lotara’s image shook with something more than distortion. ‘We’re busy up here ourselves, you know.’

Khârn crouched by the sealed cupola. ‘Very well. Enjoy your little skirmish in the void, flag-captain.’

She turned her head, grinning right into the imagifier. ‘And you enjoy wading through the dirt, Khârn. Such an inelegant way to fight a war.’ Her image blanked out, taking the useless orbital feeds with it.

Khârn was about to tear the cupola open when another rune blinked into life on his eye lenses. A name-rune.

‘Skane?’

‘Captain.’ The reply was immediate, amidst a chorus of draconic howls. Engines. Turbines running too hot, for too long. The warrior’s augmetic vocal cords didn’t steal emotion from Skane’s voice, but they did add a burbling, crackling quality to everything he said.

‘You just came into vox-range. For the last seven minutes, the only contact I’ve had is with the ship.’

‘Aye, it’s all rather gone to spit down here,’ Skane voxed back. ‘Where are you?’

‘I don’t know.’ A moment’s pause. ‘When we broke the Academy Guard, I was with the vanguard pursuing the survivors.’

‘The Nails?’ Skane asked.

‘The Nails took,’ Khârn admitted, knowing it would explain everything.

‘Understood. We can’t track you, our auspex is already dead.’

Of course it was. Of all his squads, it would be the Destroyers he made first contact with. The ones whose weapons annihilated the efficiency of their more temperamental equipment. Argel Tal often said that Fate had a vicious sense of humour. Khârn never doubted it for a second.

‘Connect it to your armour. Leech power to amplify your locator rune for a moment.’

‘That never works,’ he muttered, but said, ‘Aye, captain,’ a little louder.

Khârn looked at the blue-painted hull beneath his boots. The Rhino was motionless, its engine silent, but the scanners might still be operational. It would certainly be easier than dealing with his Destroyers and their degraded tech–

Miracle of miracles, Skane’s name-rune flared again, this time with translocation and distance data.

‘Got you,’ Skane voxed. Khârn was already running again.

Lotara Sarrin had earned the Conqueror’s throne six years ago, just before her thirtieth birthday. Her promotion had made her one of the youngest flag-captains in the entire spread of the Emperor’s expeditionary fleets, which in turn had made her a focus for scriveners and imagists inbound from Terra’s remembrancer order. They’d plagued her, dogging her every step in the brief period Lord Angron had allowed their kind aboard the World Eaters flagship. When they’d been shipped back to Terra in shame, their work undone – in fact, barely even begun – the official notations recorded their departure as due to ‘irreconcilable maladjustment to void wayfaring’.

Spacesickness. That had been Khârn’s idea, delivered with his usual sly, dry lack of a smile.

The real reason was simple enough: they’d annoyed Lotara Sarrin, therefore they’d annoyed Angron. The primarch had ignored them until the moment he heard Lotara’s first complaint. They were banished back to Terra the next day. Khârn had been one of the warriors tasked with throwing them off the flagship, ignoring their shouted protests and the way they’d waved Imperial licences that supposedly gave them permission to remain. It had all been accomplished with an admirable – and, given the Legion in question, surprising – lack of bloodshed. If anything, the World Eaters were more amused than anything else.

Lotara’s military record spoke in bland, archival terms – replete with neat, uninteresting servitors’ handwriting – of exemplary bravery, steadfastness and patience, citing her frequent dealings and mediations with the primarch of the XII Legion. It also noted her many medals and decorations – none of which she ever wore outside of formal occasions, and most of which languished at the bottom of the wardrobe in her forever-untidy personal chambers.

Anyone reading this record would also find various notations of level-headedness, commendable tactical insight and a gift for logistics. All very orderly, all to be expected in a prominent captain.

The only citation she actually cared about was noted in the following terms: ‘Awarded a unique distinction by the XII Legion for notable courage in the compliance of the worlds formerly claimed by the Ashul Stellar Principality.’

She wore that commendation, loud and proud. The Blood Hand, a red handprint across the chest of her crisp white uniform, as if the raised throne of ornate filigreed brass didn’t already mark her out from the three hundred other officers working in the strategium.

The Conqueror’s bridge was a hive of shouting voices, chattering servitors, and overseer officers calling from station to station. Lotara paid it no heed at all, content from the background noise that her crew was doing its job. She had eyes for nothing but the oculus viewscreen and the three-dimensional tactical display it generated. All the while, she kept a steady stream of orders relayed over her collar vox-mic, while drumming her fingertips on the armrests.

The void war was going well. She’d have known that with her eyes closed, given the unreal punishment both the Word Bearers king-ships were delivering to the beleaguered world of Armatura, but it was far from a foregone conclusion.

The primarch was off-ship, fighting on the world below. She was free to minimise casualties as best she could, rather than send the fleet into yet another cruel assault purely to inflict maximum damage and deploy boarding pods, regardless of the cost in men and materiel. This degree of tactical subtlety was a rare treat. Harder, though. She was used to fighting dirty, like the Legion she served.

She’d not lied to Khârn – the surface war was a mess of unholy proportions. Lotara kept sparing glances to the pict-feeds showing the city drowning in its own dust. She’d been at the briefings weeks ago, when Angron had demanded to make planetfall on Armatura and break it from within. No surprise there. What had come as a surprise was the moment Lord Lorgar Aurelian of the Word Bearers nodded in agreement with the Eater of Worlds. The last year had seen them cut across the Imperium, reaving through the worlds in their way, despite Lorgar’s protests to make full speed for Ultramar. Now they’d finally arrived in Ultramar’s heart, all restraint seemed cast to the solar wind.

She spared another glance at the pict-feeds. This time, the city’s images held her gaze. Lotara frowned.

‘Intensify sectors eight and fifteen,’ she ordered one of the servitors slaved to the orbital-scrye console.

‘Compliance.’

She sucked a slow breath in through her teeth as she stared at the resolving images. ‘They’re bringing down buildings in quick succession,’ she said. ‘Look. Look at these barracks crumbling in neat order. That’s not from the battle. Those buildings have to be rigged with charges. The Ultramarines are killing their own city to bury our Legion in the rubble.’

Ivar Tobin, her first officer, nodded to her assessment. ‘So it seems, captain.’

‘Get me Angron,’ she said to him. ‘Now.’

‘Aye, ma’am.’ He left her side to make her request a reality. Getting hold of the primarch while he was embattled would take no shortage of patience and resolve.

Lotara turned her attention back to the void war unfolding above Armatura. She called up a quad-screened pict-feed, hazed by distance, of one of the new Word Bearers king-ships. The thing was monstrous in its beauty, big enough to make her breath catch if she looked at it for too long. The human mind processed detail in stops and starts; it was only when a lesser cruiser’s silhouette crossed the Blessed Lady’s battlements that the king-ship’s size became apparent, and each time it did, Lotara felt her stomach lurch. The thing looked too big to be real.

Orbital wars were their own beasts, with their own methods and moments of madness. A war above a world tended to play out in much closer quarters than many stately, oddly-placid void engagements. Fighting it out in high orbit meant getting in your foe’s face, and that suited Lotara just fine. She was used to it. The World Eaters liked to board their enemies’ ships, and that almost always meant coming in close, no matter where the Conqueror fought.

‘Why is that weapon platform not dead yet?’ she asked, eyebrow raised. ‘Chase the Venator Vorena, if you please. Pursue it into the fiftieth grid, with full broadsides on that platform as we pass.’

At only twenty-three, third officer Feyd Hallerthan was the youngest of the strategium’s command crew. ‘That will bring us dangerously close to the three cruisers holding off the Lex, captain,’ he said.

She clicked her tongue – a habit of hers when she was on the verge of losing her temper. Feyd was wrong, because she could see the oncoming press of another Word Bearers cruiser and its frigate squadron would force the three Ultramarines cruisers to pull up and regroup for another attack run, unless they had a sudden hunger to be rammed or crippled by close-quarters rupture fire. Their sound tactical retreat would open up all the room she required. It took her all of half a second to discern this from the flickering dance of ship name-runes clustering and twisting on her tactical display.

She knew he had other ideas, and that they’d be acceptable enough. But Lotara knew her game better than anyone else.

‘Look to the grid beneath the Lex, and the Word Bearers vessel rising in support. That’s why you’re wrong. The Ultramarines will pull up and away, before regrouping for a second run at the Lex.’

‘I see it, ma’am. But if the–’

‘As far as I’m concerned,’ she interrupted with a smile, ‘it’s not my job to explain why my order overrules your ideas. You should perceive the reasons yourself. Now do as I say, lieutenant.’

Leftenant, she pronounced it, ever the spire-born.

He flinched, and the several tactical alternatives he’d been about to suggest shrivelled on his tongue. ‘Aye, ma’am.’

Ivar Tobin – greying, stern, professional to his core – returned to her throne’s side. ‘The primarch has answered your vox-hails, ma’am.’

‘Well, then. This is a day of many wonders.’

Lotara leaned back as the ship juddered around her, momentum dampeners straining against the tight turn. A couple of tapped keys on her armrest activated her personal hololith generator. Angron’s image stood before her throne, towering tall, distorted and pale but undeniably the primarch. His axes dripped colourless blood, but the hololithic droplets ghosted away into nothing as soon as they hit the deck.

‘What do you want, captain?’ Pain-tics flawed one side of his face, leaving the other slackened in a dull snarl. She knew better than to ask if he was in pain. Angron was always in pain.

‘The casualty reports from the surface attack are looking rather unpleasant. What’s going on down there?’

‘The Evocati.’ Angron’s image distorted to the point of failure, then streamed back into grainy existence. ‘And they have a Titan Legio as well. Sorry if we’re not pacifying the world as quickly as you’d like, Lotara.’

‘Don’t be childish, my lord.’

‘I am no one’s lord, and I grow bored of telling you that. You’re always very brave with me when I’m several thousand kilometres away, captain.’

‘I know, sire.’ She steepled her fingers, briefly distracted by the ship shaking around her again. The frigates passing their stern were targeting the Conqueror’s engine decks, to little effect.

‘How’s my ship?’ Angron asked, spitting blood onto the rocky ground.

‘My ship is fine,’ she replied. ‘How many Evocati are on the surface?’

The colossal figure grunted, lifting an axe in what might have been a god’s shrug. ‘A lot. All of them. I don’t know.’ He was looking away now, starting to scan the wrecked city over his shoulder. She didn’t have long, he’d be lost to the Nails soon.

‘The junctions in the capital, where the primary avenues meet; it looks like the Ultramarines have the buildings rigged to detonate. Be careful as you advance into the city, sire.’

‘You worry too much, captain.’

She clicked her tongue again. ‘Does it not seem perfectly reasonable, sire, that a war-world would be prepared for every eventuality when it comes to an invasion? At least consider advancing with the Word Bearers and sending scouts ahead to confirm what I’m seeing.’

‘My brother’s precious Bearers of the Word are hissing their insipid prayers as they march slowly down the streets. The war will be over before their bolters sing even once.’

She swallowed her temper as best she could. ‘Do you at least want me to target the Titan Legio’s foundries from up here?’

‘I want you to leave me alone, captain.’ Angron turned back to face her, his left eye twitching tightly closed in response to the spasms tugging at the corner of his lips. His unwilling smile bared one side of his implanted iron teeth. ‘Shoot whatever you wish, but cease whining to me about it.’

Distance did nothing to steal any of the primarch’s blunt, savage grandeur. He was a ruined, towering thing of pain-spasms and sutured flesh. Lotara had only ever seen two primarchs, but despite the legend that each was cast in the Emperor’s image, Lorgar and Angron couldn’t have looked less alike. The former had a face that belonged on antique coins, and a voice that made her think of warm honey. The latter was an angel’s statue, desecrated by a hundred blades and left in the rain. Angron was ripped skin and roared oaths over a core of thick blood vessels and muscle meat.

Whatever aesthetic intention there’d been in his creation was long lost; time and war had seen to that. Had fate not intervened, perhaps Angron would have grown to be as beautiful as his brothers Lorgar, Sanguinius, or even Fulgrim – but fate was never a silent ally to anyone.

The primarch’s distorted hololithic wavered as the ship took another barrage against its void shields.

‘How’s the void battle?’ Angron asked. She knew he didn’t want details, and knew his fragile, mutilated mind wouldn’t hold onto them even if he tried. Grey blood was already trickling down his white chin. Another nosebleed.

‘We’re still here,’ she said.

‘Good. Stay that way.’ As he turned his back on her, the image flickered once more and finally died.

‘This isn’t good,’ she mused aloud. ‘This isn’t good at all.’

‘Ma’am?’ asked Tobin.

‘Khârn’s right about the primarch.’ She turned her throne back to face the void war. ‘He’s getting worse.’

With restored vox, Khârn spent several painstaking minutes speaking with his sergeants, coordinating the movements of the few squads who weren’t lost to the Nails. Precious few of them, as it happened.

Esca was immune to ever being lost. The Codicier’s report was curt and clear; he knew full well Khârn preferred it that way. He had little to say, beyond the fact the fighting was fiercest at the avenue junctions. Ultramarines and Academy Guard resistance was at its strongest there, where they defended fortress-barracks brimming with defensive turrets.

Skane was still inbound, one of the few to keep his head in the battle, but Khârn found the Word Bearers before he found his brother.

A year’s alliance thus far had reaped little tangible reward. The Legions had almost come to blows mere weeks ago – both their fleets hanging in deep space with guns rolled out and boarding pods racked into firing tubes. Beyond that aborted betrayal, halted only by Lorgar and Angron finding a xenos fleet to murder instead, interactions between the Legions were considered on the right side of cordial if warriors managed not to spit at each other in mission briefings.

A squad of Word Bearers stood in a half-circle around one of their battle tanks. Their chanting was an impassioned chorus, sounding disgustingly close to worship. It was in Colchisian, of course. The Word Bearers rarely deigned to speak Low Gothic, even around their brother Legion. Yet another bone of contention.

Their murmured prayers broke off as Khârn came closer.

‘Captain,’ one of them greeted him. Behind the sergeant, three Ultramarines were lashed in crucified ruin to the tank’s hull. Iron spikes had been driven through the warriors’ arms and chests, impaling them in place. All three legionaries of the XIII were still twitching, still struggling – even the one with a spike through his throat. It was hard not to admire such tenacity.

Khârn lifted his axe to gesture at the crucified Ultramarines. ‘You truly have time for this desecration?’ He kept the edge of condescension from his voice. Just.

The Word Bearers sergeant, clad in the crimson of his Legion’s new livery, closed the holy book he’d been reading aloud to his men. The tome’s pages met with a soft thump, and the book fell to hang on a short chain bound to the warrior’s belt.

‘It seems you have time to run off into the dust and get separated from your men, World Eater.’

Khârn felt the tick-tick-tick of the Butcher’s Nails start again in the back of his brain. Misfiring signals from his skull made his fingertips tense, and he accidentally gunned his chain-axe’s trigger, making the saw-teeth whine as they chewed air. The Word Bearers clutched their bolters tighter, but made no overt threat of their own.

‘Watch your words,’ Khârn warned. ‘Get back into the fight, all of you. Victory is hardly guaranteed here.’

The sergeant, his faceplate silver against the red of his helm, looked back to the tortured Ultramarines for a moment.

‘This is a sacred observance. We do not take orders from you, centurion.’

‘And yet,’ Khârn said, smiling behind his faceplate, ‘this time, you will.’

The incoming whine of overburned jump pack engines punctuated his words. Skane was the first to land, hitting the ground running, skidding to a halt at his captain’s side. The rest of his Destroyers came down in ragged order, weapons holstered, bandoliers of radiation grenades rattling against their armour.

‘Is there a problem, captain?’ Skane asked. The gritty, dusty wind clattered against his scorched ceramite. The only colour on his war plate was the leering red of his eye lenses. Beyond that, he and his brothers could have been shadows born from the ash – the ghosts of warriors slain in flame.

Khârn didn’t answer. He kept staring at the Word Bearers sergeant. ‘Back into the battle.’

Buildings fell in the distance, with the distinctive thunder of dying architecture. ‘Yes, sir,’ the Word Bearers officer said at last.

Khârn finally turned to Skane. ‘Come with me.’

The Eighth Captain of the XII Legion left the Word Bearers by their Land Raider. His Destroyers followed.

‘Making friends, sir?’ Skane asked in Nagrakali, all guttural grunts.

‘Speak Gothic,’ replied Khârn. ‘Make the effort to cooperate, even if the Word Bearers refuse to do the same.’

Skane’s articulated collar gave a low whine as he turned to look at his captain. ‘I wouldn’t piss on a Word Bearer even if he was on fire. You think I care what toys they use to fly around in?’

‘Just do as I ask, Skane.’

The Destroyer shrugged. ‘Of course, sir.’

‘Report,’ Khârn prompted.

He could hear Skane’s quiet chuckle behind the scorched faceplate. ‘You’re not going to like this, sir.’

Khârn resisted the urge to sigh. ‘Where’s Angron?’

‘No one knows for certain. He was lost to the Nails after we took the Krytica Junction half an hour ago. Delvarus was the last to report in; he says he saw the primarch eating some of the enemy dead.’

‘Tell me that’s a joke.’

Skane shrugged again.

Maybe Lotara was right. Maybe they should have just let her bombard Armatura into dust.

‘Why is Delvarus down here?’

‘It seems Lotara let him slip the leash. The flagship’s hardly going to be boarded by anything worthwhile during that mess in the sky.’

Khârn waved the matter away. ‘I need to get to the front line,’ he said. ‘Someone has to coordinate the assault with the Legio Audax. Damn it, I don’t even know if we’re winning.’

‘I can answer that one for you, sir,’ Skane replied. ‘We’re most definitely not winning.’

Magnus watched the warring heavens. Mostly, he watched the Blessed Lady and her twin sister, the Trisagion, making a mockery of Armatura’s orbital arrays, dismantling one of the best-defended worlds in the Imperium with barrage after barrage from their howling, flashing weapon decks.

‘You’ll need those at Terra,’ he said softly. Lorgar didn’t answer. His brother hadn’t answered anything in some time.

The ships’ size and scale rendered all countermeasures obsolete. For the first hour, nothing could punch through their shields. Nothing even managed to scrape their skin. It took the combined firepower of a battle-station, two orbital defence platforms and a suicidal ramming from the Imperial warship Steel Sky to finally burst the Blessed Lady’s shields. She sailed on, oblivious to the thousands dying within one of the flaming monasteries on her back, for their agonies made no difference at all to a crew of half a million.

Lorgar knelt at the basilica’s heart, head lowered in prayer. The mere sight of it made Magnus’s skin crawl. Despite the aetheric nature of his new form, some instincts died hard.

‘Lorgar,’ he said. His brother’s answer was to keep whispering his blasphemous, deluded devotions. ‘Lorgar,’ Magnus growled.

The Word Bearer looked up, his inked face one of transcendent focus. He blinked then, for the first time in half an hour.

‘Something is wrong.’ Lorgar rose to his feet, boots sending cracks along the mosaic floor. He held out a hand towards one of the hundred bookshelves, and his crozius maul slashed across the cold air to land neatly in his right fist. ‘We will speak soon. Farewell, Magnus.’

‘Going to war, brother?’ the sorcerer asked.

‘I am needed on Armatura,’ the Word Bearer replied.

‘Ah. Don’t you wish to talk me into the war? That is why you summoned me, is it not?’

Lorgar didn’t look back. ‘I know your decision, Magnus. You will stand with us at Terra. I was told this by the gods you insist aren’t real.’

The sorcerer shook his head in dismissal. ‘Tell me what demands your presence on the surface.’

Lorgar sealed his tri-horned helm in place, speaking before leaving the chamber.

‘Angron is in trouble.’

FOUR

Buried Alive
Communion
Valika Junction

Serenity fled from him.

He clawed after it, raging against the futility of his own desperation. The taste of failure was already coating his tongue with familiar bitterness. He screamed skywards, wanting rainwater to wash the taste from his teeth. His scream ended dry.

He’d been so close to serenity that time. So close.

Yet it fled, hurling him back into the world of bleeding meat and bruised bone – a life where his violated skull pulsed fire around his body in rhythm with his racing heart.

He wished for something, anything, to ease the clockwork agony engine in his brain, mutilating his mind with its poison.

And he was weak. Weak and blind. He trembled in the dark, shivering and pained and inhaling the reek of his own blood. He couldn’t see his hands before his face, but he felt how they bled.

Angron, said a voice.

Angron. The name meant nothing.

Angron. Angron. Angron. Several voices. Ten, maybe twenty. He wasn’t sure. He roared a second time, bellowing for them to get out of his head.

I can’t reach him, the strongest of the voices said. The Nails have truly damaged his mind this time.

I can’t reach him, either, said another.

Then we have to risk Communion, said yet another.

The response was a silent wave of cold, cold repulsion, the psychic reflection of magnets refusing to bond.

No, one of the voices said in the wake of the nausea. Esca, no.

The strongest agreed. We cannot countenance Communion again. Think of the losses last time, and how much weaker we will be without them.

Then what? Do you trust Lord Aurelian?

An amusing notion.

Lorgar is powerful beyond our reckoning. He could reach Angron.

Lord Aurelian hasn’t even made planetfall, and I am unwilling to trust him in a matter this delicate. We have to risk Communion. It must be us.

And if we don’t?

The arguing voices fell silent. Their hesitation made him smile, though he wasn’t sure why. Perhaps because it stank of indecision, and indecision stank of cowardice.

He’s dying, the lead voice finally said. This is one step beyond being lost to the Nails. He will never recover without our aid.

Leave me be, he thought. Leave me be. Get out of my head.

Vorias… said one of the voices. Give the order.

Another long pause, another hesitation that reeked of fear. Cowardice wasn’t the fear of death. Cowardice was having something to lose. What worth was a warrior who forged attachments to the impermanence of the world around him? Everything faded. Everything died. Everything decayed. Attachment was weakness.

The men behind these voices had something to lose, and it made them afraid. That made them weak.

Brothers, said the lead voice, reluctantly. Join me in Communion.

He turned from the irritating buzz the voices were becoming. His knuckles whitened and cracked as he clutched the drenched handles of his axes. When he opened his eyes, confronted by the utter blackness of his surroundings, he screamed through a mouthful of bloody froth and started digging. No surrender. No submission.

Despite no knowledge of who he was or why he was entombed, the kicking, thrashing part of his hind-brain focused on one thought. This wasn’t the first time he’d been buried alive.

With no up, no down, there was only ahead or dead.

Khârn tasted his own blood – a rare and unwelcome flavour. The Ultramarine before him refused to die, and while he could sympathise with the warrior’s will, he had enough to worry about already. The last thing he needed was the XIII dragging out their demise in a protracted last stand.

The wound in his side ached with an incessant pulse, throbbing in time with the beat of his heart. Pain nullifiers flooded his bloodstream from the intravenous injection ports at his wrists, close to his collarbone, and along his spine. Even so, warning runes flickered across his retinal display, in case he was somehow unaware of the blood haemorrhaging from the wound below his ribs.

The Evocatus moved in for another thrust, feinting and weaving, his footwork flawless on the rubble-strewn ground. Khârn stumbled back, blocking the gladius with his toothed axe rather than risk dodging on the unsteady rocks.

The warrior immediately riposted, coming in low with a second thrust. Khârn deflected it by slamming his fist into the Ultramarine’s faceplate, sending the legionary reeling. It bought the World Eater enough time to bring his axe up again, as he clanged back to back with Kargos behind him.

‘Captain,’ his brother breathed. ‘I’m having such a wonderful time.’ He seemed to be grinning, but every World Eater in a Sarum-pattern faceplate seemed to be grinning.

Around them was nothing but a chaos of crashing blades and cursing warriors. Blades against ceramite gave their distinctive dull toll, interspersed with the close-range bark of bolters. Flatlines played across Khârn’s eye lenses as more and more of his men fell to XIII blades. Slain Academy Guard were slumped across the rocks and Khârn was treading upon their bodies as much as he scrambled across the uneven ground.

The Evocatus refusing to die bore the insignia of a sergeant. The warrior’s cloak, once red, was stained with dust clinging to the blood and oil, scaled by encrusted dirt. A golden helm marked him as one of the honoured elite, those souls sworn to train successive generations of Ultramarines and send them forth into the Five Hundred Worlds. Khârn hated him for his stubborn tenacity as much as he admired him for it.

The Valika Junction wasn’t supposed to be a chokepoint. They should have seen this coming. Another Legion – one not dancing to the tune of the Butcher’s Nails in the back of their heads – would have seen it clearly, and that scraped Khârn’s temper raw. The World Eaters had poured into it in a howling rush, jostling each other as they sprinted, chasing the fleeing Academy Guard in their filthy blue uniforms.

The Academy’s towers detonated, and masses of falling rock came crashing down onto the avenues below. The roads had burst and crumbled, sinking into the earth. Hundreds of World Eaters gone in a handful of heartbeats, buried beneath a city district. The XIII had mined the avenues and rigged their own beautiful buildings for timed explosions, just as Lotara had warned. It was happening across the city, but the Nails stole caution, twisting it into the sick pleasure of joining a massacre.

Blood mattered, nothing more. Seeing the enemy break and flee invited howling laughter. The laughter lasted until the world exploded around the Legion’s vanguard.

Khârn arrived late, after half of the squads here were already buried in the wreckage. The avenues were cut threads, strangled by the rubble of priceless marble. Here and there, the tracks of a World Eaters tank were visible at the very edges of the settled avalanche.

Sniper fire spat from the remaining rooftops and balconies above, lancing through World Eaters helms and dropping the warriors where they stood. Ultramarines gunships roared overhead, their engines laughing in crescendo to the staccato chuckles of their heavy bolters. They fired and fired, pouring their anger down onto the dying Eaters of Worlds. The Nails stole pain, gave him serenity, and lent him strength, but Khârn cursed them every time he went into battle. He cursed them now, as his senses rang with the dissonant chime of the countless flatlines.

He needed an aerial view. They couldn’t keep fighting blind, with Ultramarines reinforcements pouring in from the east and west districts.

‘Skane,’ he breathed.

Skane was gone. Dead or too far away, Khârn wasn’t sure which. Even Kargos, at his back a moment before, was gone to chase another foe.

Khârn turned, releasing the charge from his shaking plasma pistol. Bolts of corrosive fusion-fire splashed against the three uniformed humans scrambling towards him, incinerating them where they stood. He spun back in time to catch the Evocatus’s descending blade, twisting it aside and levelling another kick to the Ultramarine’s emblazoned chestplate. The wound in his side caught fire again, burning in the backwashed heat from his plasma shot. Through clenched teeth, Khârn howled to the strangled skies, up at the dust that blocked them from the fleet.

The vox was useless, lost to scrambled shrieks and taunting static. They had to get out of the Junction. They had to reach the primarch. There was no front line among the fallen buildings, only clusters of desperate, isolated bands of warriors.

His axe lodged in the Ultramarine’s neck joint, finally dropping the Evocatus into the rubble. Khârn pulled the blade free on the third try, letting the whirring teeth cleanse themselves of blood. He was turning to seek another foe when he felt the first tingle of a teleportation flare itching at his gums.

For several seconds he stood there, turning slowly, trying to pinpoint the locus of arrival. Dust swirled around him, as the smallest rocks quivered and lifted from the destroyed ground. He saw, between duelling warriors in white and blue, where the flare would bloom and fade, bloom and fade, finding nowhere stable to lock. The uneven ground would murder a locus lock, as would the hundreds of moving bodies, and the interference from the dust.

‘Lotara.’ His voxed words melted together in a blur. ‘Lotara, abort the teleportation at the Valika Junction. Abort the teleportation at the Valika Junction. We’re fighting over cursed earth, there’ll be no locus lock.’

Her image crackled back into life in the corner of his retinal display, briefly enough to deliver a single sentence.

‘It’s not us, Khârn.’

Her image distorted, vanished. He was left looking at data-spills and a leaping targeting reticule that couldn’t ascertain which was the ripest kill in an ocean of enemy warriors.

A bolter shell cracked off his shoulder guard, the shell’s kick sending him stumbling as shrapnel shattered across his helm. He fired back blind, leaving his plasma pistol starved as it recharged.

Argel Tal, you whoreson, where are you?

+Khârn?+ The voice was distant, weak, muffled by the Nails’ beat.

Argel Tal? Brother, where are you? Bring the Bearers of the Word. We’re being slaughtered here.

No answer. Nothing.

‘Anyone,’ he voxed. ‘Anyone who can still hear me, anyone still alive, this is Khârn at the Valika Junction. I have the Eighth, Twentieth and Sixty-Seventh Companies with me. We need armour and air support, immediately.’

‘Where are the Word Bearers?’ one of his sergeants demanded. ‘They’re supposed to b–’ Static ate the rest of the warrior’s words, but he was right. The XVII swore to reinforce them at Valika. Khârn had led the briefings himself.

Other replies came in the form of howls and cheers. A Legion lost to the Nails. A Legion sprinting gleefully into a hundred ambushes. You couldn’t collar the Eaters of Worlds.

The only voices that made sense in the aural melee all demanded to know the same thing.

‘The primarch,’ they called, over and over. ‘Is it true? Is Angron dead?’

The entity called itself the Communion.

It rose above the Valika Junction, into the smoky sky. Nineteen threads pulled at it – nineteen bonds preventing it from soaring too high. The Communion turned in the air, staring down at the city beneath, where buildings toppled and men screamed in a world of dust and dreadful physicality.

Drawn by curiosity, the Communion drifted lower, watching the lives of the tiny creatures ending in minute flickers of sparking souls. Each death sent a sliver of mist rising from the broken shells of meat and iron. A warrior would fall, and the soul-flare would rise, hazy and indistinct. Each one shrieked, though some laughed between their screams.

The Communion drifted even lower, close to the ground now, running its clawed hand through the misty soul rising from the twitching corpse of a warrior in white. The soul parted, the way mist was broken by the breeze. The Communion laughed, delighted by such fragility.

The nineteen bindings pulled at it, shackling it tighter. An image formed in its consciousness – the image of a graven, bleeding god, lost in the dark.

Yes. The purpose. No time for these little games.

The Communion turned its focus onto the destroyed earth, and sank into the rubble.

Angron, it called. Angron, hear me.

He laughed in the blackness, the kind of laughter that spoke more of madness than mirth. He laughed as he dragged himself across the jagged rock, splitting his skin, unsure which way was up and which way was down. Blood beat behind his eyes, but that could be from his wounds as much as from gravity. His laughter was little more than snarled wheezing. He’d struggled to draw breath in this airless dark for minutes, or hours, or days. He didn’t know which. All was the same.

Trapped.

No. No, not that word. Even the thought of it set his hands shaking hard enough to almost lose the grip on his axes, and he needed them to dig. Not trapped, no. Not helpless. He wasn’t trapped here in the dark, the epitome of dark, so thick and true he could taste it on his tongue. It seeped into his eyes when they were open – were they open? How could he tell? – and filled his mouth when he laughed.

The dark pressed against him, hungry and hot. Alive. That was the truth. It was alive. It lived, and wrapped him the way a burial shroud wrapped…

Angron, said a new voice.

He wasn’t Angron. He was merely He: a creature of trembling hands, eyes that stung from grit, and laughter that had long-since died, replaced by a stammered wheeze that wasn’t – wasn’t – fear. He feared nothing. Not death, not the dark, not helplessness.

Angron, hear me.

He could feel his hands flayed raw, his fingers now sticks of wet meat fused to the handles of his axes by the glue of his own blood. Dragging himself through the rock was killing him, inch by inch, moment by moment. He was skinning himself alive. He didn’t need to see to know that. The dark couldn’t hide every truth.

The axes were dead, both of them. He knew that, too. Their toothless blades still broke rock, but they’d surely suffered past any ruination that could be repaired.

Angron.

But he wasn’t Angron. He was…

…trapped.

Trapped in the Dark.

The shaking started, harder, heavier. He slavered with it, crawling faster, the stones carving into his muscles as he dragged himself over them, under them, through them.

Angron, you’re crawling downwards, deeper into the earth.

No. That wasn’t true.

He started screaming, venting his precious breath into the place between panic and rage. Blood sheeted from his mouth and nose. The pain engine in his skull tick-tocked into overdrive, knifing its needles deeper into the meat of his mind. He had to kill. He had to kill. He wasn’t weak. He wasn’t scared. He wasn’t helpless.

‘Kill,’ he choked the words out, gagging on a mouthful of rock. ‘Kill. Maim. Burn.’

Angron. Hear me. I am the Communion.

The anger – it wasn’t fear, it wasn’t panic – drowned in the wake of their words. He stopped shaking, stopped dragging himself through the rock.

‘Who are you?’

The last nineteen still alive. I am the Communion. The only one who can reach you.

He tried to wipe his eyes clean of the clinging blood. It did little but smear it across his face.

‘Who am I?’

You are Angron, Lord of the Twelfth Legion.

The calm suffused him now, easing his aching bones. He knew, without knowing how he knew, that it was artificial. The voices were doing something to him, to drown the anger-that-wasn’t-fear.

I am counteracting the machine in your skull, by altering the chemicals flowing through your brain. I cannot maintain it for long, not with only nineteen of us left. Your mind is too different from baseline humanity. It resists any interference.

He tried to shake his head to clear it, but the crunching pressure of the rock all around denied him even that.

No. Lies. Lies, all of it.

‘Who are you?’ he spat this time.

I am the Communion.

Which meant nothing at all. ‘If you have power to reach me, then free me.’

I cannot. I do not exist on this plane of being. I am the gestalt of nineteen psychic minds, nothing more. Nineteen minds separated by hundreds of kilometres, as the Legion marches to war across this world.

‘Free me!’ he said again.

You have to free yourself. You’re digging downwards. The enemy mined the roads and collapsed the towers upon the vanguard of our army. You were over thirty metres beneath the ground when you woke. You’re now closer to two hundred.

And bleeding. And weakening. And your axes are broken. Even your kind aren’t immortal, sire.

He didn’t believe a word of it. He didn’t want to believe it. All the same, he relaxed his grip on the axes. He told himself it was to bide his time, rather than any relief from the agony in his head.

The thing called him ‘sire’. That was interesting.

I am the meeting of minds, born of the last among your sons who still speak without speaking. I am the strength of the last nineteen that still live. I’ve silenced the Nails. You are yourself, for a few rare moments.

Try to remember all that came before. You are Angron, Lord of the Twelfth Legion, a son of the Emperor of Mankind. This is Ultrama–

No. Enough of the voice’s whisperings.

He remembered standing in the dark.

He remembered standing in the dark, while his brothers and sisters died.

He remembered standing in the dark, while his brothers and sisters died, because he wasn’t there to fight with th–

No. Not that, sire.

He remembered being blinded by his father’s light. He remembered refusing to abandon his brothers and sisters, beneath a blue sky at high-sun, far from the city of Desh’ea. He remembered the mechanical thunder of absolute betrayal, when he was stolen from the death he’d so richly earned.

He remembered the cold moment of truth as he stood in the dark, his hurting eyes healing, that every day he breathed was an unwanted gift. He was walking another man’s destiny now. His destiny was to be with the men and women who needed him, who called for him, who followed him into the mountains and died without him. A destiny denied.

He was Angron of Desh’ea. After that, nothing mattered. He’d listened to the others that begged him, that needed it all to matter. He’d played their games, living out another man’s life. He’d led his fleets, he’d embraced his sons, he’d told himself that blood was thicker than water, and the Eaters of Worlds were the army he wanted and the horde he deserved. He’d sustained himself on lies, letting none see how he starved.

And he served in his cold-hearted father’s empire, enduring the silent sneers of brothers he despised.

Yes, Angron. Angron the Conqueror. The Butcher. The Red Angel. All the things they’d made him into, after stealing his destiny as…

As what, sire?

He recoiled from the voice. It wasn’t for them to know.

‘Vorias.’ He growled the name of his Legion’s Lectio Primus.

Vorias is within me, sire. I am the Communion.

Angron wanted to spit. Filthy psykers. His Legion would be cleaner when the last of them finally died. Their whispers set the Nails ringing inside his skull like nothing else could. Already, he could feel blood sheeting from his nose.

‘You’ve done what you wished to do. You reached me, now tell me which way to dig, and get out of my head.’

They did. They obeyed both demands. Angron spent several gruelling, bleeding minutes twisting beneath the earth, before resuming his aching crawl. This time, bound for freedom and the light above. More importantly, bound for revenge.

Esca collapsed backwards, his armour thudding against the Rhino’s hull. He slid to the ground in a slow hunch, ending the fall in an ungainly slump. Blood ran from his ears, his nose, his eyes, and none of this was anything new. It still hurt, it hurt every time, but even pain became mundane when it was a constant companion.

He could feel the Communion dying in the distance. The gestalt being they’d shaped with the union of their powers was crying out as it diminished, pained by the simple oblivion of each psyker withdrawing his mind and returning to individuality. Strange and unfortunate for the short-lived intelligence, but nothing else would have pierced the murk of Angron’s broken psyche. The primarch’s proto-Nails girded his mind from intrusion. No one knew why, or how, or if it was even intentional.

Esca crouched there, breathing through bloody teeth, too weak to even swallow. To force one’s way into a primarch’s mind was to swim blind through rockcrete. And the Nails… the Nails made torture into a nightmare. Angron’s Nails were almost septic in their simplicity, clouding the warlord’s brain from outside influence, turning his thoughts into untraceable, uncatchable ghosts. To even speak with him, mind to mind, took an event like the Communion, and an event like the Communion left the remaining World Eaters Librarians sickened and weak in the aftermath. Whatever went into the construction of Angron’s cranial implants defied simple reverse engineering.

He finally managed to look up, at where his own brothers were judiciously ignoring him across the wrecked plaza. Esca stared into the dust, watching the white-clad sons of Angron duelling amongst the rubble, crashing blades against the silhouettes of Ultramarines who refused to give ground. Smaller shadows, the human soldiers of the Armaturan Wardens, fought in ever-retreating ranks, forming pockets of resistance with their quick-flashing lasrifles. Even through the dust-mist and the chemical stinks of burnt metal and tank engines, he could smell the fear-sweat decorating the humans’ bodies.

A shadow blocked out the weak sun. A small shadow. He raised his head again, unaware he’d come close to passing out.

The stink of human skin hit him first. And then, the smell of blood. Thin mortal blood, unlaced by stimulants and unfiltered by enhanced organs. He couldn’t make out the face or the features of the man’s armour, but he didn’t need to. It wasn’t a legionary. The human wasn’t on his side.

He lifted a hand. To kill the man? To ward off the coming execution? It didn’t matter. Esca’s hand shook in the air before him, the gravest and clearest confession of weakness. Betrayed by his own body.

+Vorias,+ he sent in silence, though that was worthless. Vorias was half a city away. +Khârn,+ he tried. +Kargos.+ They were both nearer. He couldn’t see Khârn fighting in the chaos of the Valika Junction, but he could hear him shouting over the vox, demanding to abort a teleport lock.

Predictably, neither answered. They probably couldn’t even hear him.

The human silhouette levelled a rifle, aiming at his head. Esca laughed, but it left his throat as a wet, wheezing chuckle – a man choking on his own bile.

‘Why?’ the man asked. ‘Why did you betray us all?’

Esca’s vision was swimming as he tried to focus his thoughts. He laughed again, just as weak. His hand was still trembling.

‘Answer me!’ the soldier cried. He pushed the rifle’s muzzle against Esca’s cheek.

The World Eater tried to answer, and instead vomited dark blood down the front of his armour.

A growl. A whine. Something flashing in the sun.

Blood, hot and too-human, painted Esca’s face. The shadow fell, and another replaced it. This one came with the purring thrum of active armour.

‘Esca,’ said the new shadow. It carried a chain-axe, and its helm was crested. It smelled of war and hate and fire.

‘Captain,’ the Codicier replied in a raw whisper. ‘My thanks.’ He held out his shaking hand, needing to be helped up.

The other World Eater stepped back, as if threatened. Ah. Yes. Esca lowered his hand again.

‘Forgive me, Khârn,’ he managed to say.

‘It’s fine.’ The warrior turned away. ‘Now get up and finish this fight.’

Esca watched his captain moving back over the rubble. The Codicier stood almost a minute later, looking around for the weapons he’d dropped when he’d saved his primarch’s life.

The Armaturan wore the dirty blue dress tunic of an Academy Guard officer, replete with gold ropes and silver frogging.

‘Fff… for th-the Emp-peror.’ The dying man stuttered the words from a ruined mouth. Blood streamed from his gums where his teeth had been until Khârn backhanded them down his throat only seconds before. Distracted, the World Eater dragged the struggling mortal into a headbutt, crashing his snarling faceplate into the man’s forehead. Whatever bone remained whole after that blow, it wasn’t enough to keep him alive. The Armaturan officer slumped to the ground, as dead as the city he’d failed to protect.

Khârn breathed in, inhaling the bloodstink painted across his faceplate. The Nails gave a pleased, warm pulse in response.

He looked skywards as the teleport locus fixed at last, ripping a conduit through the warp with a bang that blew out what few windows remained whole in a radius of several streets. The displaced air pressure was like a sonic boom of its own, blasting thirty metres above the battlefield. Khârn looked up when the airwave hit, feeling pebbles and grit clattering against his armour. Those closest to the airburst were thrown from their feet – World Eater, human and Ultramarine alike. He was far enough away that it did little beyond scramble his retinal display for a few seconds.

A demigod in red and gold fell from the golden wound in the world’s sky. A magnificent warrior-priest armoured in sacred crimson, each armour plate inscribed with runic mandalas and prayers written in Colchisian cuneiform. The oaths and scrolls bound to the dark ceramite caught the wind like wings of parchment, spreading as he fell. Khârn felt it then; he felt the instinctive sigh of submission, that skin-itching awe in the first moments that one stood in a primarch’s presence.

Lorgar’s ridged boots crunched down on the rubble, grinding the rocks to pebbles and dust. Sniper fire lanced the air at once, flaring with frustrated light as it impacted against the psychokinetic shield shimmering around the primarch’s armour. Khârn shouted a warning, but Lorgar paid as much attention to the centurion’s cry as he did to the incoming storm of fire that supposedly threatened his life. His attention was elsewhere, focused on the cursed earth lining the fallen avenue.

An Ultramarines gunship rattled overhead, rows of heavy bolters chattering and flashing in the dust-brought darkness. That got the primarch’s attention. Lorgar turned in a measured, fluid arc, dragging Illuminarum’s brutal maul-head across the ground before roaring as he hurled it skywards. The crozius spun in an energised blur, crashing into the cockpit’s reinforced windshield with a shatter loud enough to be audible over the gunship’s protesting jump jets. As the Thunderhawk banked away, Lorgar raised his hands towards it, fingers curling into claws. He gripped it, holding it in the air.

And he pulled.

The gunship’s engines coughed black filth and shuddered in the sky. Lorgar pulled again, a prophet clawing wisdom from the heavens. The gunship fell, smashing into the broken avenue with an ear-aching crash of tormented metal, engines aflame, hull mangled.

The primarch ignored his lost crozius for the moment, and looked back at the rubble lining the wide avenue.

He said one word. Somehow, Khârn heard it distinctly, above everything else, though it was no more than a whisper.

‘Brother.’

The Lord of the Word Bearers started hauling the rocks free and casting them away from the buried, collapsed road, with the same untouching ease as he’d pulled a gunship from the sky.

Skane came down, jump pack engines giving an ululating whine as he skidded to a halt next to Khârn. His black armour was painted white with the dust of the dying city.

‘You’re going to love this,’ he said to his captain.

Khârn was unable to look away from Lorgar. ‘Are you seeing what I’m seeing?’ he asked Skane.

‘This is even better, captain.’ The Destroyer shook his head. ‘Do you feel that?’

Once he paid heed, he couldn’t help but feel it. The ground quivered, just faintly, but as regularly as a racing heart. The city shook not from its death, but from the footsteps of giants.

‘Titan-tread,’ said Khârn.

‘I saw several coming through the dust,’ Skane admitted. ‘And none of them are on our side.’

FIVE

The Ember Queen
His Imperial Wisdom
They Cheer, My Princeps

The huntress went by several names, some of which were affectionate, some of which were archival in nature, and some of which were curses as she cast her shadow over her foes.

In the various records kept by what remained of the 203rd Expeditionary Fleet, she was listed as L-ADX-cd-MARS-Quintessence-[Necare Modification]-I-XII-002a-2/98: VS/TK/K, which was hardly a name to strike terror into the enemy.

In the annals of the Dark Angels, she was known as the Ember Queen, remembered from the decades she’d served with the First Legion before finding herself sent with her sisters to fight alongside the Eaters of Worlds. A banner commemorating her victories with the Dark Angels had hung in the strategium of the Lion’s flagship, Invincible Reason, only to be torn down when it was discovered that she had turned traitor.

To the troops who fought at her feet, she was more often known as Jackal, or Howler. Her cry always had her little brothers roaring in reply. To those who knew her best, those who guided her movements and formed the biological components of her brain, she was Syrgalah, First Huntress of the Ember Wolves.

The command Titan, as with every war machine in the Legio Audax, sourced her name in antiquity, taking it from the Himalazian dialects of proto-Gothic that still existed in scraps of lore from the lost ages of Ancient Terra. Long ago, when Terra had been Old Earth – when the skies were blue heavens instead of grey iron – entire cultures spread across the planet’s largest continent. Now it was the site of the Imperial Palace, and echoes like Syrgalah’s name were all that remained of those near-forgotten souls.

Syrgalah moved forwards in a brutish hunch, her wolfish skull of iron-riveted ceramite angled down to stare along the road. Her weaponised arms tracked her gaze, panning left and right with each sweep of the cockpit sensor screens that served as her eyes. She stalked rather than walked, clawed feet crunching three-toed imprints into the rockcrete avenues, her gait making her lean side to side with every step.

A titanium plaque on the dense armour plating of her shin displayed the words ‘If wolves have a queen, this is she’, again in the Hindusian proto-Gothic that had given her a name. The Lion, Lord of the First Legion, had honoured her with the inscription decades ago. Years of war had left the plaque scratched, battered and warped, but the tech-priests always returned it to legibility. Who bestowed it upon her didn’t matter. The sentiment was all.

In her armoured skull, the three command crew were strapped into their restraint thrones. Venric Solostine was eighty, but rejuvenat surgery kept him looking fifty, at the cusp of the second renaissance of handsomeness some men were lucky enough to enjoy. Silvering stubble marked his jawline, surrounding an easy and frequent smile. Connective neural cables ran from his temples and the back of his head, linking directly to his leather seat. He looked through Syrgalah’s cockpit-eyes, at the artillery tank grinding its gears to reverse back down the avenue. The vehicle’s mounted cannon boomed with black smoke, and Syrgalah’s void shields lit up with the irritation of kinetic impact.

‘That Vindicator needs to die,’ Solostine said.

‘Aye, sire,’ Toth Kol called back from his throne. ‘Pursuing.’ The cockpit shook harder as the Warhound Titan started its lurching run. Grit rattled against its armour as it stalked through the dust clouds.

In the throne next to Toth, Keeda’s face was cast in unhealthy amber light; the false fire from her flickering targeting display.

‘I already have the shot, sire.’

In his command throne, Solostine pushed both his fists forwards, a slow and careful double-punch. Gears and hydraulics gave a heavy whine as Syrgalah mirrored his movement, its weaponised arms lifting and aiming in neural sympathy.

It was all the permission she needed; Keeda grinned and took the shot. Syrgalah’s left arm roared, the vulcan mega-bolters opening up with a deafening roar to obey the gunner’s trigger finger. Spent shells rained onto the road in a monsoon of smoking scrap.

‘Target destroyed,’ Keeda said.

‘The target is more than destroyed, my dear.’ Solostine’s approval murmured through the Titan, causing a shiver of pleasure through the old girl’s iron bones.

Toth walked Syrgalah around the avenue’s turn, marching into a side street. The Warhound gave the dead Vindicator a derisive kick as she passed by. The tank’s hull, chewed through by Keeda’s barrage, tumbled across the rockcrete road and into a wall.

‘Moderati Primus?’ Solostine called.

‘Aye, sire?’

‘The kick.’ He was chuckling. ‘A lovely touch. Auspex?’

Toth’s bionic eyes refocused on the display monitor to his left. ‘All formations holding within engagement parameters. Over half the Legio is embattled, the rest are moving up as planned. Loss ratio reported as one enemy engine for every one of ours.’

‘Tolerable,’ Solostine mused, ‘but hardly exemplary, given the circumstances. The Legio Lysanda hardly outclasses us.’

Toth watched the road ahead. ‘Lysanda fights in union with the Ultramarines.’

Solostine nodded. The implication need not be spoken clearer – the same thing happened every time the Legio Audax went to war. Where other Space Marine Legions would work in tactical conjunction with their Collegia Titanica forces, the World Eaters could never be trusted to keep their heads long enough to display such patience.

The Warhound lurched onwards, its rattling chassis plunging through the dust clouds strangling the city. They saw by auspex, moving towards mangled heat signatures and movement betrayed by wide-angle echolocation. Behind Syrgalah, the Warhounds Maakri and Kalla kept pace with their alpha. Their sombre armour plating showed the same abuses borne by the command Titan.

‘Incoming message.’ Toth was frowning. ‘The flagship is filtering it as best she can. It’s from the front line, to all outrider elements. They want us to converge on…’ He pressed his bionic palm to the vox-input augmetically attached to his temple.

Solostine tapped his fingers on the armrest of his throne, effortlessly leaning into the roll and rock of the old Titan’s tread.

‘To converge on…?’ the princeps asked. ‘To converge on what? Don’t tell me this will finally be the day the Twelfth Legion asks for our help.’

‘Shit,’ Toth said, releasing the curse in a slow breath. ‘The transmission is from Eighth Captain Khârn. He’s ordering all scout units back to the Valika Junction, and demanding immediate reinforcement.’

Solostine tutted at the swearing. ‘A little dignity goes a long way, Moderati Kol.’

‘My apologies, sire.’

‘Forgiven.’ Solostine was listening to the transmission himself, and his own smile dimmed. ‘We’ll have to fight across a quarter of the city to reach Valika. I… wait, wait. This can’t be correct,’ he said.

Keeda, without a link to the vox-net, finally looked away from her gunnery consoles. ‘What is it?’

‘Reports are coming in from half the junctions across the city,’ Solostine said. ‘The worst is at Valika: Lysanda’s engines are inbound. In addition, Lord Aurelian has made planetfall there.’

Keeda frowned, her orange glass targeting visor showing a continual scrolling data feed. ‘Why can’t that be correct?’

‘Not that,’ Solostine said. He keyed in a command to spread the vox-message to the cockpit’s primary speakers. ‘This.’

‘…lost contact with the primarch, repeat, this is Khârn at Valika. We’ve lost contact with the primarch, reinforcements are–’

Keeda’s frown went nowhere. ‘The World Eaters always lose contact with the primarch. They lose contact with everyone, once… you know…’ She tapped her fingers to her temple. ‘The Nails take over.’

Solostine looked through the Titan’s eyes, at the burning city beyond. ‘Apparently, something is different, this time.’

Khârn screamed, not from rage nor from his wounds, but because he was still alive. The sound was one repeated a thousand, thousand times across the city by men pushed to their physical limits and beyond, yet given no respite. He screamed to override the pain of his own muscles, fighting against the lactic burning of an exhausted body flooded by combat stimulants. He screamed and laughed as he killed, and as his axe fell, and fell and fell.

He’d not lied to Argel Tal. Some warriors enjoyed war, and he was one of them. Not the crushing press itself, but the primal exultation of breaking the enemy ranks and the dizzying laughter that came with it; the prickling pleasure of breathing as others broke open and died. There was such depthless joy in survival.

But war-scribes had been getting their trade wrong since the very dawn of language. Some things simply couldn’t be described, and war – true open war between clashing armies – was first among them. By the nature of perception, one man’s wisdom would always be another man’s lie.

Some tale-tellers focused on the moment-by-moment action and reaction of a warrior in the heat of the fight, describing the motions of mortality. Others focused on the atmosphere of the wider conflict, and the press of emotions on those involved within it.

The truth was both, and neither. Khârn knew it well.

No universal truth of battle existed. Sometimes he’d fought and never been able to recall a single axe-fall, nor the face of a single slain enemy, despite them crying out before his eyes for hours on end.

He’d also fought on battlefields where every contorted face clung to his memory for hours afterwards, and he remembered each and every nuanced tilt of his axe, as well as the exact tune it made shearing through armour and meat and bone.

Battle was a matter of endurance, the passing of time marked only by his own aching muscles and breathlessness. Front-line warfare – from the warbands of Ancient Terra to the grinding of vast hordes in the Great Crusade – was a war against the self. Skill meant nothing, while brotherhood and endurance meant everything. Every warrior in the 31st millennium who picked up a rifle, pistol or blade was duelling against their own reserves of courage, strength and endurance. They were duelling against their own brothers’ and sisters’ courage; their capacity to stand and hold the line.

After thirty thousand years, warfare had come full circle.

The sheer scale of humanity’s conflicts disregarded the corrupt reliance on automation as seen in the Dark Age of Technology. Mankind was back down to swords beating against shields and men entrenched with their rifles, where the gods of myth were Titan war machines and Baneblade tanks.

In his calmer moments, Khârn felt honoured. He was living through a second age of legend, where the future’s mythology was being written around him with each new victory. The World Eaters were the descendants of ancient phalanxes; the spiritual sons of shield walls in lost kingdoms. They were echoes made manifest, conjured from battles that broke down into bronze-bladed duels between a thousand heroes, once formation was forgotten in the blood, the sweat, and the curses of two armies grinding.

They weren’t soldiers, fighting in packs through conquered streets. They were warriors, drawing blades to fight in the moments where courage and endurance threatened to meet madness. Those moments never made it into the sagas.

But he saw no great art to warfare. At least, not beyond the momentary aesthetic pleasure inherent in a sight so unbelievable that it drowned the senses: a city aflame, perhaps, or an orbital pict-view of armies so colossal they blackened the very land over which they were killing each other.

And yet, he loved war. He loved the brotherhood, fighting side by side and back to back with warriors he’d die for, and who would die for him. He loved the momentary surge of life he felt each time a foe fell before his axe. And, as proud as any man without ever tainting himself by vainglory, he loved war because he had a gift for it.

The true strength of the Emperor’s Space Marines was in their genetic coding. Not their strength, mighty though it was; not their discipline, for many lacked that virtue almost entirely; not in the armoured fist of their massed armour battalions, which in truth could be crewed by lesser men with little difference.

No, their strength was a testament to the Emperor’s shrewd foresight for conflict, for he made warriors that could endure more than any other mortal. Secondary organs compensated when primary hearts and lungs grew tired. Wounds that would leave a man or woman stunned or crippled scarcely slowed a legionary at all. They were children harvested from a natural life, grown purely into creatures that were able to tolerate pain and damage beyond measure, and still keep going.

The Emperor, for all his supposed faults, understood war had come full circle. In his Imperial wisdom, he’d bred soldiers to win those ancient wars that would be fought again in the future.

So Khârn screamed. He screamed as he severed the head of a defiant, uniformed Academy Guardsman, and he screamed as he tore a female officer in half on the backswing. He screamed as he felt exhaustion that would cripple a human, and he pushed through it, again and again. An Ultramarine rose up before him, bolter and gladius ready. Khârn took the legionary’s arm off with a chop, kicked his chestplate hard enough to send him sprawling, and looped a weapon chain around the wounded warrior’s throat. He strangled the Ultramarine, embracing him from behind to throttle the life from him, roaring and howling and frothing all the while.

And the Nails sang. They pulsed hatred through his head, promising an end to the pain and never delivering.

Shadows darkened the day as enemy Titans passed, focusing their eardrum-bursting weapons on the World Eaters battle tanks. The hammering crash of vulcan mega-bolters was loud enough to be Armatura’s own heartbeat. Firesprays from discharging cannon arms lit up the dust in flashing hazes, their weak light backwashing to paint the Titans themselves as towering things of iron and shadow.

Khârn saw Lorgar’s silhouette in the dust, hurling great rocks and slabs of fallen architecture aside with telekinetic fury. The primarch was digging deep, well below street level, leaving the air tense with a pall of psychic resonance sharp enough to breed migraines and toothaches among those nearby. Any Ultramarine descending into the hole died without Lorgar even sparing a glance; mirage-waves of kinetic pressure slammed into whole squads, hurling them away to die against the rocks. The human soldiers caught in those careless expulsions of force flew even further, pulping against the rubble where they landed. Lorgar kept digging.

A Warhound Titan, hunched and hungry, stomped its way through the dust cloud, bringing its weapons to bear on the primarch. Khârn drew breath to shout a warning, exhaling in wordless shock a second later.

Lorgar, his gauntlets rimed with psychic hoarfrost, lifted a chunk of broken masonry the size of a Rhino transport and hurled it across the avenue. Such was its speed that dust-waves parted in its wake. With the majestic toll of a ringing bell, it collided with the Titan’s armoured wolf-head cockpit, flattening the crew chamber and sending the Titan slowly, so slowly, toppling onto its side. The few World Eaters still sane enough to bear witness cried out with laughter and renewed their assault.

More Ultramarines poured into Valika, leading squads of human soldiers fresh from other fights. Others fell from the sky on growling jump packs. Still others dropped from gunships, descending through the dust on rappelling cables. Cobalt-blue tanks roamed inwards, grinding over the rubble, weapon mounts blazing.

‘Where are our reinforcements?’ Khârn demanded over the vox. ‘Where are the bastard Word Bearers?’

Kargos and Skane fought with him, as did Esca and Jeddek. The Librarian threw himself into the fight, violet lightning dancing in blinding arcs between his axes. Jeddek was one of the oldest living Eaters of Worlds. He’d crusaded across the stars from the Legion’s founding, long before they rediscovered the primarch’s homeworld, or started recruiting from worlds beyond Terra. He held the Eighth Company’s heraldic banner aloft, the great woven flag showing the fanged, 8-marked skull devouring a red, dead world.

Khârn fell back to stand with his banner bearer. ‘What happened?’ he shouted above the storm of sound.

Jeddek lifted the stump of his other arm. It ended at the elbow. ‘The Ultramarines happened.’

Kargos crouched to reload his bolter. ‘They’re still happening, in case you haven’t noticed.’

A bolt shell spat from the dust, crashing against Jeddek’s chest and driving him to one knee. The banner wavered, dipping, falling.

Skane fired his pistols back, killing the hazy figure of an Ultramarine ascending the rubble slope towards them. ‘You’re avenged, Jeddek,’ he voxed.

‘I’m not dead yet,’ the veteran growled. He hauled himself to his feet, raising the banner again. Blood marked the ruination of his chestplate. Khârn could see the hint of an organ quivering within the mess of cracked ceramite and sundered ribcage.

‘Where is the cursed Seventeenth?’ Kargos spat the words. ‘Where are they?’

Skane – wasn’t it always Skane? – voiced what was on their minds. ‘Betrayal. They’ve left us to die in some great and holy joke, mark my words.’

Khârn looked at his chain-axe, toothless and warped from overuse. He looked at his plasma pistol, thirsting and weakened from overheating, venting pressurised steam in protest.

‘They wouldn’t abandon us.’

Skane grinned. ‘You actually believe what you’re saying? Tell them Lorgar is here, and then they’ll come running.’

Khârn’s answering smile was a bleak, thin thing indeed.

‘This is Captain Khârn of the Twelfth Legion to any Word Bearers forces close to Valika. We’re overrun, and need immediate reinforcement. Your primarch is here. Do you hear me, cowards? Your primarch is here.’

A reply crackled back at once, violated by vox-distortion. ‘Confirm.’

Khârn laughed, sheathing his pistol and lifting a discarded Ultramarines bolter from the rubble.

‘I’m looking at Lorgar as I speak, you cur. It’s not just us you’ve abandoned here.’

‘This is Torgal of the Word Bearers Seventh. Request for reinforcement acknowledged.’

Khârn cracked off a single shot with the stolen bolter. It burst an Academy Guardsman apart as he struggled to scramble over the rubble and into cover.

‘What does acknowledged mean? Does it mean you’re actually coming this time?’

The vox fell back to static.

‘Cowards.’ Skane was still grinning. He holstered both of his empty pistols and looked around for a weapon he could scavenge, coming up with a lightweight lasrifle, almost comically small in his armoured hands, complete with a human forearm still gripping it. After throwing the hand away, he still couldn’t fit his finger in the trigger guard. Skane tossed the useless gun in the same direction as the severed limb. ‘And tell them to bring ammunition,’ he grunted.

More shadows became silhouettes, and the silhouettes became enemy soldiers emerging from the haze. The Armaturan Guard wore rebreathers to block out the dust. The Ultramarines led them in implacable, defiant dignity. More walkers – Warhounds – lurched out of the dust and into the desecrated plaza, blaring their warhorns as a wolf would howl.

‘It’s been an honour serving with you, sir.’ Now Kargos was chuckling.

Khârn swallowed the acrid taste of his corrosive saliva. World Eaters humour – always the guilty, black laughter at the eye of the storm. He smiled back.

‘Shut up, Kargos.’

The Warhound Titan Ardentor swung its weapon arms down, panning over the craters torn in the violated ground. Headlights on its muzzle cracked into life, carving this way and that, as the canine Titan snuffled the dirt for prey. Its void shields sparked with incidental fire from nearby World Eaters in the ruins, but with its energy barrier active, it stalked on in defiance of their meaningless gestures.

Another of the iron beasts bathed a nearby building in a spray of explosive vulcan fire, chewing through the stone to dice the legionaries within. Spent shells the size of a man’s arm rained onto the road: hundreds of them in a clattering fall, spilling across the street.

Ardentor’s horns blared as it crunched its first step down on the rubble slope. A cry of protest and a call to arms, all in one. Its vulcan bolters whined in throaty starvation, ammo-dry from hours of fighting without resupply. Secondary weapon mounts, good for little more than spitting at light infantry, chattered from its chin. Tracer fire slapped across the dusty ground, eating into the crater.

Princeps Maxamillien Delantyr leaned forwards in his throne, the attachment cables straining at his spine.

‘I sense something down there. Maintain defensive fire.’

His Moderati Secundus emitted a binaric spurt of disagreement. ‘Auspex still registers nothing.’

‘Sighters confirmed this is the crater made by the enemy’s psychic release event, whatever it was. There is something down there.’ Delantyr scratched beneath his itching rebreather mask. ‘Fire the primary plasma arm into the crater.’

‘My princeps, we have no more than three unleashments remaining before reactor hypovolaemia.’

‘We will rearm and recharge when Valika is cleansed, Kei. If our guns starve and our reactor goes thirsty, then I will grind these traitors beneath our feet. Now fire as commanded.’

‘Aye, my princeps.’

As the helmeted moderati worked, bringing the right arm to bear, emergency lighting dimmed the cockpit into half-gloom.

‘Core hypovolaemia threat,’ crackled the tech-priest’s emotionless tones from the plasma reactor chamber, housed in the armoured room behind the cockpit pod.

‘I’m aware.’ Delantyr forced a smile. ‘Just give me one shot.’

‘Accruing lethality,’ called Moderati Kei. He rotated seven dials in quick succession, and squeezed his left trigger. ‘Brace for unleashment.’

‘All brace, all brace.’

The Warhound’s heels locked tight as it fired, and a second sun was born at Valika.

Imperial plasma technology combined elemental gases to form the fire that licked across the skin of stars. In ancient ages, the process was better known as fusion – the ionising of hydrogen at a hundred million degrees – to recreate the heartbeat of a sun through human ingenuity. Cooking the plasma was half of the ritual. ‘Unleashment’ was the rest. Among the hallowed halls of the Legio Lysanda and the various Collegia Titanica, unleashment of their god-machines’ plasma weaponry came with a wealth of prayers, invocations, benedictions, and the burning of a specific scent of incense.

The Warhound fired, its comet-tailed bolt of raw plasma contained within an engineered magnetic field to prevent the projectile’s dissipation from the ionised atoms flying apart. Venting began at once, ghosts of coolant steam slashing from the relief ports along the Titan’s weaponised arm.

The unleashment incinerated the dust, burning the air clear, and splashed a sun’s core into the crater for the fraction of a second. The World Eaters caught at the blast’s edges dissolved into bones and armour shards spilling through the air, eroding to powder, and then to nothingness.

In the crater’s pit, Lorgar stood with his peaceful eyes raised to the staring Titan. Ash drifted away from his armour, the last remnants of the holy parchments bound to the ceramite. The air rippled with the force of his focus, and the kine-shield he kept raised with his outstretched hand. The ground by his boots, in a spread of several metres, was unharmed rock. Everything else was burned into sludged, black glass.

All three crew members leaned forwards in their thrones. Kei raised his targeting visor.

‘What am I seeing?’ he asked. ‘It can’t be.’

The Moderati Primus, Ellas, narrowed his eyes to squint. ‘Is that…?’

‘Fire, damn you!’ Delantyr was yelling. ‘Fire again!’

‘Brace for–’

‘Just fire!’

Lighting failed in the cockpit as power bled from the reactor. The tech-priest’s voice snapped over the vox with uncharacteristic urgency.

‘Core hypovolaemia threat,’ he practically whined. ‘And we aren’t br–’

Ardentor fired again.

The discharge sent the Titan rocking back two steps, its splayed claw-feet crunching into the avenue to avoid falling. In the wake of its release, the weaponised arm hissed steam from its coolant vanes, like a forged blade quenched in water.

The lights reactivated. Kei’s targeting visor came back online a moment later, and the control consoles followed.

‘He must be dead,’ Delantyr whispered. ‘He has to be dead. We’ve killed a primarch. Walk us closer.’

The Warhound realigned, coming around to stare back down into the crater.

Kei’s eyes flickered between the annihilation below and the pulsing chime of auspex contact. ‘Inbound engines,’ he said. ‘Legio Audax. And gunships – declaration signatures marking them as Seventeenth.’

Delantyr spoke through clenched teeth. ‘They’re too late.’

The primarch of the Word Bearers had fallen. His armour, once red and engraved with scripture, was an ashen husk of charred plate. Cracked and weeping skin showed around the patchwork spread of bleeding burns. Not a patch of skin was left untouched. He didn’t rise from his knees. He didn’t lift his head. He did nothing at all.

‘He’s dead.’ Ellas spoke softly.

‘Fire again.’ Delantyr breathed the words. ‘Fire again.’

‘You bled the core,’ Kei replied. ‘We’re plasma-starved.’

‘Fire the suppressing tracers. Three bursts.’

Ardentor’s anti-infantry bolters spat their tracer fire at the prone primarch. The first burst chewed glass, spraying fragments everywhere. The second two punched home in the scorched armour, blasting the fallen Emperor’s son onto his back – a vessel of cooked, punctured meat.

‘We just killed a primarch.’ Kei swallowed. ‘We just killed a primarch.’

Delantyr’s grin showed almost every tooth he had. ‘Crush him. Leave them nothing to bury.’

Ardentor walked. Its backwards-jointed legs hammered down on the steaming, downsloping glass, breaking it underfoot as it staggered down into the crater. When it reached the primarch’s body, Ellas raised the right claw-foot, and steered both control levers to slam the limb back down.

The Warhound shook, unbalanced with one leg in the air. Great gears in the war machine’s knee and hip protested with rough, mechanical coughs.

‘Get the leg down,’ Delantyr ordered. ‘Finish it.’

Ellas gave the control levers another wrenching shove. ‘Something’s obstructing us.’

Kei lifted his targeting visor again, looking out of the Warhound’s left eye-windshield. He took a slow breath, and glanced back at his princeps.

‘My princeps? The World Eaters in the ruins… They’re cheering.’

The bleeding demigod had torn his way through the ground, giving voice to his resurrection with a bellow nothing short of ursine. Gore sheeted him, painting him in dark, rich red wetness. He threw his axes away, ruined and never to be wielded again, and breathed freedom into his lungs. It smelled of melted glass and felt like sunburn.

‘Lorgar.’ He spat blood as he said the name, rising to his feet at last.

The Word Bearer lifted a scalded hand, not for aid, but in warning. Angron had no time to lift his mutilated brother, sprawled at his feet. The sun went dark, as dark as night falling in an instant.

He turned, raising his arms, and took a god-machine’s weight on his shoulders.

Every muscle in his body locked tighter than the iron trying to crush him. Drool stringed through his metal teeth, skinned knuckles white as he defied the will of a Titan. He gave a bear’s roar as the foot lowered another half-metre. Sinews crackled in his shoulders. His broken boots skidded back on the patch of unglassed rock; something cracked in his spine, something else cracked in his left knee. The compression of his bones sounded like twigs breaking underfoot, which was a vivid burst of imagination he didn’t appreciate.

But he could hear his men cheering. He could hear them howling as they killed, and crying his name.

He blinked to clear away his sweat’s greasy sting, and dug his boots into the ground. With a smile slitting across his broken-angel face, he shifted his slipping, blood-slick grip on the Titan’s clawed foot, and started pushing back.

‘Lorgar.’ Angron spoke in something that wasn’t quite a growl and wasn’t quite a laugh. ‘Get up. I can’t hold this forever.’

SIX

Ursus Claw
Respite
Gorechild

Syrgalah limped into Valika, sparks spitting from its violated mechanisms, with its armour plating scarred by bolt shells and oil bleeding from ruptured cable-veins in its knees. Armatura wasn’t kind to Scout-class Titans forced to fight on the front line.

Keeda and Toth both kept half an eye on their respective auspex consoles as Syrgalah stalked around the half-buried wreck of a World Eaters Land Raider. The junction was ripe with heat signatures, matching the hulking silhouettes of other Titans in the dusty murk. Toth read at least two Reavers at the junction’s edge. The Legio Audax excelled in pack tactics to bring down bigger prey, but Syrgalah had arrived alone, and reinforcements were still inbound.

‘We’re outgunned,’ he said, ‘unless the rest of the Legio arrives before I finish this sentence.’

‘Funny.’ Keeda sighted an Ultramarines gunship in the dust cloud. ‘I’ve got the shot,’ she called back to Solostine.

His face was bloody; small-arms damage to the cockpit had hit him in the arm, but chemical pain nullifiers injected into his throat rather took the edge off that, yet allowed him to stay sharp.

‘Fire at will,’ the princeps replied. He indulged a moment’s distraction to tongue a loose tooth. Must have happened when he cracked his head against the throne’s side. It amused him to think that this was how the degeneration started, now they were so far gone from safe space and easy resupply. Rejuvenat surgery had replaced every tooth in his mouth with compound substitutes indiscernible from the real thing, but if he kept this up out here on the Galactic East, he’d have to consider the quicker, cheaper iron replacements favoured by the Twelfth Legion. He’d never met a single World Eater without at least one metal tooth jammed into his gums, and most sported whole sets from their time in the gladiatorial pits.

He felt the tremor of Syrgalah’s wrath as Keeda brought the gunship down in flames. Then he felt the tremor of something worse, something that stabbed little needles into the space between his vertebrae.

‘Taking fire from behind,’ he said. ‘Bring us about.’

Toth turned them in a snarling lurch, and Keeda panned the vulcan arm in a whirling, fire-spraying arc. An enemy Predator tank rolled into view, spewing heavy bolter fire up at them.

Solostine hissed in empathic pain – sympathy wounds darkening his skin in stigmatic bruising, even as Keeda punctured the tank and left it a hollow, steaming shell.

‘Do you hear that?’ Toth interrupted Solostine’s muttered praise.

‘Tell me it’s a resupply lander,’ Keeda noted, tapping a display screen drowning in red runes. ‘Our vulcan is starved.’

‘It’s not that,’ Toth replied. He was holding a hand to his earpiece. ‘It’s this.’

He brought the hololithic generator between their pilots’ thrones to life with a cranked lever.

The face that appeared in the air was female, in profile, her blue-white holofeatures speaking out of time with her crackling voice.

‘Ember Queen?’ she said.

‘The lovely flag-captain.’ Solostine inclined his head to the image. ‘How goes the war in the heavens?’

Keeda occupied herself with the muzzle-bolters, one of many minor modifications their tech-priests had made in recent years. She hammered tracer fire through the dust at the blotchy shadows of Academy Guards fleeing from the turning tide.

‘Walk us,’ she whispered to Toth. He complied, letting Keeda chase the running soldiers, cutting them down.

The image of Captain Lotara Sarrin wavered. ‘Venric? Contact is flawed. I can scarcely hear you. My scrying shows you at Valika.’

‘Confirmed,’ the princeps replied. ‘With twenty engines inbound.’

‘Can’t see a damned thing, though,’ muttered Keeda.

Sarrin turned her head, addressing an officer on her warship’s bridge. Her voice was a hurried crackle when she returned.

‘Listen to me, Venric. We’re working through sighters on the ground, so I can’t be much help, but you have to find the Lysanda Warhound Ardentor. Kill it. Kill it now.’

Toth and Keeda didn’t need the order relayed. They started working their consoles, bringing Syrgalah into a limping run.

‘Got her,’ Keeda called.

Solostine tasted blood from the loose tooth. Not a good sign. ‘Count on us, Lotara.’

She smiled. ‘I always do, old man.’

Sweat rained from him.

Angron stood defiant, the weight of the world on his shoulders. He’d been braced against the Titan’s claw for less than thirty beats of his heart. It felt like an age. It felt like two ages.

‘Lorgar,’ he said through teeth clenched hard enough to squeal. ‘Get clear.’

The Word Bearer lifted an immolated hand. He couldn’t speak, could scarcely move, but he added the dregs of his psychic push to his brother’s strength. The raised hand trembled – where it wasn’t cooked bloody, its burn-sores were weeping.

Angron knew plasma wounds well enough, and Lorgar was fortunate to still be alive. As he breathed in dust and oil fumes, panting against the weight, he managed to shake his head.

‘Now you decide to be brave?’ he growled, salivating in thick strings. ‘Just get clear.’

Lorgar lowered his ruined hand, and started crawling.

‘Finish it,’ Delantyr yelled.

Ellas was trying. The servos in the knee and ankle were locked and unyielding, refusing to obey his controls. He couldn’t lift the leg back up for a second try, either.

‘Engine behind us,’ Kei warned. ‘An Audax engine.’

‘Get the leg down!’

‘My princeps–’ Ellas started to object, but Kei interrupted, staring at his scanner.

‘It’s armed with… I can’t even tell what that is. Something with magnetic accelerators, cycling up to charge. You need to turn us, fast.’

‘I can’t. The knee is–’

‘Ellas,’ Delantyr said, with sudden, cold calm. He had a service laspistol aimed at his steersman’s head. ‘Get us turned around.’

Ellas felt gooseflesh rise on his skin. ‘Aye, my princeps.’

Keeda sighted Ardentor in the crater and the surreal vision of the two bleeding primarchs mere moments from destruction. Lorgar was ravaged by burns, lying to the side. Angron stood beneath the Warhound’s foot-claw, holding it up, braced against its final fall.

She knew the strength – in exact measurable power and force – in a Warhound’s towering musculature, for she’d served Audax since childhood: first as a tech-menial and later as a member of two Titans’ command crews. At fifteen, she’d been inducted into the slave maturation process to determine how well she’d acclimatise to cockpit interface and react in combat scenarios. At nineteen, she was weaponmistress aboard Hanumaan. At twenty-four, Princeps Ultima Venric Solostine selected her for his own crew aboard the command Titan Syrgalah.

Her first operation as Syrgalah’s gunner had been referred to in Legio briefings as Walk: CC00428al-0348.Hne. History was already coming to call it the Isstvan Atrocity, when four Space Marine Legions purged their own ranks in the annihilated streets of Isstvan III’s Choral City.

Valika was the first time she’d ever fired without permission.

The muzzle-bolters would do nothing, the vulcan arm was dry, but she had the last ace in her deck. Keeda had her spear, and her spear was forged to bring down the biggest prey.

The World Eaters claimed to be warriors, not soldiers. The Legio Audax, bound to the XII Legion for decades, claimed something similar. Their Titans weren’t war machines. Their Titans were hunters.

She pulled back both unlocking levers, gripped her control sticks and fired the ursus claw. Magnetic coils in the Warhound’s arm launched the spear, propelling it into the crater and sinking it home in Ardentor’s torso with a brutal crack of annihilated metal. Solostine gave a slow smile as he watched the Lysanda engine jerk with the impact.

‘Beautiful shot, Moderati Bly.’

‘My thanks, princeps. Magnetic bindings empowered.’

Ardentor rocked back and forth, its shoulder and cockpit holed through. The great impaling spear came active, magnetically sealing inside the lethal wound.

‘Walk, Toth.’

‘Aye, sire.’

The Audax Titan took three steps back from the crater’s rim, pulling the harpoon cable taut. Ardentor toppled backwards, crashing onto the ground, its reactor-heart still active but its command crew destroyed in the impaling.

Syrgalah kept walking backwards, retracting its harpoon and dragging the downed Titan’s corpse up the crater slope.

‘Cut them loose,’ said Solostine.

‘Cutting them loose, sire.’ Keeda deactivated the magnetic grapple on the harpoon’s body and let the spear pull free of the mangled metal.

The hunter, Syrgalah, left its slain foe on the avenue and turned in search of other prey, as the cheering cries of World Eaters warriors crackled over the vox.

He moved over to his brother, offering a skinned hand. The battle still raged above and around them, but incoming Word Bearers gunships and Audax Titans were finally pressing the Armaturan Guard back.

The two primarchs gripped wrists, and Angron pulled Lorgar to his feet. Apothecaries from both Legions were sprinting into the crater, voxing awed murmurs to the squads at their sides. Angron paid no heed. With the Titan’s weight off his shoulders, he had more than a moment to glance at Lorgar. Half of the Word Bearer’s face was sloughed almost to the bone, no different from wax trails down a half-spent candle.

‘Are you dying?’

Lorgar grinned, with a ghastly cadaverous leer. ‘I think I might be.’

‘You look like you are.’

Lorgar’s remaining eye fixed onto his brother’s gaze. He was still grinning because the ruination of his face left him no choice in the matter.

‘I sought to save you. To unearth you from that burial.’

Angron swallowed. He felt something in that moment – the uneasy threat of kinship. He sensed it, with one who was not one of his First Brothers, and felt suddenly unsure whether to retreat from it or embrace it. He’d always loathed Lorgar. Even seeing him fight after Isstvan, and how far he’d come from his years of cowardice, wasn’t enough to build any real bond.

‘Is that a lie?’ he asked. ‘You tried to dig me out?’

Lorgar’s grin was a rigor mortis smirk of bloodstains and burned gums. ‘You know it’s the truth.’

‘You weren’t needed.’

Lorgar turned away. ‘Be that as it may, I thank you, brother. Thank you for stopping the Titan.’

Another hesitation. For a moment, it seemed Angron would speak, but he said nothing.

Gunships were coming down around them now. The first Apothecary reached the primarchs; Angron dismissed him with a wave.

‘Away with you, Bloodspitter.’

‘But sire…’

‘I said away with you.’

The World Eaters backed away. Khârn was among them, with his closest kindred.

Angron met Esca’s eyes for a long, sterile moment, before nodding a grudging greeting. A thanks, perhaps. Of a sort. Esca returned it, though – as always – he kept his distance from the primarch.

Lorgar ceased his limping retreat to the closest Thunderhawk. He looked up at the dust-choked sky then turned his slagged face back to Angron.

‘There are so many people dying on this world, right now, as we speak, and muse, and breathe. It’s changing the song, brother. Every life ending in pain changes the tune. That’s why we’re here. That’s why Ultramar must die slowly, in pain, rather than in the rush of quick fire. The tune must be pitch perfect.’

Angron felt naked without his axes. Already, distraction set in, sending him casting about for a temporary replacement.

‘You babble, priest. Get back to the ships. We will speak when Armatura chokes beneath our Legions’ boots.’

Lorgar didn’t reply. Word Bearers flocked around him, chanting and praying, some of them falling to their knees in reverence. He didn’t ignore them as Angron ignored his sons; Lorgar took the time to honour them, blessing their devotion with the touch of a hand on their helms, or pressing his bloody palm-print to their oath parchments. He honoured them in the ruins, baptising them with his own blood.

‘Lorgar,’ Angron called, as the Word Bearer reached the gunship. When his brother turned, the primarch of the World Eaters spat onto the blackened earth. ‘Try not to die before I return.’

Lorgar gave his mutilated smile again, and ascended into the Thunderhawk.

Angron turned back to his sons, their armour spattered red on white, their faces and snarling helms staring in mute shock.

‘Leave me,’ he growled.

Khârn wouldn’t let it lie. ‘Sire…’

‘Leave me, Khârn. Prattle at me later, when the Nails no longer sing.’

‘No.’

The World Eaters turned to the Eighth Captain, several of them shuffling nervously. Above them, Word Bearers gunships drove the Ultramarines running from Valika, after the cost already had run to hundreds of XII Legion lives.

Angron, in truth, looked little better than Lorgar. Both were miserable with near-terminal wounds. The Eater of Worlds’ armour was in fragments and his exposed skin was peeled raw from dragging himself from his rocky grave. Even weaponless and half-murdered, he could kill the half-dozen warriors before him without his heart rate increasing.

‘You have something to say, captain?’

Khârn was implacable. His powerless plasma pistol and broken chain-axe were both sheathed. To occupy his hands, he pointed at the rising Thunderhawk carrying the primarch of the XVII Legion.

‘Lord Aurelian tore rocks from the ground for almost half an hour to reach you, and slaughtered countless enemy warriors.’

Angron showed his shark’s rows of iron teeth. ‘And?’

‘And you owe him thanks. His act was noble, despite his Legion’s eternal cowardice, and he endured great horror to save you. I have never seen a warrior withstand such punishment, nor pull gunships from the sky by spite alone. This ingratitude is beneath you, sire. You are better than this.’

Kargos took an unsubtle step away from Khârn. Jeddek and Skane did the same. Khârn smiled coldly at their caution.

They’d expected anger. They’d expected to be sullenly ignored. What they hadn’t expected was laughter. Angron shattered the tension with a low, rueful laugh.

‘I’ll bear that in mind, Khârn.’ The primarch walked away, seeking a worthwhile weapon in the devastation that Valika Junction had become.

With the primarch gone, Khârn sank to the ground. For a few moments, he was content to just breathe, surrendering to the aches that populated his body after hours of remorseless fighting. A legionary could fight for days – weeks if he had to – but a capacity to endure misery didn’t offer complete immunity to mortal limitations.

And this, too, was a gesture repeated across the warring city. Soldiers stealing what rest they could – one of the realities of war that also never made it into the sagas. A Legion never fought alone; it marched with consistent trains of resupply and ammunition drops, or it halted and marched no further. Orbital assault played by the same rules. Once significant ground was taken, it was reinforced from above and served as a point for immediate resupply.

Khârn listened to the vox-chatter of World Eaters landers en route to Valika and other nearby junctions, bringing ammunition, grenades and replacement chain-axe teeth-tracks that the Legion had needed hours before. He could hear Word Bearers commanders, as well, somehow only just making it to link-up points after the World Eaters had taken a hammering at front lines across the city.

Retinal runes nagged him about the damage to his armour, but that could wait. They also nagged him about the fact that his wound had broken open again, despite his body’s haemosealant capabilities. It was clotting as normal, to prevent blood loss, but kept re-tearing when he moved. He’d been bleeding on and off for over two hours. A human would have been dead in minutes.

‘Your vital signs are singing a merry tune,’ Kargos voxed. ‘Let me take a look.’

‘It just needs sealant,’ Khârn replied. ‘Leave it. It’ll bide.’

Kargos crashed down next to his captain, unlocking his helmet and pulling it free. ‘Armatura, eh? I’d rather have taken Calth. At least they had surprise on their side – almost enough to cancel out the enormous drag factor of fighting alongside these bastard Word Bearers.’

Despite himself, Khârn chuckled. Kargos had that effect on his brothers. The Apothecary wasn’t done, though. ‘I saw you strangle that Ultramarine Evocatus with your weapon chain. That was beautiful.’

Even seated, Khârn offered a theatrical, mocking bow. ‘Not one of my more honourable duels.’

‘I can’t think of a single fight in Twelfth Legion history that could be described as honourable.’

Khârn hung his head, hoping against reason that the ceaseless pressure in the back of his mind would ease for just a few minutes. But the Nails wanted him up. They wanted him killing, or they’d bleach his brain of all other feeling.

‘There was one,’ he said. ‘One honourable fight.’

‘Ah.’ Kargos grinned, showing metal teeth of his own. ‘The Night of the Wolf doesn’t count. We both know Russ will never have let that reach any Imperial records. Couldn’t have his precious war-dogs’ defeat entered into the archives, could he? Not by us. Not by a worthless Legion with fire in their minds.’

Dust swirled around them both. Khârn breathed it in, tasting the char on the wind. The smell of a city ripped open to the bone.

‘Any word of Argel Tal?’ he asked.

‘None. Perhaps it’s good news. Perhaps he died, rather than choosing to abandon us.’

Khârn didn’t chuckle that time. He did, however, feel a little guilty for his smile. The Nails rewrote his emotions, but they couldn’t steal the joy from everything. Not yet, at least. He’d not worn them as long as some. He’d seen enough of the oldest veterans, like Jeddek, who felt nothing outside of slaughter. No smiles, no tears, no nothing. Dead-eyed glares and monotone murmurs, until they were turned loose on the enemy. Only then could they feel. Only then could they experience a palette of emotions beyond staring at everything and nothing with their faces twitching in pained distraction.

‘A worthless Legion,’ Khârn said. ‘Do they still say that about us, I wonder.’ It wasn’t quite a question. And if it was, it wasn’t one he expected an answer to.

Kargos spat onto the obsidian that served as earth in the wake of the plasma unleashments.

‘That alpha Wolf you killed,’ he said. ‘The hero. I forget his name.’

Khârn felt the edge of his lips pulled in another smile. Two in as many minutes. How rare. When he spoke, he put on a thick, halting accent of elongated vowels and rough consonants.

‘Aevalryff,’ he almost growled, imitating the dead Wolf’s voice. ‘Baresark of Tra. Bearer of Serpentfang.’ Khârn even beat a fist against his chestplate, as the Wolf had done.

Kargos grinned. ‘That was it. So proud, he was! He died badly.’

‘Everyone dies badly. We lead violent lives, and we die as we live.’ Khârn rose to his feet, reaching for the helm he’d discarded moments ago. Kargos followed, replacing his helm at the same time.

‘How are you so unscarred?’ Kargos asked. ‘It’s uncanny. You still wear the face you were born with.’ The Apothecary waved a hand over his own features, which – like most World Eaters’ – was a map of thick stitching and overlapping scars.

‘Skill.’

‘Ha! If you say so.’ Kargos started making his way to the closest pack of servitors, as supply crates and heavy armour were finally being unloaded from the gunships and landers. ‘Khârn?’ he called back. ‘Centurion?’

Khârn walked to where an axe lay on the ground. Not his axe. Not an axe that belonged to any legionary. It was a toothless relic, scratched and scraped and worn from too long carving rock rather than flesh.

‘Khârn?’ Kargos voxed again.

‘A moment,’ he replied. ‘Give me a moment.’

He crouched to pick it up, but his fingers closed into a fist before they touched the black haft. Was this sacrilege? Was this sure to anger his volatile primarch?

Khârn clutched the haft and lifted the weapon with one hand. It was heavy, heavier than he’d been expecting, and would need both hands to swing with any artistry. But then, if he cared for artistry, he’d have been a swordsman.

‘I’ve found Gorechild,’ he said.

It was Skane’s voice that crackled back. ‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘Sir, don’t. You know his traditions.’ Other voices joined in, all referring to the primarch’s superstition of inherited weapons bringing ill luck. A gladiatorial conceit, from his homeworld.

‘He threw it away for a reason,’ voxed Esca. ‘It’s ruined, captain. It’ll never function again.’

Khârn ignored his brothers’ protests. He walked to the closest tech-priest, who was busy overseeing the distribution of fresh ammunition crates to World Eaters battle tanks.

‘You. What’s your name?’

The robed priest made a sound not entirely unlike a child screeching binaric code. Khârn held up a hand when he saw the priest lacked a mouth; a vocabulator replaced it, sutured in place, forming an eternal ‘O’ where the man’s lips, teeth and a tongue had once been.

‘Enough. Your name isn’t important.’ He hefted the toothless Gorechild, but pulled it back when the priest made to take it. ‘This axe was toothed by the fangs of a mica-dragon. Do you recognise it?’

Again came a screech of code. Khârn assumed it meant yes – no Audax officer or minister could serve alongside the World Eaters and fail to have observed Gorefather and Gorechild at least once.

‘I want this area excavated, the moment it’s marked as secure. Find the chainsaw teeth to repair this axe. I imagine it will take days. I don’t care, take as long as you need. Is that understood?’

The priest’s eyes, still human, widened in alarm. He gave voice to another spurt of code, this one clearly a protest. Khârn blink-clicked a flashing icon in the upper left of his eye lens display, and waited for the translation runes to scroll across his vision.

‘If it’s not your area of jurisdiction, find someone in Audax I can rely on to do it.’

Another spurt. Another sighing wait for translation. The priest looked horrified, and the wide-mouthed speaker where his mouth should be only aided the impression.

‘If it takes two hundred servitors and a week of painstaking engineering, then it takes two hundred servitors and a week of painstaking engineering.’

Another blurt, longer this time. Another pause as it translated.

‘Khârn,’ said the World Eater. ‘Captain of the Eighth Company, most of whom are lying dead around us. Take note of that fact, when you excavate this junction. Treat their bodies with the necessary respect, until their gene-seed is harvested.’

The last screech was shortest of all. The priest bowed after vocalising it.

‘After that,’ Khârn confirmed, ‘do with the corpses as you wish. Burn them or leave them to the carrion birds, for all I care.’ He grinned, showing teeth which were still all natural. ‘We aren’t a sentimental Legion.’

SEVEN

No One Runs
Unauthorised Planetfall
Shield Wall

Lotara didn’t mean to laugh, but she admired an enemy with a backbone. The War-Regent of Armatura was a captain in the Evocati, a silver-haired Ultramarines warrior with a regal sneer and eyes that suggested something hawkish in his blood and bearing. She liked him at once; he reminded her of her father, who was a spire-lord in his own right.

‘That’s very amusing,’ she replied to the hololithic image, at the heart of her busy bridge. ‘Considering your cities are overrun and your fleet is aflame.’

‘I take it,’ the Ultramarine said with kingly patience, ‘that you’re refusing to surrender?’

Lotara laughed again. ‘I like you, Captain Orfeo. I hope you receive a quick death down there, for it would grieve me to know you suffered. To that end, I hope the World Eaters catch you before the Word Bearers. The latter tend to treat their prisoners rather unwholesomely.’

Disbelief, albeit polite and reserved, marked the soldier’s face. ‘What can you hope to achieve, Flag-Captain Sarrin? Armatura is but one world – one world among the Five Hundred. Calth may die and Armatura may wither, but how much damage can you hope to inflict? What is the purpose of your war?’

‘My purpose here, my dear Evocatus, is to kill until my primarch tells me to stop killing.’ Her tone was saccharine enough that several of her bridge officers found themselves smiling at her mockery of the Ultramarine. ‘Look to the skies, Captain Orfeo. Your fleet lies in ruins. Their wreckage will shortly be raining upon your cities.’

No cutting retort. No bitter reply. He nodded once, as if dismissing a subordinate, and the hololithic image blinked out of being.

‘And yet,’ she said, turning her head to regard First Officer Ivar Tobin, ‘he has a point.’

‘Sympathy with the enemy, ma’am?’ He raised an aristocratic eyebrow. ‘An executable offence. I should draw my service pistol at once.’

She gave him a look. She gave him the look. ‘I’m serious, Tobin.’

Sarrin keyed in a command on her throne’s armrests. The primary oculus screen changed views, showing one of the Word Bearers king-ships slowly pulling up from Armatura’s atmosphere. Just looking at it made her stomach lurch. Such furious, immense majesty. The Blessed Lady rose on thrusters, ramming through the wreckage of the destroyed Ultramarines fleet.

‘Look at that,’ she said. ‘Tell me why, when Lorgar commands vessels like that, we even needed to make planetfall. One of those alone would have washed the surface with flame. And Lord Aurelian has two of them. That’s not even counting the Lex, the Conqueror, and our armada.’

Tobin watched the vast ship in silence. Before speaking, he returned his attention to the strategium and its busy, bustling crew. With the void war winding down, the Conqueror’s bridge still buzzed with activity. Various stations were trying to piece together a full analysis of the battle, with losses and casualties; others were doing all they could to coordinate the nightmare on the surface. Lotara, a void fighter far beyond any other in Tobin’s experience, always joked that these were ‘the little details’.

‘You know my feelings on politics, ma’am.’

She had her boots up on one armrest now. ‘Politics?’ She gave a snort he sincerely doubted had come from her time in her home world’s courts. ‘This isn’t politics. This is tactics, and you know it.’

‘Be that as it may, ma’am, I feel supremely unqualified to comment.’

She shook her head with a smile. ‘Coward. You’re lucky I need you.’

‘As you say, ma’am.’

Lotara turned at the sound of a proximity alarm. ‘Details?’ she asked.

‘The Ultramarines vessel Praetorian Trust has powered up in the wreckage, ma’am.’ Scrymistress Lehralla was a crippled thing, emaciated and legless, augmetically bound to the central auspex console. She turned to face Lotara, the cables stringing between her head and the ceiling machinery giving her a crown of serpents, like something from the old Grekan mythos. ‘It seems to have powered down in the debris and played dead for several hours, drifting free of the battle.’ Her voice was surprisingly gentle, and wholly human.

‘Trust the Ultramarines to stick to the classics.’ Lotara leaned forwards in her throne, watching the tactical hololithic. ‘And trust us to fall for them.’

Tobin pursed his lips, watching the flickering red rune blink as it moved across the three-dimensional holo-map. ‘They’re running.’

‘Like hell they are. No one runs from the Conqueror.’ She gestured to the helmsmen. ‘Chase at once. Order all other vessels to hold back, this one’s ours.’

Tobin straightened his uniform as he kept watching the map. ‘They’ll be free to break into the warp in seven minutes.’

‘They’re sluggish and plasma-cold from hiding in silent running,’ she replied. ‘We’ll catch them before their engines are even warm.’

‘Four minutes, ma’am, if they wish to risk navigational flux from the debris field.’

Lotara was staring now, her eyes bright. The Conqueror shook as it breathed again, running hot and hard. ‘We’ll have them in three minutes, Ivar. Am I ever wrong?’

He cleared his throat, avoiding eye contact. ‘There was the incident at New Kershal.’

Lotara held up a finger. ‘Hush, now. We don’t speak of New Kershal.’ She grinned as she looked back to the oculus. ‘Three minutes, you watch. Weaponmaster, ready the ursus claws.’

‘Aye, ma’am,’ came the reply, the only reply she ever wanted to hear when the sirens wailed.

Scrymistress Lehralla twisted in her life-support socket. She leaned over the hololthic projector table, her augmetic fingers manipulating the starfield image: rotating it, zooming, forcing focus.

‘Ma’am, the Word Bearers king-ship Trisagion is also moving to engage.’

‘Duly noted, scrymistress. Kejic?’

The vox-master looked up from his console. ‘Ma’am?’

‘Inform the Trisagion that this is our prey. They are to break off pursuit at once. Try to phrase it politely.’

As Kejic relayed the message in his crisp, clear tones, Lotara stared at the hololithic display, waiting for any sign the Trisagion’s rune was falling off pursuit. It blinked once, twice, and its projected vector turned aside.

‘Trisagion reports that she’s killing thrust and coming about,’ Kejic confirmed.

‘See?’ Lotara said to Tobin. ‘Look where manners gets you. All ahead full.’

The Praetorian Truth fled through the debris, and the Conqueror followed. Impact flares danced across both vessels’ void shields as they ploughed through the junk field. Praetorian Truth fired her lances once, risking the threat of inertial drift and power drain by emitting a barrage of cutting beams to carve through the hull of a dead cruiser turning in space before them. They bisected the hulk, as neatly as any surgeon would incise flesh, and sailed clean through the dead ship’s severed halves.

Lotara actually cheered in her throne. ‘That was beautiful,’ she said. ‘Blood of the primarchs, what shooting. Convey my compliments to the enemy captain.’

Vox-master Kejic tried. ‘No response, ma’am.’

‘Oh, well. Ask for their surrender and cut space with a warning shot.’

The Gloriana-pattern Conqueror, outweighing the Praetorian Truth by several classes, spat an indifferent lob of lance fire after its prey. Everything went calculatedly wide.

The Truth kept running.

‘No response, ma’am.’

‘I don’t know,’ Lotara feigned a sigh. ‘You try to be noble and you get nowhere.’

‘Two minutes, captain,’ said Tobin.

‘Oh, do shut up,’ she replied.

‘And might I go on record as saying this is a most inefficient use of the boarding talons?’

‘Your objection is noted and duly ignored, commander. The primarch and Khârn got to have their fun. Time for me to have mine.’

Ivar Tobin faced forwards again. No wonder the World Eaters liked her so much. She was one of them.

‘Helm, how long?’

‘Claws’ range in twenty seconds.’

Lotara was never smug. She gave Tobin a glance, a slight raise of one eyebrow, but it wasn’t the smug smile she might have got away with.

‘Ma’am!’ called several officers, the same moment a dozen others called, ‘Mistress!’

She saw it herself. The Praetorian Truth, a spear of cobalt armour with bone-white spinal battlements, was coming about. It was actually coming about. Her skin crawled with unwanted admiration. The chase was over, and the prey had stolen her chance to pounce.

‘Brave,’ Tobin said quietly. Strange, how the atmosphere soured when the prey turned and showed its teeth. Always harder to kill a courageous enemy. Desperate ones? Cowardly ones? They fell with nothing but smiles on their killers’ faces.

The ursus claws would be useless now. They were for catching fleeing foes, not engaging brave ones.

Lotara watched the smaller cruiser turning in the void, imagining the last speech its captain would be giving, as thousands of slaves ran out the warship’s guns for the final fight.

‘Kill them,’ she said, softly, calmly. ‘Just kill them.’

He led the remnants of three companies deeper into the city. The Armaturan Guard made them fight for every footstep, but Khârn’s warriors were resupplied and reloaded, and no humans could be expected to stand against them. The mortals died, and those who didn’t die added a handful of hours to their lives by running. They fell back in good order, disciplined to the last and defending every street in their city, but Khârn knew fleeing when he saw it. He chose to call it what it was, even when it wore tactics as a second skin.

This time, he countered snipers with gunships of his own, and answered Armaturan heavy armour with Land Raiders and Malcador battle tanks in the XII’s battered blue and white. Sunset made little difference. Day was darkened by the dust, and night was brightened by the city’s bones burning.

Gorechild was in guarded storage aboard his personal Thunderhawk, and he’d left the small army of servitors spreading across Valika Junction, beginning the painstaking excavation work with retasked loader-Sentinels. Heavier-duty mechanised lifters were on their way down from orbit. Rank had its advantages, once in a while. It was good for more than a helmet crest that marked you out to snipers and enemy champions with something to prove.

Time didn’t pass in minutes or hours, but in broken barricades. Their howling, sprinting charges were backed by a percussion of booming tank guns and the enraged shriek of low-altitude thrusters.

He lost the last clutches of infrequent contact with the Conqueror sometime after the fifteenth road was reaved clean. Other vessels reported her lighting up the void with engine flare and chasing an Ultramarines cruiser making a last-gasp effort at flight. That was Lotara all over, and it didn’t surprise him at all. She was denied the chance to bombard the surface; of course she’d leap at the first opportunity to do more than sit still and listen to the clicking count of the bridge’s chronometer.

When they’d overrun the last roadblock, Khârn had found himself running alongside Esca, chasing the human soldiers side by side. The young Codicier spared him a glance and a nodded salute, before powering one of his force axes through a soldier’s spine and hurling the body aside.

Khârn returned the nod, feeling the Nails sinking deeper into his thoughts. Even his skin itched at the other warrior’s nearness and he felt his lips peeling back in an unwilling snarl. Grey danced at the edge of his vision, but he resisted the order to separate Esca yet again.

He noted the instinctive gap all other warriors left around the Librarian. Esca ran alone at the middle of the pack yet far from its heart. One of the last left in the World Eaters ignored, tawdry little Librarius Division.

Psykers. The Legion’s first experiments in that regard hadn’t been pleasant. Kargos was one of the surgeons first trained to implant Nails in legionaries’ skulls, though he’d never beaten them into a psyker’s brain, and wasn’t responsible for the disasters that soon followed. What Khârn hadn’t seen for himself, he’d heard from his Apothecary.

The first signs of unease came when implanted Librarians started causing their closest brothers to suffer blinding migraines and debilitating facial bleeds. No Librarian could stand in Angron’s presence without enduring the same thing themselves; a reflection of what they inflicted on their brothers.

But the depths of the flaws became truly obvious in battle. Librarians gifted with the Nails lost the ability to control their psychic talents. One of them, a warrior attached to the 100th Company, had been lost to the Nails in his very first battle after implantation, and immolated three squads when he couldn’t cease projecting witch-lightning from his eyes. Several others had just… burst. They combusted in flaming gore.

More and more died – none right away, but they never survived for long. In a single month, almost every Librarian had been fitted with the Nails. Mere weeks later, they started dying.

Optimism, albeit cautious, had reigned for a while. After the first deaths, the psychically trained legionaries had sought to master the Nails, to balance their sixth senses with the bionics now altering their brains’ chemistry. A matter of willpower, they said, and their brothers had pretended not to notice the desperation in their eyes. Yes. A matter of willpower. It made sense.

But they kept dying. They died in battle, in storms of fire or lightning, or – in several incidents – by pulsing hateful pain through the Nails of nearby warriors and forcing their own kindred to suffer cerebrovascular blockages. Entire squads died of brain haemorrhages and strokes at their Codiciers’ boots.

That settled it. Angron gave his psychic sons a choice between execution and the Nails’ removal. The Legion learned, in those early years after their primarch’s rediscovery, that they’d mutilated themselves in the image of a man without mercy. The Nails couldn’t be removed; every World Eater knew it, for the Emperor’s own techno-mages had failed to remove the primarch’s implants. Even so, most Librarians submitted themselves for the attempt.

Every one of them died, without exception. With their rewired brains misfiring and enslaved to altered impulses, none of them died easy, and none of them died well.

Soon enough, the last Librarians were those who’d not yet received Nails in a Legion now overcome by them. They eked out an isolated existence in the near-empty halls of their Librarius aboard the Conqueror.

One by one they, too, began to die. Not from malfunction or misuse, but because they were World Eaters, and World Eaters lived brief, violent lives. A hundred remained. Then fifty. Then twenty.

No one mourned them. In a Legion that prized the bonds of front-line brotherhood above all else, the silent brothers died alone – never forgotten, but always ignored. Their gene-seed rotted with their bodies, unharvested in case their genetic legacy resulted in the same curse infecting a second generation.

He watched Esca running ahead. A loyal brother. Quiet, for reasons obvious to anyone. Removed from true kinship, even with the Legion’s utter refusal to heed – or even to acknowledge – the Edict of Nikaea. Obedience to that law simply blew beneath the World Eaters notice. By that juncture, their psychic kindred were an afterthought, scarcely worthy of consideration.

Esca was avoided by all others. But loyal. Did the last living Librarians deserve more from their brethren?

Khârn knew the answer would depend on who he asked. Angron would snort and ignore the question; just being near to one of them was agony for reasons no Apothecary had been able to discern.

Argel Tal would engage him in a good-natured debate over an army only being as strong as the weakest link in its chain, and the value of respecting sacrifice.

Kargos would screw his face up into something even less appealing than its usual stitched mess, and ask why Khârn even gave a damn.

Skane would give in to distraction, cleaning his weapons as they spoke, the yellow of his eyes betraying how radiation poisoning wasn’t particularly useful for improving his attention span.

Each answer would be as annoying as the last.

Khârn cast it from his mind, relaying a steady stream of orders over the vox for his men to slow their advance and regroup. The dust was thick enough to choke on, but most of this district still stood tall. Great pillared buildings stared down onto the wide avenues, each one marked by statues cast in earth-dark bronze. Academies. Colleges. Colosseums. Watchtowers. Halls of debate. Armouries.

World Eaters gunships juddered overhead, their spotlights raking the ground, scouting ahead of the main forces. He had outriders on jetbikes, as well as recon teams ranging ahead, and for the last few hours they’d played the invasion out as any other Legion would. Rain, doubtless inspired by the atmospheric disturbance of thousands of vessels in low orbit and making planetfall runs to disgorge troops, lashed down in a tidal pour. It did nothing for the dust beyond turning the ground to clinging mud. It did, however, go some way to cleaning the World Eaters bloodstained armour.

A Storm Eagle, dense-bodied and hanging low above the next plaza, came apart in the sky. Khârn caught the garbled words of its pilot’s last report before the gunship burst with a distance-delayed boom, sending engines and armour raining to the ground in fire.

‘Ultramarines in the next plaza, then,’ Kargos voxed. Khârn could hear his grin.

‘All squads,’ the captain said. ‘Form up and be ready.’

The Praetorian Truth grew on the oculus. It grew, and its gun bays flashed as it bared its teeth.

The Conqueror shook in sympathy with its abused void shields. Mother-of-pearl light bled across space as the invisible kinetic energy field shimmered under the impacts. Away from Armatura, away from the tight-packed iron-sky chaos of two warring fleets, the engagement was much more traditional, at a range of thousands of kilometres. Even so, the Conqueror had been closing fast, and the Praetorian Truth was now eating up the distance by coming straight at its pursuer.

Ivar Tobin stood with his arms crossed over his uniformed chest, watching the oculus. ‘They’re game, ma’am. I’ll give them that.’

Lotara didn’t disagree. She gestured to her weaponmaster and his two dozen servitors and menials.

‘Open fire.’

‘Firing, captain.’

The Conqueror shook again. An initial volley spread radiance across the Truth’s shields. A second punctured them, discharging power into the nothingness of space, no different to fluid bursting from a blister.

The cutting began, at a cost in countless lives, as the flagship’s lances knifed through unprotected battlements and spinal architecture. Fire breathed from the wounds, becoming mist in the dark, then becoming nothing at all.

‘They’re still closing,’ Tobin noted. ‘Looks like ramming speed.’

Lotara wasn’t so certain. The Truth would be dead before it got the chance to collide, leaving her with other suspicions.

‘Fire at will,’ she ordered.

More than one lance beam went wide. The Truth was a heavy cruiser, but her captain and crew demanded the best from her. Lotara watched with an admiring smile as the vessel banked and rolled as fast as its bulk would allow. It drifted aside from the Conqueror’s long-range calculated spite, closing the distance in a steady drive.

‘Ah,’ said Lotara.

‘Ma’am?’

She didn’t reply. She waited. She waited until her lances had clawed and cut and cleaved through the Truth’s hull. She waited until the Ultramarines cruiser was a crumbling, flaming wreck on dying engines, struggling to hold itself together. Inertia kept bringing it closer.

‘Here it comes,’ she said. ‘Any moment now.’

Kejic called from his station. ‘Incoming hail from the Praetorian Truth.’

‘Perfect timing.’ She gestured her acceptance, a queen enthroned on black iron and brass. The voice that strained over the bridge speakers was human and wounded, and punctuated by the sounds of its ship detonating in the background.

‘For the Emperor,’ it said. ‘Courage and honour!’

The link died. Lotara steepled her fingers beneath her chin, still watching the Truth’s death throes. She knew exactly what she was looking for, and she nodded to herself when she saw it. Airbursts along the Truth’s edges, but not the release of broadside weapons batteries. Oh, no. This was a Legiones Astartes vessel, after all.

‘Western battlement turrets, form a contiguous firing solution. Interception spread.’

A servitor at the gunnery consoles blurted its lifeless response. ‘Compliance.’

‘Commander Tobin?’ she asked.

‘Captain?’

‘Lock the ship down. Get Delvarus of the Triarii up here at once.’

It took him a couple of seconds to realise she was right. ‘Aye, ma’am.’

As he moved away to give the necessary orders, she tapped a quick code into her throne’s armrests and leaned back to get comfortable. The shipwide vox gave a three-tone alarm, preceding every captain’s address.

‘This is Captain Lotara Sarrin,’ she addressed the tens of thousands of slaves, menials, officers and soldiers. ‘All hands to your stations. Prepare to repel boarders.’

As a cautionary measure, surely pointless, she drew her sidearm and checked the power cell. Immaculate and charged, as always. On the oculus, the defensive turrets were spitting incendiary fire into the space between the vessels, but shooting down boarding pods was always an exercise in luck as much as skill.

‘Captain?’ Tobin called. Lotara wasn’t sure she liked the note of unease in his voice. Nothing ever made Ivar Tobin uneasy. ‘Captain?’

She holstered her laspistol. ‘Commander.’

‘Delvarus of the Triarii has been reported as making unauthorised planetfall.’

She sat straight at that. ‘Pardon me?’ she said, with a politeness and calm she most definitely didn’t feel.

‘Delvarus and the Triarii aren’t on board, ma’am. From the reports, they made planetfall with the Legion and apparently “neglected” to inform command.’

Lotara took a breath. Could this Legion do nothing right?

‘We’re being boarded by what may well be an entire company of Ultramarines,’ she pointed out, still with the same alien calm.

‘I know, ma’am.’

The Triarii: five full companies of the World Eaters’ finest shipboard warriors, excelling in void warfare and boarding actions far beyond traditional Legion training. Five hundred of Angron’s best, led by the Legion’s undisputed pit champion, all of whom were vowed and bound to defend the flagship. It was their duty. Their honour-bound duty.

‘This bloody Legion,’ she said.

The two armies faced each other across the open plaza. Details were sparse through the dust, but Khârn could see their front rank standing still in funereal dignity. Bronze edges on their armour burned silver in the moonlight. Helmet crests wavered, but not from fear – from the wind’s touch and the hammerfall of heavy rain.

Khârn stared at the front rank, hundreds of metres away, and the indistinct figures behind. Accursed dust.

As he watched, another gunship soared overhead. He activated his vox-link, speaking in a hurried slur.

‘This is Khârn to gunship Tyresius, abort your–’

The gunship exploded. It blew into flaming scrap directly above a nearby memorial necropolis and crashed down, taking the marble building with it. Several World Eaters stared, several others chuckled. Most ignored it, in favour of watching the hazy ranks of the Ultramarines.

‘I can’t see a damn thing,’ Skane said. ‘How many do you think there are?’

‘This has all the hallmarks of a last stand,’ Khârn replied. ‘We’re not attacking without Titans.’

‘Want me to make a weapons check?’ Skane asked.

Khârn looked at the chain-axe in his hands; it was missing several teeth, but had a way to go before it was worthless. ‘Do it. My thanks.’

He heard Skane making the rounds through the World Eaters loose ranks, checking the condition of blades, axes and supplies of ammunition. Another reality of war the sagas always missed.

Khârn kept watching the stalwart, unmoving ranks in the distance. More of his three companies’ survivors were catching up now, thickening the World Eaters lines.

‘Does anyone have an auspex still functioning in this dust?’

Several warriors gave noncommittal grunts. A few guessed at heat signatures of tanks among the heatwash of over a hundred Ultramarines, but no one had anything reliable to offer.

Khârn chose two squads to cut east and west respectively, reporting back on whatever they found.

More World Eaters caught up, with three rumbling Malcador battle tanks behind them. Chains rattled against the tanks’ hulls, each one hung with dozens of legionary helms taken from the Isstvan Atrocity and the Dropsite Massacre.

He felt it, then. A subtle change in the atmosphere, not quite physical, but still undeniable. Chain-blades started revving. Warriors started pacing, caged lions aching to hunt.

‘Steady,’ he voxed. ‘All of you, steady.’

But he felt it, too. The Nails tick-tocked with little pushes of pain, demanding he act, act, act. He gunned his own chain-axe without intending to, lips falling into the familiar snarl.

‘Steady,’ he said again. And then, ‘Esca.’

The Codicier came forwards. His brothers parted instinctively, several spitting on the floor before him, to ward off ill fortune. A superstitious habit taken from Angron’s homeworld, and one that had resonated through the Legion.

Esca, unhelmed, had uncertainty writ plain across his features. ‘Captain?’

Khârn swallowed back the rise of discomfort, which in turn was adding fuel to his anger.

‘Can you use your powers to tell me what lies across from us in that plaza?’

Esca’s surprise deepened. He blinked, and looked at his brothers around him. Khârn banged a fist against his own chestplate. ‘Look at me, damn you. Answer me. Can you do it?’

The Codicier nodded. His eyes were slate grey, a rare colour on all of the World Eaters recruiting planets. ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Stand your ground, the rest of you.’ Khârn leaned closer to Esca. Moving near him meant pushing against some unseen resistance, like walking underwater. ‘Be swift,’ Khârn warned. ‘The Nails are singing.’

Esca knelt down, closing his eyes.

Khârn, and all the others, backed away to give him room for whatever he was doing.

‘I don’t suppose the Word Bearers would like to join us for this one?’ Kargos ventured with an ugly smile.

Khârn had been listening to the other Legion’s vox-traffic, flawed as it was by interference. ‘They’ve got their own battles,’ he said. ‘They’ll pr–’

‘Vindicators.’ Esca opened his eyes, rising to his feet.

All eyes turned to him.

‘Vindicators,’ he repeated, ‘and other siege tanks – a battalion of them.’

The World Eaters looked to one another. Skane’s back-mounted turbines started cycling up, while Kargos confronted Esca, face to face.

‘They mean to shell us?’

The Codicier nodded. ‘There’s more. There’s something near here. Something immense, and alive. Inhuman.’

‘Where is it?’ asked Skane.

‘I can’t tell.’

‘What is it?’ asked Kargos.

‘I can’t tell.’

The Destroyer and the Apothecary shared a glance, as if this only confirmed the Codicier’s uselessness. Around them, the gathering World Eaters gunned their chain-blades and started beating their weapons against their armour, prowling in loose packs, eager to run forwards and meet the enemy.

But Khârn’s blood ran cold. He stared at the unyielding shadows of the distant Ultramarines in their phalanx.

‘Something’s wrong,’ he said. ‘All squads, fall back. Put distance between the tanks as well. The fleet can annihilate this plaza from orbit.’

His own men defied him, growling and arguing to the throaty whine of live chain-axes.

‘Angron demanded no bombardment,’ said Sergeant Gharte, his gaunt features unhelmed. ‘The enemy must bleed, not burn.’

‘We should charge,’ Kargos insisted. Khârn saw the twitch in his brother’s eyes, and the shine of saliva wetting the Apothecary’s lips. ‘Charge before they shell us!’

‘This is the Nails talking,’ Khârn said, but the words drowned in the cheer. They took up the Apothecary’s cry, almost all of them, raising their axes to the occluded moon.

‘Wait,’ Khârn ordered. ‘Wait.’

But the first shell was falling. It struck far, far back along the avenue, not even touching the rearguard. It didn’t matter that it missed. The World Eaters cried their rage at the filthy sky.

The second shell came no closer. The third did, though only barely. Loose debris clattered on the tanks’ hulls, falling from the plume of soil and stone that shot into the air.

The sound of any Legion charging was earthbound thunder, something tempestuous chained to the ground rather than allowed to fly free where it belonged. Along with the roars rising from spit-flecked mouths and the aggrieved complaint of chainweapons chewing the air – when the World Eaters charged, the sound was close to tectonic.

Khârn was seven steps into the charge before he realised he’d been swept up in it. He stopped, looking back, seeing Esca standing alone. Even the Malcador tanks were rolling, engines belching smog, their turrets cranking around in readiness.

‘Do not engage!’ Khârn voxed to his men, trying in the face of futility. ‘They’re driving us forwards! They want us to charge!’

‘Wait for Audax!’ Esca joined his voice to his captain’s. ‘Wait for the Titans!’

The dust thinned as he ran, and Khârn saw just what they were charging.

Nothing in mankind’s long history of warfare quite matched the sound of two Legions crashing together. Space Marine was never born to fight Space Marine, so betrayal had a tune all of its own. Not the metallic, bronze-banging din of the Ancient World, nor the chattering spit of automatic weapons in city streets that so blighted the age of humanity’s first terrified steps into space. Ceramite hit ceramite with a cracked-bell clang, strangely dull, pervasively resonant, as if the sound itself responded to the wrongness of the act.

Khârn was in the front rank when the World Eaters met the Ultramarines. He watched the gold and blue Evocati vanguard brace their shields, clashing their edges together, forming an unbreakable wall of overlapping cobalt. Full-body boarding shields. These warriors were arrayed for tight-knit boarding actions, where protection mattered more than anything else. They stood behind their decorated pavises, clad in brutal suits of densely layered Mark III plate, pistols and swords held in their free fists.

Khârn’s warriors had charged, in broken formation, a phalanx of the finest and most heavily armoured warriors in the Imperium. And he’d done it with the dregs of three disparate companies.

Break the wall. Nothing else mattered. Break the wall. Tear it down. If they couldn’t break the wall, they’d be at the Ultramarines mercy and dead within minutes. It had to fall at the first charge.

He wasn’t sure if he was thinking all this or shouting it. His men fired as they ran; gunfire clattered against the shield wall, leaving burn marks on the dark, sloping surfaces. He shouted for grenades, yelling in Nagrakali, but most of his men were already lost to the Nails.

The last thing he heard before the impact was the Ultramarines captain shouting a final order.

‘Ciringite frontem!’ he called in High Gothic. The shields lifted higher as the Ultramarines braced. The World Eaters roared loud enough to shake the sky.

When the lines met, they met with ceramite’s unmistakable clang and a bodily crunch of weight levied against weight. World Eaters lashed out with whirring chain-blades, thudding blunt against shields, or found themselves hurled from their feet by the press of their enemies’ pavises slamming back as one. The Evocati were too closely packed. Every World Eater faced two Ultramarines. Khârn’s overhead chop was blocked by one of his opponents, and he took a shield bash to the face from the other. He stumbled back, sprawling, cursing, screaming; bleeding inside his helmet.

The Nails punished him for trying to retain control by knifing into the soft meat of his brain.

Mere seconds after the lines met, the charge had faltered, broken and collapsed.

‘Contendite vestra sponte!’ cried the Ultramarines lord. His men shifted their weight, fighting back with their pistols and blades. The World Eaters still at the shield wall started dying in droves, cut down by enemies they couldn’t reach.

Time slowed for Khârn in that moment. He found his focus stolen by eerie distraction – was this what Angron had felt on his homeworld? Was this what his doomed army of slaves and renegades had felt when they were being butchered by their masters’ soldiers? When the outcast gladiator mob raised spears and swords against entire armies of shield-bearing warriors?

He rose. At least, he tried to. A bolt shell hammer-cracked into his shin, sending him stumbling again. Another tore his helm free, leaving his face stinging with bleeding burns, and giving him the taste of gunsmoke on his tongue. That flavour would never fade; he’d live the many centuries of his life never tasting anything else.

As he rose a second time, another bolt shell cracked against his pauldron, blasting fire and smoke into his face, and ripping the armour plating completely free. He didn’t care. Slavering from the Nails’ pain, he needed to kill to end the pressure inside his skull.

Staring with bloodshot eyes, a thick string of acidic drool hanging from his bared teeth, Khârn breathed two words at the advancing Ultramarines formation. They were the last two words he spoke before the Nails bit deep enough to take over. Anyone who had ever been faced with anger strong enough to steal reason knew that the seeing red spoken of by poets and scribes throughout history was no metaphor, but a literal staining of the sight.

He was no longer Khârn. Khârn, the identity built of a lifetime’s memories and decisions, faded beneath the wash of red, red rage and frantic, berserk lethality.

Just two words.

‘Our turn.’

EIGHT

Summons

A ship was never truly silent. One could never escape the steady hum of the drive engines, nor the muted echoes of distant bootsteps on other decks. Yet Lorgar prayed in silence; prayed through the pain of his wounds, while listening past the sounds of the ship for a deeper, sweeter song.

Something tugged at his thoughts. A presence, demanding his attention, as though his name were being called – barely heard – in another room.

The demigod-priest smiled at the sensation. Rather than ignore it, he turned towards it, questing for its source. It felt no different from chasing an old memory.

First, he saw the great, dark chamber, with its banners hanging from girder-rafters. Then he felt it, the cold against his skin, as if he were really standing there in the still air. His brother, one of the few he loved and who loved him in return, turned from the book he was reading on a raised plinth. Its thick cover slapped closed; neither brother was foolish enough to believe the peach-coloured leather binding was from a wholesome source.

‘Lorgar,’ said the brother in that far-off chamber.

The Word Bearer smiled – he smiled in his meditation chamber aboard the Lex above Armatura, and he smiled halfway across the galaxy – physically present in the former, a soul incarnated in the latter.

His brother looked like a god. No other word did the man justice. His armour was black chrome, a dark that suggested not only the absence of colour but the banishment of light, the way an eclipse swallows the sun. Many symbols covered its surfaces, the chief of which was the single, staring eye fashioned across the breastplate. That eye had once stared in lordly, but ignorant, invigilation. Now it glared, seeing all, black-veined by too many truths.

Above the breastplate, the face was bare, smiling, perfect in every dimension and detail, suffused with confidence. So beautiful. So very beautiful. Of all the primarchs, Lorgar’s face most closely resembled a stable composite of their father’s shifting features, but Horus was an avatar of an idealised version of the Emperor, perfected, iconic and completely devoid of the concerns of human existence. Or at least that was usually the case. Now, however, as Horus looked upon his brother, his sun-darkened features were deepened with the profoundest of concern.

‘Lorgar?’ he said again, as if unsure of the apparition standing before him.

‘It is I,’ the Word Bearer replied.

Horus stepped closer, as if he might reach out to touch his brother’s ruined face. He hesitated, and lowered his hand.

‘What happened?’

‘Armatura. Angron looks little better. The difference is that he chose to keep fighting. I trust the war to my men.’

Unasked questions drifted in the air between them. In time, thought Lorgar. In time.

Horus gestured to the book on the plinth. ‘I confess, I didn’t expect this to work. To speak a man’s name and have him appear before you? It reeks of black magic. The warp-flasks I can understand, but–’

‘Black magic,’ Lorgar smiled. He felt no pain here. Smiling was still something he was capable of. ‘An amusing notion.’ The Word Bearer walked to the book, an ephemeral hand above its closed pages. ‘Have you read it all?’

‘I have,’ said the Warmaster. ‘The binding is flayed skin. But whose?’

‘Corpses. Corpses from Isstvan III. Very decadent,’ Lorgar admitted, ‘but the symbolism in such things is important.’

Horus gave a small shrug, the joints of his armour purring. ‘Times have changed. It takes a great deal to turn my stomach, these days.’ There was a pause, as he searched for the most fitting subject to speak of first. ‘Magnus came to me, much as you do now.’

‘I know. I see his decision in the skeins of fate, even if he still lacks the conviction to make it. In time, he will commit to us.’

‘To us?’ Something cold and black glittered in Horus’s eyes. ‘To me.’

‘Very impressive. Very regal. Is this the voice you’ll use when you take our father’s throne?’

Lorgar smiled in the silence that followed his words. After a half-dozen heartbeats, Horus smiled, as well.

‘What really happened?’ Horus asked. ‘Plasma?’

Lorgar waved a hand over his charred face. ‘Plasma. A Warhound’s plasma blastgun. Twice.’

Horus winced, an awed exhalation escaping his lips. ‘You’re lucky to be merely mutilated.’

Lorgar didn’t reply to that. ‘Why did you call my name, brother?’

‘To see if I could. Nothing more, nothing less. How does your crusade fare in Ultramar?’

‘Just as planned. Guilliman is crippled at Calth. Thirty other worlds already bleed, with our Legions divided and laying siege. Soon, another thirty will suffer the same. We are spreading pain onto the canvas and painting it into a landscape.’

‘What of Calth?’

Lorgar paused again. The confession came without malice, without any emotion at all. ‘Kor Phaeron and Erebus are no doubt celebrating Calth as a triumph.’

‘Then they won?’

Lorgar shrugged. ‘They believe so. They gave birth to the Ruinstorm. It lacks the majesty of the Great Eye, or even the Maelstrom, but it’s a beginning.’

Horus rested a hand on the skinbound book again. ‘Why is it that you sound less than convinced of their triumph?’

‘One has to wonder how triumphant they really were, if their victory parade involves turning tail and fleeing from the Legion they supposedly crushed.’

Horus chuckled, conceding the point. After a short silence, he asked what Lorgar had been waiting for him to ask. The real reason he had summoned his brother.

‘Will this work, Lorgar?’ Horus smiled, but it was a melancholy thing, speaking of a vulnerability always suppressed before other souls. ‘I cannot win this war without you and Angron. I cannot win it without your Legions.’

It was Lorgar’s turn to laugh. ‘Spare me the false humility, Horus. Even if you lost every brother, every Legion, every ship and every soul serving you, you would still throw open the doors of Father’s throne room and expect to win.’

But Horus wasn’t smiling. ‘Will it work?’ he asked again. ‘Can you really drown Ultramar in the warp’s tides, or is the blood of Guilliman’s Legion the most we can hope for?’

Lorgar walked the amphitheatre space of the Vengeful Spirit’s war room, known to the Sons of Horus as Lupercal’s Court. He wasn’t there, not really, yet his footsteps echoed all the same.

‘You forced me to take Angron and the maddened fools he calls his sons. Now you question me, wondering if I will fail. When did you trade your trust in me for this undeserved doubt?’

‘When you changed.’ Horus said it simply. ‘When you fought Corax, and left Isstvan V a different man, claiming to have defied destiny. When you teleported your warriors onto Fulgrim’s ships and threatened his Legion with destruction because he was no longer himself. I traded trust for doubt when I was no longer certain just who you were, Lorgar Aurelian.’

‘I am the Archpriest of the Primordial Truth.’ The Word Bearer’s voice shook, just slightly. ‘I am the Minister of Chaos Absolute.’

‘Those are grand words, Lorgar. They mean little without results.’

Lorgar rounded on his brother. ‘I am who I was born to be. You seek to punish me for no longer being the weakling, the lost one, the primarch with no purpose. Think back to Isstvan III, Horus. I heard that planet die, even thousands of systems away. Surely you spoke with your astropathic choirs, or the fleet’s Navigators. That world’s death-scream was louder, brighter, harsher than even the Astronomican.’

Lorgar lifted a hand, swirling his fingertips, forming an illusory sphere from white flame. It coalesced, forming a ghostly image of Terra. A lance of thin, utterly straight light beamed from the surface of the largest continent.

‘The Blade of Hope. The Emperor’s Blessing. Every Imperial vessel in the galaxy sails by that guiding light. Nothing else pierces the warp’s restless tides. It’s their only star to sail by, and for three beats of a human heart, you, Horus, caused enough pain on one world to eclipse the Emperor’s own psychic beacon.’

He stepped closer to the Warmaster, fire in his eyes. ‘Suffering, Horus. Do you understand? Pain and terror reflected from the material realm into the warp. The agonies of billions upon billions of mortals at the moment of death, poisoning the warp’s song itself. You changed the tune, made the whole melody miss a note.’

He smiled, and while the smile was slow and serene, it still twisted his annihilated face. ‘All pain passes the veil, manifesting as turmoil in the hell behind reality. Your deed sounded as a single drumbeat. I, brother, will compose a whole symphony. Doubt me all you wish. The worlds here are dying to torturous slowness, sending their protracted death-cries across the veil.’

Lorgar made a fist, clenching his teeth. ‘I am re-tuning the warp. Ripening it. I will project Erebus’s Ruinstorm as a flood across the Five Hundred Worlds, pulling space apart by its seams.’

His snarling tirade came to an end and he lowered his gaze. ‘Forgive me my passion, brother. But also trust me, please. I will sever Ultramar from the rest of the Imperium. I will take Guilliman out of the game.’

Horus had a gift for looking magnanimous no matter the moment. ‘You have my trust.’ He leaned on the pulpit, as if the confession cost him. The Warmaster regarded his brother for a long moment. ‘Will you heal? What have your Apoth–’

‘I will heal,’ Lorgar interrupted. ‘Through prayer and meditation, not the awkward fumbling of Legion Apothecaries.’

The Warmaster nodded, though Lorgar saw the doubt his brother sought to conceal. ‘And what of Angron?’

Lorgar raised a brow, scabbed over where his eyebrow had been. ‘I have just realised what’s happening here, brother. Am I one of your lackeys to stand at attention and report?’

Horus’s laughter was unfeigned. ‘Don’t be petulant, Lorgar. We are planning to conquer a galaxy. Intelligence and logistics matter. Tell me of Angron.’

Angron. There was a tale with a twist or two. The Word Bearer’s wracked features blanked into a mask of neutrality. ‘I will speak of Angron when I’m certain just what I can say.’

The Warmaster exhaled slowly, softly, a gesture to signify the erosion of his otherwise infinite patience.

Such theatrics, thought Lorgar.

‘Brother,’ said Horus. ‘If you try to feed me excuses such as “the stars are not right”, I will hunt you down and kill you myself. Then Guilliman’s vengeance won’t be a worry for you at all. Erebus once used that line of reasoning with me. It is fortunate that I was in good humour at the time.’

Lorgar’s eyes, the tawny colour of fox-fur, flickered with what may have been amusement. The stars are not right. That did sound like Erebus.

‘Is something funny, Lorgar?’

‘Many things, but nothing where Angron is concerned. Focus on your own half of the war, Horus. I will act in regard to Angron when I need to act.’

‘Or when he forces your hand.’

Lorgar inclined his head – concurrence, not submission. ‘Or then.’

‘Is he going to die?’ Horus fixed his gaze on his brother’s. ‘Answer me that at least.’

This time, Lorgar sighed. ‘Yes. Most likely. I will do what I can, but the sickness within him runs deeper and truer than any of us ever knew. His Legion loathes him and emulates him in equal measure. He is getting worse, and they all see it. The implants drilled into his skull will be the death of him, that much is clear. Whatever archeotech was used in their fashioning, it was not made for a primarch’s brain. They cannot be removed. They cannot be countered. But I am not entirely devoid of inspiration.’

Horus sensed that was as much as he was going to get. ‘One last matter, then. What of Signus Prime?’

The Word Bearer was already fading. ‘Signus Prime is your game, Horus. I have greater matters on my mind.’

‘Greater matters?’ Irritation marked the Warmaster’s flawless features again. ‘But Sanguinius…’

‘Sanguinius will stand at Eternity Gate with tears in his eyes and acid in his heart, no matter what you and Erebus hope to accomplish at Signus Prime. Remember that, when your gambit there fails. Remember it when you face the Angel on the final day. Remember that I was the one who told you how it would really end.’

‘What is a “greater matter” than the Angel, at this stage of the game?’

‘Almost everything,’ Lorgar’s voice emerged from the cold air. ‘Ultramar. Fulgrim. Guilliman. Wars we can actually win. There are only two among us who would stand in defiance of the Angel’s wrath, Horus. Only two who would see him slain, once he fights with nothing left to lose. You are one. Angron is the other.’

Truth dawned behind the Warmaster’s eyes. ‘You’ve foreseen it. I hear it in your voice. And that’s why you strive so hard to keep him alive.’

The Word Bearer’s voice softened, fading as his corporeal form had faded.

‘Prophecy is a mistress with many minds, and should never be trusted with all one’s heart. I seek to save Angron because he is my brother, Horus. There was a time when you’d have realised that and thought the same yourself. How soulless you sound now. Watch your thoughts, Warmaster, lest you find yourself hollowed out by your rising ambition.’

‘And you watch your tongue, priest,’ Horus snarled at the empty air.

Halfway across the galaxy, Lorgar opened his eyes, back in a body made of char-blackened meat.

And smiled.

NINE

Awakening
Fury
Titan’s Fall

His first thought was that his targeting array was malfunctioning.

‘My targeting array is malfunctioning,’ he said. Except he said nothing, because nothing came out. Data, in jagged Nagrakali, rained down his red-glassed vision display. He read it, processed it, and because it made sense, he waited patiently.

While he waited, he watched the two humans before him. One of them was Lotara Sarrin. He liked Lotara. The Blood Hand marked her uniform, and it was a fine sight. He’d been there to see Khârn make the mark himself, after all the void-murder Sarrin had committed that fine day.

The other human was robed in red, hooded by an overhanging cowl, and possessed five rotating eye lenses instead of a face. In fairness, it could have been any number of tech-priests, but that didn’t matter, as he liked none of them. He had an eidetic memory, as did all legionaries, so it wasn’t that he forgot the priests’ names. He just never bothered learning them.

He was cold, now that he was awake. A penetrating, heavy-rain kind of cold that sank into the pores and softened the bones. Not that it mattered. It wasn’t like it would kill him. It wasn’t like he could even shiver. No room for that in his coffin.

When he concentrated, shutting out the outside world, he could almost feel himself. The real himself: a naked, hobbled, foetal-curled corpse compacted into an adamantium shell. It might just be his imagination, though. Difficult to say for certain.

His vision shook, making the runes blue for a moment. Sound arrived with a blast, bathing him in the noise of a workshop at war. The crackle-sizzle of sparks and soldering. The rhythmic clang of forge hammers. The binaric burbles of robed half-men.

‘My targeting array is malfunctioning,’ he said. His voice was a mechanical rockslide.

‘It shall be attended to,’ the priest replied. He replied in binaric cant – a keening spill of ones and zeroes, but it was translated into Nagrakali and Low Gothic by the visor display.

‘Captain Sarrin,’ he said. He’d never been gifted at discerning human physical cues. Her eyes were narrowed. Her heartbeat was elevated. Her mouth was set in a thin, firm line that paled her lips. ‘You are either angry or worried.’

‘Both,’ she replied. ‘Lhorke, I need you to defend the ship.’

He hadn’t refused, not that there was any chance he would. Lotara asked him to stand, to walk, to fight, and he would refuse her nothing. Nor would his brothers. All of them hungered to decorate their armour in blood once more. It had been too long – decades, for most of them. Decades when mercy dictated they’d be locked in dreamless sleep, but stasis was a lie of a word.

It was still possible to dream in stasis. Time didn’t always freeze for the mind – only the body. The only thing to be locked into was the crippling mawkishness of one’s own memories.

When he could walk. When he could breathe. When he could feel the kick of a bolter in his fist.

Lhorke shed his bleak musing the moment he pulled clear of his restraint platform. The deck shook beneath his boots. That felt good. The tech-priests backing away before him as he opened his articulated, joint-grinding fists, and dry-fired the combi-bolters in his palms. That felt good, too.

‘Load me,’ he’d commanded them. They’d obeyed. And the truth was, having them obey his orders also felt very fine indeed. They’d loaded him as they’d finished waking his brothers.

His brothers listened to him in death, as they had in life. They were the first, yet he was the First, and while the emphasis was subtle – a single capital letter – the distinction was everything.

They were also the Wounded. The Failures. The ones who endured their handlers whispering binaric code-words such as ‘unstable’ and ‘volatile’ and ‘terminal degradation’.

That’s why they weren’t on the surface. That’s why they were kept in stasis. They were the oldest, the first, before the techniques had been perfected.

Hellesek lacked one arm. His ironform was under-going repair when he’d been reawakened, and he’d come online with a crushing power fist for a left arm, and the bizarre loss of temporary amputation on the right.

Krydal couldn’t speak. His sarcophagus was bolted into his ironform, still damaged from his last battle, blessed and consecrated by holy oils but installed without his delicate vocabulator circuitry in place. No time for such things.

Neras was worst of all. He woke enraged, lost to the Nails, forever lost even while he slumbered in stasis. Chains broke beneath his first heaving steps, and his roaring chain-blades drowned out the sound of all other industry in the teeming workshop. The wiser tech-priests ran. The more devoted, or more foolish, tried to restrain him with electro-shock bindings – and, in one hilarious instance, a prayer to the Machine-God meant to invoke a sense of calm.

Lhorke had brought his lost brother back. He achieved it by a volley of combi-bolter fire against the other Dreadnought’s sarcophagus, to gain his attention, and then by beating him into submission with heavy fists. It was no contest at all. As the First, Lhorke was more than a sarcophagus bound to a war-body. His ironform was an avatar of the Machine-God. The Legion had honoured him, resurrecting him as a Contemptor.

Neras was still frantic, still fierce, but he’d come back from the precipice. He could function for now.

Thirteen of them, in all. Thirteen of the XII Legion’s first Dreadnoughts – Lucifer and Deredeo-patterns, variously abandoned or intentionally forgotten, now standing in unique states of disrepair. They led the defence, as the only World Eaters on board.

World Eaters. Lhorke still felt an intruder to that name. He’d lived and died as a War Hound, in the decades before Angron, before they took the name Eaters of Worlds to honour the primarch’s slain rebel army, the Eaters of Cities. He still displayed the old Legion scratch kill-markings on his ironform, and on his breastplate he bore the armoured wolf’s head, collared by a chain around its throat.

War Hounds. That was his Legion. Not these furious, half-lobotomised madmen who abandoned all notions of honour when they lost themselves to berserker rage.

Even so, they were still his brothers. He couldn’t hate them, but he could blame them. The rot started to creep in when they rediscovered the primarch from that worthless world he called home, and yet, the Legion could still have refused the Nails. They chose to emulate their gene-father, despite all it would clearly cost. They chose to tear open their skulls and let the poison be placed inside.

Angron had ordered it, but was that an excuse? Could the primarch have forced a hundred thousand warriors to bend to his will if they’d refused the mutilation of their minds? Lhorke had fallen in battle thirty years before the primarch’s arrival. He’d been active day and night back then, before the mind’s sluggishness began to take hold. It was difficult to remain awake after a few years. The mind, forced to exert itself to command the ironform, began to suffer the strain of isolation and claustrophobic confinement.

So he’d started submitting to the restful half-sleep of stasis. A few months, at first. Then it became a year for every year he remained awake. He needed more and more rest, to balance the exertion of mastering his ironform.

He’d never felt the kiss of the Nails in his brain pan, though. It was easy enough, given his circumstances: beating them into his corpse’s skull came with significant risk, and he was a relic by any virtue of the word. They wouldn’t risk him in the surgery, so he remained one of the few War Hounds among the rising ranks of the World Eaters.

But what was done was done. The old Legion and the new were bonded by blood, no matter how many disparate worlds the warriors had been drawn from over the decades. Kinship flowed between them, whether he willed it or not. Blood, as so many of their parent cultures had said, was thicker than water.

Lotara ordered the robed priestlings to upload a tactical feed of the Ultramarines boarding pod location points.

‘The what?’ Lhorke had asked. He turned from watching Neras undergoing the chanted Ritual of Reawakening, and looked down at Captain Sarrin’s tiny, tiny figure.

‘The Ultramarines,’ she replied. ‘The… Thirteenth Legion Astartes?’ She looked worried, as if he’d forgotten who the XIII actually were.

Something rattled and clanked deep in his heavy metal guts. ‘You want me to kill Ultramarines.’

‘They boarded us!’ she insisted.

Lhorke crouched down, his joints giving industrial-grade snarls as he did so. He brought his cranial input/output node, fashioned as an armoured helm, almost level with her face. A giant kneeling to address a child.

‘Why did they board us?’

She was obviously worried now. ‘Can’t you fight other legionaries?’

Of course he could. He’d fought the Wolves, hadn’t he? Sent them yelping back to their gunships after they came howling about the Nails, after Angron had assumed command over the Legion. As long as he lived within this foetid, cold coffin, he’d never forget Angron and Russ fighting in the amber light of that alien sunset. The battlefield had reeked of their godly blood.

‘What reason?’ he replied to Lotara. ‘Why are we at war with the Ultramarines?’

‘I… Because…’ She’d trailed off. That’s when she’d turned to a nearby priest, and ordered a further uploading of data.

They weren’t at war with the Ultramarines. They were at war with half the Imperium. They were openly at war with the Emperor now, and they had been for over a year. Most of the time seemed to have been spent in warp transit, descending on unsuspecting worlds still blind to the unfolding war and massacring their populations wholesale.

Angron, he thought. The sheer bitterness of the conjured name made his corpse tremble in the amniotic fluid of his coffin-cradle. He felt his own withered limbs tense and twitch.

With that indecipherable dose of madness in mind, Lhorke had led his wounded and abandoned brothers back into battle.

Discipline won wars. Fury won fights.

Against the Ultramarines discipline, the only weapon that remained was fury. A fury beyond reason; a fury beyond containment. Fury so depthless it couldn’t be countered, because those possessed by it cared nothing for their own lives.

When two warriors stood and fought, giving no ground, awareness of mortality couldn’t be banished from even the most dutiful and courageous souls. Soldiers defended themselves to stay alive. Training and instinct forced their hands – they ducked, they dodged, they weaved and blocked and parried. On a conscious level, this was skill. It was finesse. On an unconscious level, it was the reaction of training and simple, instinctive awareness of mortality.

It was also the secret behind the World Eaters, how they won wars without the discipline so resplendent in other Legions. Fury won fights – win enough fights, and they’d still carry the war.

The Nails weren’t implants as remembrancers and archeotechnicians understood the idea. The implants added nothing to a World Eater’s brain. Instead, they stole from it. They bleached a warrior’s mind of all reason, all caution, all mortality’s instincts. The Nails rewarded rage with spurts of electrochemical pleasure, tingling synapses and deadening enjoyment of everything else. No better machine had ever been contrived to encourage warriors into pursuing the dubious peace found in absolute, careless, guiltless fury.

When Khârn hit the shield wall, he was barely Khârn any more. He was a shell of humanity stripped down to feverish rage, never thinking of defending himself, never responding to any threat of pain or danger. He ripped the boarding shield from his first foe’s gauntlets, spraying spittle-froth into the warrior’s faceplate as his axe cleaved down. He took blades and bolt shells against his armour without noticing, always attacking, always attacking, always attacking.

A warrior who wants to live has no defence against one who doesn’t care if he dies. And Khârn, every warrior wants to live.

The primarch’s words. Angron’s quietly growled wisdom, in the hour before Khârn became the first to accept the Butcher’s Nails in his brain.

‘Blood for the primarch!’ he screamed as he slaughtered the Ultramarines, with his face painted red by dead men’s insides. ‘Skulls for the Twelfth Legion!’

Along the front line, where legionaries in bloodstained white met those in cobalt blue, the same performance played out a hundred times. World Eaters too wounded to charge dragged themselves across the ground, screaming their hate, axes and swords still revving in their hands.

Time meant nothing to the Nails-lost. Khârn sensed the escalation around him, the way a shark senses the ebb and flow of the tides without needing to really pay heed. In flashes of vision between the moving red-stained blurs of enemy limbs, he saw other warriors in white demolishing the Ultramarines ranks, as well as gunships brightening the sky on downturned thrusters. The headache-beams of lascannons lanced through the fighting crowds with resonant, waspish sounds, superheating the air around the growing hosts of warriors.

Titan-tread shivered the ground, their towering forms visible through the dust, fighting their own godlike wars above the herds of mere mortals around their ankles. When they deemed the ground battle worthy of their attention, the screaming, crashing hordes would die in great swathes, disintegrated in sunflame or swept clear by withering volleys of massed vulcan bolter fire. Here and there, the pressurised clatter-rattle of ursus claws loosed at larger foes. At one point, Khârn thought he saw the silhouette of a Warlord-class Titan dragged almost to its knees by four Audax Warhounds, pulled down by their harpooning grip. He had a heartbeat’s span to see the great shadow kneeling, before the fight took him again.

He was close, now. Close enough to smell their breath when he tore their helms free and broke their faces open with his fists. Close enough to hear the crackle of their own vox-network ordering full retreat.

They wouldn’t flee. The Ultramarines fought back to back in ever-diminishing circles, refusing to run. They wouldn’t show their backs to the foe, and there was no way to retreat in good order, no matter what their commanders demanded.

‘Khârn!’ a voice cried above the battle. How it was magnified, the World Eater could only guess. He fought on in a frothing, panting fever, his hands numb from gripping the blood-slick axe haft. Everything existed in the flickering flurry of sword blades and shield edges and fists and boots and red-eyed bronze helms.

‘Khârn!’ came the voice again. ‘Face me!’

He lashed out with his axe, its blade spraying sparks as it skidded across an Ultramarine’s breastplate. The teeth chewed and scraped, mangling the aquila emblazoned on the warrior’s chest. Not the royal Palatine Aquila, the Emperor’s own symbol borne among the Legions only by Fulgrim’s sons. This was the worthless mark of Imperial dominance that any warrior was free to wear.

Khârn drew back for a second cleave. This time the spinning teeth bit into the legionary’s throat, chewing the softer armour there and into the flesh beyond. When the body dropped, Khârn hacked a third time, took up the helm by its sergeant’s wreath, and raised it in his fist as he screamed up at the choked sky.

A shadow eclipsed what pathetic light the moon tried to bring. It struck the ground hard enough to crack stone, manifesting behind the World Eater – a presence formed of blackness and blades.

He turned, lashing out.

Argel Tal smashed the blow aside with his golden two-handed sword. The axe sparked and splintered in Khârn’s hands, falling to pieces as it met the Custodian sword.

‘Are you insane, brother?’ Argel Tal asked, his second, harsher voice dominating his human one.

The Word Bearer’s armour was ridged by growths of dense, bleached bone forming the suggestion of an exoskeleton on the scarlet ceramite. His helm was crested by curving horns, and its silver faceplate warped into a wolfish maw. Veined bat’s wings, formed from some unnatural blend of fleshmetal and scorched ceramite, rose in a living cloak from his shoulders. Something divine, fallen into sin: an angel as envisaged by daemons.

The sight of this creature was enough to pull Khârn back from the Nails’ edge. Without his axe, he used the chains that bound his weapons, slashing left and right with the iron whips.

‘Where have you been?’ he managed to shout, through teeth sticky with blood and thick spit. The Nails pushed his muscles into action, wanting him to strike the Word Bearer. They promised him another pulse of pleasure if he would only betray his brother.

Argel Tal beat his wings, lifting off the ground long enough to deliver a kick to an Ultramarine’s throat. He landed with his blade en garde, deflecting a bolt shell from the side.

‘You weren’t the only ones in trouble,’ he replied. His human tone, lower and softer, was enriched with apology. The harsher voice, resonant and serpentine, spoke the same words at the same time, yet somehow implied amusement.

Khârn dragged a fallen gladius from the ground with one hand, and a chainsword with the other.

‘Valika.’ He spat the word, turning his focus to the fight. The brothers slammed back to back, duelling their foes at the heart of the battlefield. ‘We needed you at Valika.’

Argel Tal’s wings should have been a burden in close quarters, but in the heat of the moment they became weapons as true as his stolen blade. He wielded them as shields, rippling like sails in the wind, yet as durable as ceramite. Blades clanged aside from them, he beat them to throw his foes off-balance, slamming them into their helms and deflecting their thrusts. All the while, the Custodian sword rose and fell in his scarlet fists, reaping life.

The Word Bearer’s reply was a breathless growl. ‘Is this really the time?’

Khârn bit back a reply as the vox seeped with unwelcome words. ‘This is Keeda Bly. Syrgalah down. Reinfor–’

‘Can you help them?’ he asked Argel Tal. Neither of them could see anything through the melee. Khârn stamped his boot down on a fallen warrior’s throat, and asked again, uncaring of the desperation in his voice. The Legio Audax’s command Titan was threatened. That took priority over all else. ‘Can you help them?’

‘I can try.’ The Word Bearer pulled his sword from an Ultramarine’s belly, twisting to rip the armour apart. Innards looped out in a slopping flood, and the Armaturan legionary still took another three swings before falling to his knees. These wretches took some effort to put down. ‘You never really get used to killing your own kind,’ Argel Tal breathed, and let the blade fall. The Ultramarine’s head rolled clear.

‘Stay alive,’ he told Khârn, and launched skywards – wings beating, dust swirling.

Toth woke himself with a moan, though it melted into a scream when the pain hit. He thrashed in his throne, inhaling the copper-smelling smoke filling the cockpit, dragging on the emergency release and yelling that it was jammed.

His thrashing cleared the smoke long enough to see that he was wrong. The release wasn’t jammed, he just wasn’t reaching it. The arm clawing for the emergency release lever ended at the elbow. Where his remaining organic forearm and hand had been, there was nothing but air and red ruin at the joint.

The sight actually stopped his screams. He looked at what was left of his arm in numb, amused horror.

‘My arm’s gone,’ he said in a strangled whisper. ‘My bloody arm’s gone.’

He tried to reach with his other arm, but the distance was too great. His fingers curled uselessly in the air before the lever’s shining iron handle. Shock and blood loss had him reeling, dizzy to the point of intoxication.

‘Keeda. Keeda, I’m trapped in my throne. Keeda.’ He rolled his head to the side, peering through the smoke. ‘Keeda, my arm’s gone.’

He was confronted by the sight of her backside in standard-issue grey overalls as she crouched on the control console, facing Solostine in the princeps’s seat. He grinned drunkenly, though he’d never in his whole life felt an iota of attraction to her.

Toth’s lolling head smacked against his headrest, against the iron edges where the support cushions had been before the crash. The entire cockpit was tilted halfway on its side, making it hard to keep his head up.

‘Keeda,’ he said to her backside. ‘Keeda, I’ve lost a lot of blood. I can’t… I don’t… Keeda. Keeda. I think my arm’s on the floor. Keeda. Find it, Keeda. Please.’

She turned in the tight confines of the Warhound’s cockpit, swore more viciously than Toth had ever heard her swear, and left Solostine in his throne. Toth couldn’t really see through the smoke. The princeps looked asleep.

Keeda – who even under these dire circumstances was sick to death of Toth mumbling her name – reached to pull the emergency release by the steersman’s throne. It clanked and clicked and gave a disappointing hiss. Nothing happened.

‘Marvellous,’ she said. ‘Just lovely.’ Her face was a soot-streaked mess. Toth watched her pull her service pistol, and dimly wondered why she would want to shoot him. She didn’t, of course. With a soft-spoken apology to Syrgalah’s machine-spirit, she shot twice – destroying both magnetic couplings sealing the roof cupola closed.

‘We’re leaving,’ she told Toth.

‘We crashed,’ he told her.

‘We most certainly did.’ She straddled his control panel, balancing precariously as she bound his severed arm in a tourniquet made from her sleeves.

At one point, she saw his arm on the floor by his boots. He’d guessed right, it was down there.

‘Come on,’ she said, as she started lifting him.

Shock was on her side; he was compliant, despite his ceaseless mumbling. ‘Keeda,’ he said again. ‘What about the old man?’

‘He’s dead.’ And she didn’t have tears in her eyes. If she did, it was the smoke. Just the smoke.

‘Keeda. He’s not dead. Is he? Keeda?’

Good question. Unless you could live with half the avataric interface console rammed through your chest, he was most certainly dead.

‘He’s gone, Toth. Keep climbing.’

She was pushing him up through the cupola now, getting him out first. ‘If you say my name once more, you delirious bastard, I’ll shoot you.’

Other hands reached in, frantic hands, grabbing at Toth’s half-limp body and pulling him away from her. ‘No!’ she screamed, and pulled back with one hand, scrabbling for her gun with the other.

‘Be peaceful, Moderati Bly.’ She knew that voice, its emotionless, vox-ish tone. ‘It is me. Only me.’

She looked at the reaching hands, bionic in crude rendition of human musculature, yet strangely beautiful for that fact. Burnt scraps of red robe hung through the open cupola.

‘Ninth?’

‘Affirmative. It is me. The Ninth.’

‘Have you got Toth?’

‘A second and subsequent affirmative.’

‘Keeda.’ Toth was drooling in his rebreather, still mumbling. ‘Keeeeeda…’

‘Hush,’ she told him, not unkindly. ‘Pull him up, Ninth.’

‘A third and most welcome affirmation.’ The tech-priest’s augmetic arms heaved, cylinders and pistons and little gears tightening as he lifted Toth clear. She heard the moderati say Keeda yet again, followed by the Ninth muttering something about exsanguination and the radial and ulnar arteries.

Crouching by the slumped form of Princeps Solostine, she closed his eyes with a stroke of her fingers.

‘Thank you,’ she told him. A moment later, she was hauling herself up in Toth’s wake.

The Ninth supported Toth, the former with his Martian red robes left in tatters, seeming naked without the shroud or the servo skulls that usually orbited him in antigravitational diligence. Most of his body was given over to articulated armour, unusually slender and carefully contoured compared to the dense plating of battlefield enginseers. She’d had no idea his augmetics were so artful beneath the robe.

The Ninth, without his hood, revealed a shaven head marked by augmetic nodes, and a heavy visor in place of his eyes. A scarab of round iron replaced his vocal cords; from this tiny speaker came his tinny vox-voice. All else above the neck seemed human.

‘The princeps?’ he prompted.

‘Gone.’

‘There will be a grieving process, involving rituals both mournful and sincere. Come, Moderati Bly. We must get clear.’

Easier said than done. Keeda usually stood above the ‘groundwork’, where infantry duelled in Syrgalah’s shadow. Now Syrgalah had fallen, leaving her crew stranded in the thick of it. Warriors in white and blue battled and screamed around the toppled Titan. For several mute seconds, she wasn’t even sure what to do, or where to run. The pistol in her hand was useless – a toy against any member of the Legiones Astartes.

‘Moderati Bly–,’ the Ninth began. The sentence ended in a smothered cry as the tech-priest was thrown forwards, nailed by a bolt shell in the back. Keeda saw him crawling on the ground, his legs severed, dragging himself to get back to her. No hope of that; she and Toth still stood atop the Warhound’s grounded skull. She grabbed Toth before he could fall, pulling him close.

‘Traitors.’ The vox-voice was low and very, very sure of itself. She turned and fired at the Ultramarine below, her shots deflecting from his armour, leaving tiny, insipidly worthless burn marks where they managed to bite. He and three of his battle-brothers lifted their bolters. In the same second, a shadow danced above her.

It landed with a brutal crunch, eclipsing the light of the XIII Legion’s muzzle flashes, and taking the worst of the gunfire in a storm of cracks and crashes against its scarlet ceramite. A figure. A thing. One of the Word Bearers, one of their maddened Gal Vorbak creatures. He pulled the two humans against his scorched armour, shielding them both, folding his bleeding wings around them.

‘I am Argel Tal,’ he said, in two voices through one throat. His face was a mask of canine metal, and the words were wet with the blood trickling from his fanged maw. ‘Khârn asked me to keep you alive.’

Keeda had survived the death of her Titan, murdered by a Lysanda Reaver in black and white that killed them without looking twice. She’d survived the wracking pain of severance from Syrgalah’s great-hearted machine-spirit – a soul she adored and would willingly die to defend. She’d pulled her mutilated colleague free from imminent death and bidden her dead mentor farewell. She’d even fired hopelessly at soldiers sworn to kill her, whom she knew she could never have harmed.

But she only started screaming when a daemon embraced her and said he’d come to save her life.

TEN

The Ghenna Scouring
The War is Over
Endings

Lotara Sarrin had told him where to hunt. She’d uploaded nine separate boarding pod points of entry across the Conqueror’s port side, and the casualty reports over the vox did the rest. They were dealing with an estimated ninety Ultramarines, with a sub-analysis detailing projected casualties given crew density and armsmen response predictions at each impact point.

Lhorke stayed with Krydal and Neras, for they were the worst. They needed guidance, and orders to follow.

The other Wounded spread out, their stomping tread taking them across the ship. Lhorke and Captain Sarrin tasked them with leading the defence, though the vox was still alive with reports of Ultramarines massacring the human crew and the naval armsmen sent to hold their ground.

Bodies lined the walkways. If a veteran’s guess was anything to go by, Lhorke considered the projected crew casualties on the wrong side of conservative. The Ultramarines invaders knew their lives would end on this ship, but that many warriors could easily tear the ship apart before they were brought down.

And they moved swiftly. Distasteful as it was, Lhorke was reduced to ordering armsman fire-teams to stand and be slaughtered in order to delay the Evocati squads for long enough that his Dreadnoughts might catch the boarders at all.

Still, the Space Marines were fragile enough, once they were in reach of his claws.

He paid almost no heed to the killing. What pulled at him most were the questions of this insane war against the Emperor and his empire. How had the Legion tolerated its own purge? How had they slaughtered their own brothers with impunity on Isstvan III? How could they betray their own blood? The War Hounds – and the World Eaters that followed after them – were a Legion founded upon brotherhood above all else. They taught it in the gladiatorial pits, bonding warriors from different worlds, chaining them together and forcing them to fight as pairs.

So how had it come to this?

Angron.

Angron and the Nails.

During the Great Crusade, the primarch’s discovery had been a long time in coming. The War Hounds bore witness to other Legions uniting with their primarchs for the first time and were no strangers to disconsolate jealousy. Speculation was rife, from the muttered worry that their primarch might already be dead, to the hope he would be a warrior and general to rival Horus, Guilliman, Dorn or the Lion.

And then, on that foul backwater world, they finally found him. His first and most dubious honour was to be the one primarch to refuse the Emperor’s benevolence and to turn his back on the Imperium’s claims of conquest. Angron, master of his doomed slave army, cared nothing for a galaxy’s worth of dreams and triumphs. He wished only to die with those rebels who’d escaped the gladiator pits with him. This ragged army of his brothers and sisters were holed up in the mountains with carrion birds and snow bears for company, waiting to starve or fall in battle – whichever death came first.

The Legion were told of his refusal. Their primarch had defied the Emperor.

The War Hounds didn’t hate Angron for his choice. They worshipped him for it. What primarch better understood the bonds of brotherhood than one who turned his back on the Emperor, on the Imperium, on life itself – to die side by side with his kindred?

Yet the Emperor denied him the choice. Angron would lead a Legion in the Imperium’s name whether he willed it or not.

Lhorke had been slumbering in the first of his necessary respites by the time they orbited Angron’s worthless little world. They’d woken him, though. They’d woken all of the first ones in the weeks after Angron’s arrival. The Legion had never known a more momentous event.

Gheer had been Legion Master, then. A good man, Gheer. An axeman to stand with the best of them. Uninspired around a planning table, admittedly, yet he’d managed to make bluntness into a virtue alongside brutality.

Dead the very night the primarch joined the Legion. Slain by their new father, in Angron’s first uncontrollable, melancholic fury.

But in those earliest days, the Nails were a virtue. None of the newly-renamed World Eaters would face the fact their primarch carried a curse from the years on his homeworld. They focused on his prowess, on the strength and speed gifted to him by the archeotech implants, and when the primarch demanded his sons lie under the Techmarines’ claws and the Apothecaries’ knives, few had resisted the chance to share the same virtuous pain as their noble primarch.

Everything changed with the hammering of the Nails.

The World Eaters, once known for their brotherhood, became known first and foremost for their savagery. Reports began filtering back of excessive Legion casualties in tacticless displays of horde warfare, and Imperial Army forces pleading for assistance from other Legions when the World Eaters were the ones to answer the call. Planets surrendered rather than face the XII Legion in battle, but not all who surrendered were spared the war. The Nails dulled all other pleasures, until the heady bite of adrenaline was the only certain way to experience anything but the dimmest memory of emotion. Their rewired minds allowed no other pleasure beyond battle.

Worlds bled. Worlds burned. Worlds died.

The Emperor, it was said, had become… how had rumour put it? Displeased. What a word. So polite, considering the madness that followed in its wake.

Imperial records stated that two primarchs came to Angron, both claiming to have been sent by the Master of Mankind. The first arrived soon after Angron joined his Legion. The second wouldn’t come until almost a century later. By then, it would be too late.

Russ was the first. He came, and he brought his Wolves. Already, they called themselves the Emperor’s executioners. Had he been given the title? Doubts were everywhere, among the primarchs and their Legions most of all. Why the Space Wolves? Lhorke still recalled the arguments on everyone’s lips. The Wolves lacked the Ultramarines numbers and Russ lacked the impartial wisdom of Guilliman. They lacked the Thousand Sons widespread gifts of sixth sense, and the Wolf King lacked the far-reaching knowledge of Magnus the Red. They lacked the ferocity of the World Eaters; the resilience of the Death Guard; and all but one of the twenty Legions lacked the grandeur, the reputation and the victories of the Luna Wolves. More telling, every Legion but one lacked Horus, the First Primarch – suspected even then to be hailed one day as Heir to the Emperor.

But the truth twisted depending upon who told the tale. Russ lived the role as though it were his birthright. What mattered, in the shadow of that commitment? Nothing. Nothing at all.

They’d met at Malkoya, on the fields beyond the dead city of the same name. The World Eaters, battered and bleeding from Ghenna’s compliance, formed ragged lines before the assembled Space Wolves Legion. The primarchs stood before their hosts, armed and armoured – Angron awash with blood and carved up by fresh wounds; Leman Russ in resplendent plate the colour of the storms on his tempestuous homeworld.

Lhorke had stood with Angron, as had Khârn and the other captains. Even interred in his walking coffin, he’d been struck by the majesty of standing before Russ. Here was a being gene-coded to perfection: a reflection of humanity’s beloved royal paragon. Russ bled authority without effort, and without the need for posture or pretence. In all ways, he should have been a barbarian – from the ragged blond hair to the frost-weathered skin that aged him far past his years. And yet, he inspired no mockery. He made barbarism a controlled trait, something noble to be understood and mastered, not a state of primitive regression. Leman Russ was the dynamism of a life free from civilisation’s shackles. He was strength and purpose and heart, where all else was grey with the promise of inevitable stagnancy.

He wasn’t a wolf because of how he fought and howled and bunched his men into packs. He was a wolf because of how he lived, forever echoing the vitality and honesty of the wildness at the heart of all life. It was said in smiling whispers that VI Legion genetic coding was tainted by canine blood. Lhorke believed it. Seeing Leman Russ made him yearn to breathe again, and feel anything beyond the cramped, cold-milk discomfort of his amniotic womb-tomb. Never had he felt more dead – not before, and not since.

The Wolf King hadn’t come to debate or offer pleasantries. Nevertheless, Lhorke remembered the nod of respect offered by the primarch.

‘Legion Master,’ Russ had said.

Lhorke’s ironform wasn’t made for obeisance, but he lowered his chassis in an awkward bow.

‘Great Wolf,’ he’d replied. ‘I am Legion Master no more.’

Russ had smiled, then. A crooked smile, offering the barest, whitest flash of his teeth. ‘More’s the pity. If you were, perhaps my presence would not be necessary.’

Angron spoke at last. Unlike Russ, he was savagery unrestrained by healthy dynamism. He brought no charismatic aura of life and passion. He was a god of war: broken, dangerous and, worst of all, unreliable. The Nails had forced his left eye to twitch open and closed in a madman’s blink.

‘Did he send you?’ the Eater of Worlds asked.

Russ said nothing. His silence had Angron smiling, though it was an ugly slice of a thing, showing no joy.

‘He didn’t, did he? The Emperor and Horus sail the stars together without a care for any of this. You’ve come to punish me because you believe it’s your place.’

In those early years, Angron carried his first axe, the precursor to all others. He called it Widowmaker. It would break this very day, never to be used again.

Russ carried Krakenmaw, his immense chain-blade, toothed by some Fenrisian sea-devil from that blighted world’s many myths. The wind toyed with his bedraggled hair, blowing strands of the golden mane across his face. Eyes the colour of melting ice never left the bloodshot orbs in Angron’s cabled skull.

‘Reports reach my ears, Angron. The words of commanders and captains who have suffered at your side. Soldiers forced to fight without orders, losing hundreds when mere dozens needed to die. Your own allies speak of the butchery done to them at your sons’ hands. Report after report after report, witness after witness after witness. All of this comes to me, and I wonder, my brother: what am I to do?’

Two immense wolves circled the primarchs. Their fur was white, dusted by grey. One snarled, as wolves will always snarl when threatened, saliva-wet fangs on show, eyes sharp and ears low. The other merely paced, content to watch the speaking godlings, its dark eyes catching the light of the setting sun. The calmer beast came within Russ’s reach, and the warlord dragged armoured fingers through its thick coat.

‘I am not your lackey to judge,’ Angron stated. The cybernetic cables forming technological dreadlocks tensed as he clenched his iron teeth. ‘And you have no authority over me. Over any of us.’

Russ smiled again. ‘And yet, here I am.’

‘To do what? To commit to a war that will see both our Legions in ruins?’ Angron wiped a wounded hand over his face, as if the simple gesture could clean away the pain. ‘Leave. Leave before this becomes something you regret.’

The wind was picking up, now. Lhorke felt it as a dull whisper against his ironform, but it tore at the banners raised above the Space Wolf ranks.

Russ spoke again, pale eyes unwavering. ‘The surgery must end, Angron. The Emperor himself wills that it be so. The massacres end here and now, as well. Look what you have done to this world.’

‘Cleansed it.’

‘Butchered it. Reaved it. Ghenna is scoured of all life. Is this a deed you want listed beneath your name when statues rise to celebrate the Great Crusade?’

Angron cared nothing for statues, and said so plainly.

Russ shook his head. ‘You cannot sail the stars in this frenzy purely because you’re too damaged to learn the art of war. The implant surgery must be reversed. Your sons will submit to mine for a return to Terra. Once we reach the Palace, everything will be done to remove these parasitic engines from your men’s minds.’

Despite the twitches, Angron’s tortured eyes were wide in genuine surprise. ‘You think you have any authority over me? You think you can threaten me and expect to walk away?’

‘I think there’s a good chance of it, aye.’

Angron grinned, though it was an anguished thing. ‘And if you die?’

The wind pulled at Russ’s wolfskin cloak. ‘Lorgar wrote something several years ago that has nourished my thoughts each day and night since he shared it with me.’

The World Eater snorted, showing just what he thought of his pious, scrivener brother’s musings, but Russ was unfazed.

‘It is not enough that corruption is recognised,’ Russ quoted. ‘It must be opposed. It is not enough that ignorance is acknowledged. It must be defied. Win or lose, what matters is making a stand for the virtues we will bequeath to the human race. When this galaxy is finally ours, we’ll hold a worthless prize if we plant the last aquila, on the last day, on the last world, having led humanity into moral darkness.’

Angron listened, but cared little. Even then, he was a stubborn creature, taking spiteful pride in his own isolation.

‘Lorgar wages war with a quill,’ he said, ‘but the galaxy will not be brought to heel by crude philosophy. Your ideals are meaningless.’

‘Ideals are what we fight for, brother.’ There was something colder in Russ’s tone, then. A decision had been made, frosting his voice.

Angron had laughed, the sound rich and true. ‘Such pretty lies! We fight for the same reasons men have always fought: for land, for resources, for wealth and for bodies to feed into the grinders of industry. We fight to silence anyone that dares draw breath and whisper a different opinion from ours. We fight because the Emperor wants every world in his hands. All he knows is slavery, painted in the inoffensive cloak of compliance. The very notion of freedom is a horror to him.’

‘Traitor,’ Russ hissed.

Angron stood tall, still grinning. ‘Do we give choices to those we slaughter? A true choice? Or do we broadcast that they must throw their weapons into the fires of peace and bow down, faces pushed into the mud like beggars, thanking us for the culture we force upon them? We offer them compliance or we offer them death. How am I a traitor, wolfling? I fight as you fight, as loyal as you are. I do the tyrant’s bidding.’

‘We offer them freedom.’ Russ spoke through clenched teeth, the moon bright in his eyes. ‘You are mutilating your own sons and stealing their minds – now you preach of the Emperor’s tyranny? Are you lost so far in your delusions?’

Angron’s smile faltered, fading away. His face seemed slack, his eyes staring past Russ. Defeat was etched upon features still twitching in pain.

‘You are free, Leman Russ of Fenris, because your freedom matches the Emperor’s will. For each time I wage war against worlds that threaten the Imperium’s advance, there comes another time when I am told to conquer peaceful worlds that wish only to be left alone. I am told to destroy whole civilisations and call it liberation. I am told to demand millions of men and women from these new worlds, to make them take up arms in the Emperor’s hordes, and I am told to call this a tithe, or recruitment, because we are too scared of the truth. We refuse to call it slavery.’

‘Angron…’ Russ snarled.

‘Be silent! You have given your threats, dog. Now hear me. Listen to another hound barking, for once.’

‘Then speak,’ Russ had said, as if permission were his to give.

‘I am loyal, the same as you. I am told to bathe my Legion in the blood of innocents and sinners alike, and I do it, because it is all that’s left for me in this life. I do these things, and I enjoy them, not because we are moral, or right – or loving souls seeking to enlighten a dark universe – but because all I feel are the Butcher’s Nails hammered into my brain. I serve because of this “mutilation”. Without it? Well, perhaps I might be a more moral man, like you claim to be. A virtuous man, eh? Perhaps I might ascend the steps of our father’s palace and take the slaving bastard’s head.’

Both Legions tensed. Thousands and thousands of warriors clutched bolters and chainweapons tighter. Lhorke had even taken a step back, his joints loud in the sudden silence.

Russ felt no such hesitation. He drew his blade and launched at Angron, only to be met with the World Eater’s axe blocking the blow. The brothers breathed hatred into each other’s faces.

‘You are lost,’ Russ growled. ‘You gelded, black-hearted heretic.’

‘I am merely honest, brother. In all but this you are no different from me.’

‘If you cannot see the chasm between savagery and ferocity, then you are hopelessly gone, Angron.’

The World Eater threw Russ back, sending the Wolf King staggering. ‘Then I am gone. But we both know the day will never dawn that you can best me in combat.’

For several seconds, the primarchs stared at each other.

Lhorke never saw who fired the first shot. In the decades to come, the World Eaters claimed it came from the Wolves’ lines, and the Wolves claimed the same of the XII Legion. He had his suspicions, but what was hindsight in the face of catastrophe? Without either primarch giving an order, two Legions fought.

The Night of the Wolf, they’d called it in the years since. Imperial archives referred to it as the Ghenna Scouring, omitting the moment the World Eaters and Space Wolves drew blood. A source of pride for both Legions, and a source of secret shame. Both claimed victory. Both feared they’d actually lost.

Lhorke had been forced to slumber increasingly often in the following decades, easing the pressure on his caged brain and withered form, but his awakenings were frequent enough to perceive Angron’s deterioration through the years. Slow and subtle as the alterations were, the primarch still couldn’t hide them. In truth, he may not have even been trying.

Each time Lhorke rose to walk the Conqueror’s decks and join his brothers in their Great Crusade, he could see the primarch suffering the bite of those hateful implants. The Nails’ afflictions struck harder, more frequently, and their pain lingered longer.

Worse, it was spreading across the Legion. The legionaries’ brains were almost human compared to the primarch’s transcendent physiology, and the erosion of their self-control was accordingly quicker. Lhorke watched it with a curious mix of detachment and guilty compassion, noting another notch on their descent each time he awoke. Concentration seemed a chore for them, over long periods of time. They laughed less and relied increasingly on Legion serfs to maintain their armour. Attention spans shortened, wandered, forever looking to the next war.

Still, the brotherhood remained strong at the Legion’s heart, and there was the test that truly mattered. World Eaters were still chained together in the fighting pits and duelled to the cheers of their brothers. They entered without armour, naked but for loincloths to show they feared no wound, and to prove every warrior would fight on equal ground.

For especially deserving legionaries, the XII even opened its pits to those born of other bloodlines. Sigismund of the VII paired with Delvarus of the Triarii, and the two of them won every fight they entered – always to first blood, never lasting more than half a minute. No one could keep up with them. No one even came close.

Amit of the Blood Angels paired with Kargos, and few ever wished to come up against the Flesh Tearer and the Bloodspitter. They were known for always fighting past first blood, third blood and into sanguis extremis. No dirty trick seemed beyond them, and every one of their matches was a death bout.

And then there was Argel Tal. Lhorke had first seen the Word Bearer in the pits, paired with Khârn. From the very first moment they were chained together and stepped into the chamber, ringed by howling gladiators looking on, Lhorke knew the two of them would lose more than they ever won. Khârn was an indifferent competitor and found few World Eaters willing to stand with him. Lhorke could tell right away that in Argel Tal, he’d found a kindred spirit, silently laughing at the same joke.

Regardless of the lethal grace they so plainly shared, and the effortless brotherhood that bonded them, neither took sparring seriously. They saw no honour in the pits; merely distraction and amusement. When they fell in defeat – which they did almost every time – it was always without rancour, despite the fiercely competitive nature of the duelling taking place in the Conqueror’s iron bowels.

Sigismund once knocked Khârn to the deck in seven short seconds; the same moment Delvarus scored first blood on Argel Tal’s bare chest. Enduring the jeers and laughter of their comrades, the World Eater and Word Bearer had crashed their manacled wrists together in a Legiones Astartes battle-sign of mutual respect, and did the same with their opponents. The traditional salute of a good fight, fairly won.

‘You’re useless,’ Delvarus had said, a smile on his mouth but not in his eyes.

‘I am,’ Argel Tal admitted, ‘when my life isn’t on the line.’ He spoke in Nagrakali, the World Eaters’ bastardised tongue. When a Legion was born of three dozen worlds, they needed a new language to share. Argel Tal spoke it with a curious softness, almost scholarly in his tones.

Delvarus had grinned. ‘That’s Khârn’s excuse, as well.’

‘True enough. But Khârn is your primarch’s equerry and his name is known throughout the Legions. Delvarus is a name shouted here and here alone.’

‘Are you implying something, Word Bearer?’

Argel Tal’s dark eyes shone in the murk. ‘I thought I was directly stating it, but yes, you could say “implying” if you prefer.’

Delvarus was one of the few World Eaters not to shave his head. The discomfort of hair in his helm was irrelevant; he’d never cut his long black locks. In the pits, he wore it loose, and as he re-tied it in the wake of Argel Tal’s words, he looked between the Word Bearer and Khârn.

‘A death bout, then. Sanguis extremis.’

Both Khârn and Sigismund objected. The Black Knight refused on issues of honour, for the sin of slaying a cousin from another Legion, while Khârn had shaken his head, running his fingers along the edge of his toothless duelling axe.

‘It would be wrong to deprive the Triarii of their captain. Best take your anger elsewhere, Delvarus.’

Lhorke’s concerns had been eased by the display, as they always were when he saw the pit-fights still forming the core of the Legion’s bonds. But on the battlefield, the World Eaters were a changed force. Russ’s warning went unheeded. More and more, Angron would stalk from tactical briefings before any decisions were made, never citing the pains in his head but never needing to. His sons weren’t blind. Besides, they felt the same pain, forever growing like a cancer in their skulls. From a Legion once as concerned with logistics as any other, the XII was soon hurling men at enemy strongholds without thought of civilian casualties, let alone their own lives. They advanced ahead of their marked resupply points, outpacing their heavy armour, and caring nothing for how bitterly expensive each victory became, so long as the blood flowed.

‘Legion Master.’

His former title dragged him back from futile reverie. Lhorke had to crouch to make it through the corridor arch into the next chamber where the lesser Dreadnoughts waited. Neras had vox-blurted his name.

‘Do you hear that?’ Neras boomed from his ironform’s vocalisers. A squat, proud model ironform, rather than bearing its coffin on the front, Neras’s frontal armour was formed into an ornate helm with a T-shaped visor. Either side, murals of his victories were acid-etched into his sloping armour plating.

‘I hear it,’ Lhorke replied. Bootsteps, in the hallway ahead. Too heavy to be human.

He looked briefly at his massive metal fists, as if he were still alive and carried a bolter to reload. The huge gauntlets were bloodstained, with silvery grey metal showing beneath the remaining flecks of paint. He’d never killed an Ultramarine before this evening. Now he’d killed four himself, while the other wounded amassed their own tallies.

They powered up with a thought, marred only by the slightest time delay between his desire and their activation. Wreathed in shimmering, humming energy fields, the blood smears flash-fried to his weaponised hands bubbled and dissolved away.

‘Get to the bridge,’ he declared. ‘I will deal with these dregs and make my way to the primary engineering deck. Hold the strategium until my arrival. Now go, in the name of the Emp–’

Neras’s chassis gave a grinding gear-slip of a sound. Laughter, of a kind. ‘Old habits,’ the Dreadnought growled.

‘Go,’ Lhorke demanded.

The dead men separated at last, walking through corridors as familiar to Lhorke as anything in life. This ship – back in the age it bore the name Adamant Resolve – had been his to command.

‘They’re safe.’

The draconic shadow appeared by Khârn’s side again, its golden blade burning the air in wide, buzzing arcs. Wherever the sword cut, the air held the sea-salt smell of ozone.

‘Where?’ the World Eater asked. Above them, the avian shriek of single-man Gyrfalcon fighters split the sky. Around them, the World Eaters and Ultramarines still killed each other, trading exhausted blows. Sweat painted Khârn’s face, stinging his eyes, and he could feel the clumsy ache in his leaden limbs. The ground was lousy with the dead and the dying, making all footwork treacherous. Every warrior kept sliding on the blood-slick ceramite of the corpses beneath their boots.

‘They’re safe, damn you. I got them to my Fellblade.’ Argel Tal pulled his wings close with a crack like cloth sails catching wind. Khârn caught a split-second glance of them snapping tight to the Word Bearer’s back, both of the daemonic limbs ragged and bloody.

‘Khârn!’ he heard his name cried out above the chaos.

Endure. Survive. Fight. He lashed out with his weapons, thrusting into unprotected joints, battering other blades aside if that was what it took.

‘Khârn!’ the voice shouted again. ‘Face me, coward!’

Argel Tal laughed. ‘Someone knows you’re here.’

‘More fighting, less jesting.’ The World Eater backhanded one of his opponents away, but he staggered as his boot came down on a dead World Eater’s sloping pauldron. Unbalanced, he was easy prey – a sloppy parry snapped his chainsword halfway along its length, tracked teeth scattering like gambler’s dice. His opponent shield-bashed him back against Argel Tal, stumbling both of them.

The Word Bearer beat his wings to turn in a blur, his relic blade catching the blow meant to end Khârn’s life. Ultramarine and Gal Vorbak pushed against each other, energised blades grinding, raining sparks in an incandescent spray. The deadlock lasted a moment, no more, before Argel Tal’s greater strength started pushing the Evocatus back. His boots squealed over the stone as he tried to stand his ground.

Argel Tal’s eye lenses flared an unhealthy, crystal blue. Sick heat throbbed from his armour, emanating a plague victim’s final fever, and he spoke three words in a tongue that spilled into Khârn’s ears and scraped letters of fire behind his eyes.

‘Eshek’ra mughkal krikathaa.’

The Ultramarine’s fists opened, letting his sword fall. Before the warrior could offer any reaction or emotion at all, his helmeted head tumbled clear. Argel Tal booted the headless corpse in the chest, sending it to the ground with its brothers where it belonged.

Khârn felt blood trickling from his nose. ‘What was that language?’

‘I told him to drop his sword.’

‘That isn’t what I asked, brother.’

Argel Tal risked leaving himself defenceless, offering his hand to help Khârn rise. The World Eater fired from the ground, plasma blasting a hole through another Ultramarine’s chest. As the warrior fell, the axe he’d been raising to strike Argel Tal from behind clattered to the floor.

‘A child’s error,’ Khârn chided his brother, scrambling to his feet without taking the hand. His breath was sawing in and out of his body. ‘Focus.’

‘Khârn!’ came the shout again.

The centurion swore in Nagrakali. ‘Who is shouting that?’ he added in Gothic.

It was Argel Tal who answered. He aimed his golden blade deeper into the melee, where a cloaked and crested Ultramarines officer was carving his way towards them. He didn’t need his warriors to part the sea of enemies. He came in an unpretentious stride, crested helm bowed, a power sword in one hand, a gladius in the other. Khârn watched him disembowel one of Skane’s Destroyers with a sweep of his sword, while ramming the gladius home in another World Eater’s throat. Both blades slashed back from the dying warriors’ bodies in perfect order, only to catch an incoming axe strike, deflecting rather than blocking it. The World Eater pulled back for another swing, only to be parried a second time. He jerked back as the captain’s gladius sheathed itself in his belly, struggling free just in time for the sword to ram through his chest.

Even amidst the storm, Khârn breathed in slow awe. Perfect grace. Perfect fluidity. Perfect economy of movement and balance and application of strength.

He had to kill him. What a trophy that helm would make.

‘He’s mine,’ Khârn said. ‘He is mine.’

The captain couldn’t have heard, but he levelled his stabbing sword at Khârn all the same, marking his foe. ‘Khârn!’ he shouted again, vox-amplified by the muzzled Mark IV helm.

‘I think you might be his.’ Argel Tal was grinning, teeth white in his dusky face.

‘You take his honour guards,’ said Khârn.

The Word Bearer looked at the spearmen flanking their captain. Each of them bore a helm crested with a white horsehair tail. ‘There are four of them.’

‘There are indeed.’ Khârn kicked up a fallen chainsword from the ground, stealing the bloodstained blade from one of his dead brothers. ‘So I wish you luck.’

He heard Argel Tal’s wings spread with another cloth-sail crack, but he was already sprinting ahead. Ultramarines parted before him, weapons raised in defence as they backed away, funnelling his charge towards the Evocati captain. By contrast, World Eaters still hurled themselves at the swordsman, only to be cut down and kicked aside with shameful ease. As he ran, Khârn imagined the officer’s contempt etched clear across his face beneath the blue helmet.

The Nails gave a pleased pulse as his adrenaline flowed fresh, the feeling as soothing as ice on a burn.

‘Khârn.’ A hazy pict-feed flared into life at the edge of his retinal display. ‘Khârn, the Conqueror is back in orbit, but we’re still–’

‘Not now, Lotara.’

‘But–’

An irritated thought was all it took to kill her image and lock the signal out. There were other Legion officers, damn her. Officers not up to their throats in enemy heroes. She could harass them instead.

He knew that was the Nails talking. He didn’t care.

The Evocatus threw back his dust-darkened white cloak, casting it to the ground. His honour guards intercepted the World Eaters still seeking to reach their captain, cleaving them apart with blows from their halberds. Petty envy burned within Khârn that moment. Their unity of movement, their disciplined teamwork – when the World Eaters charged, they fell into barely bound packs, relying on ferocity and individual strength over any tactical cohesion. This was like looking at what might have been – and what once was – without the Nails.

Argel Tal landed at the heart of the honour guard quartet, wielding both spear and blade in fists that should have only been able to hold one or the other. No human could move as he moved; no legionary could, either. He melted away from every cut and chop and thrust that should have ended his life, reality itself rippling around him as he moved faster than mortal muscles could follow. The fluidity went past grace and into something almost boneless.

Khârn could hear his brother’s blended voices mocking the warriors, but couldn’t make out the words. It didn’t sound like the harsh, alien tongue he’d used before, for which Khârn was bemusedly grateful. That was his last thought before he reached the officer.

They met blade to blade, long enough for him to see the faint impression of eyes behind the captain’s coloured lenses.

‘Orfeo,’ the Ultramarine breathed. ‘Legatus of Armatura. Now you know the name of the warrior who will end your pathetic legend.’

‘Horus,’ Khârn replied. ‘Warmaster of the Imperium. Now you know the name of the next Emperor.’

They disengaged, throwing their weight against their joined blades to come apart cleanly. Both warriors were exhausted from hours of battle, and aware the eyes of their nearby kindred were beginning to fall upon their every movement. Breathless and aching, they brought their weapons up once more, no longer part of the wider battle at all.

The former Legion Master crouched beneath the archway as he entered the bridge. His walk had fallen into a halting limp, dragging the seized burden of one locked limb. Bolters still thudded, which boded ill, and everywhere he looked the deck was brutalised by scattered corpses and the aftermath of fragmentation grenades. If they lived through this – and he was no longer certain they would – the ship would need drydocking for overhaul.

Familiar figures were visible through the gunfight. Krydal was a one-armed wreck, gored by massed bolter fire and slumped at the base of Lotara Sarrin’s raised throne. Neras was down and twice as dead, the entire left side of his ironform melted to waxy slag by a vicious shot from a vape-gun.

Lotara herself was defying the protective wishes of her personal guard, crouched behind the tertiary weapons console and firing back at the Ultramarines holding the rear of the chamber. Her armsmen guards wore full suits of matt-red carapace armour with rebreathers and rangefinder goggles, and they crouched with her, ringing her with the fiercest loyalty. Lhorke saw her elbow one of them away when he sought to pull her back into cover. She didn’t even stop firing.

Of the several hundred crew that populated the strategium, at least three-quarters were dead or close enough not to matter. Lhorke knew it upon first glance, even without his scrolling auspex-scan feed telling him Deceased… Deceased… Deceased… with tracking flickers on every corpse in the room.

The Ultramarines turned away from the abundance of easy prey, sighting Lhorke down their gun barrels as he entered the chamber. Four of them remained, holding the balcony at the strategium’s rear, and of these last four, two were down and crippled, firing from where they lay. Even prone, they used their bodies as shields for their brothers crouching behind them.

The body of one other, already slain by massed shotgun and las-fire, lay by the command throne, risen above the charnel house of mortal corpses. Lhorke suspected he’d died inflicting casualties of a hundred to one in this nest of easy murder; butchery to do any legionary proud.

He ignored the cheers from the surviving bridge crew as he started his leaning, limping run. The bridge itself shook beneath his tread, ceiling spotlights shattering to rain glass shards on his etched armour plating. Lotara’s cheer was harder to ignore – he heard her swearing in gutter Nagrakali: ‘Get these dog-screwing whoresons off my ship!’

Bolt shells burst against his atomantic shield. A roiling bolt of plasma splashed over it, briefly lighting the energy screen with oily, refracted luminescence, only to dissipate into painless steam. Lhorke took their onslaught head-on, striding up the stairs, joints whirring out a grind-song despite the limp, as he pushed his ironform to move faster, faster.

His shield burst at point-blank range. It died with a final, gasping surge, sending worms of discharging electricity crawling across the power pack mounted on his back. It meant nothing. It meant less than nothing.

He crushed the first crawling Ultramarine beneath his massive foot, crumbling the warrior’s ceramite into mangled metal panels and smearing the pulped biological remains across the deck. Bolts clattered against his armour, decorating him in scorch marks, scrambling the delicate circuits of his retinal display yet not quite blanking his vision. Scratches. Flesh wounds, for want of a better term. Lhorke reached for the next two warriors, the combi-bolters in his fists opening up with nasty chatters even as he lunged to smash the enemies aside. He caught them both and started squeezing.

The Ultramarine in his left fist was dead before he clutched him, holed through by the combi-bolter volley. He shook the fresh corpse regardless, its limbs and neck breaking, before it was hurled across the bridge to crash along the deck.

The one in his right hand took several seconds to die, fighting and shouting in fruitless defiance against the slow-closing fingers. With a final meaty crunch, the warrior fell limp and gushed blood from a ruptured body. Lhorke hurled the organic detritus in the same direction as the last.

‘You,’ he said to the last Ultramarine. A more patient, sonorous threat had never been uttered on the Conqueror’s bridge.

The warrior was scrambling back, unable to run with the injuries to his knee and belly. Defiant to the very end, he raised his plasma gun. The magnetic coils glowed, then brightened, then went phosphorous.

Lhorke tore it from the warrior’s hand, compressing his iron claws and scrapping the priceless weapon without a thought. Its gathering power erupted in a torrent of liquid blue-white fire, eating into the Dreadnought’s arm. Retinal temperature gauges spiked to the accompaniment of warning runes. Lhorke looked through them, reaching down to clutch the Ultramarine’s leg as the warrior crawled away.

A twist, a rotation of his wrist servos, and the legionary’s spine crackled into worthless bone pebbles. Lhorke tossed the paralysed wretch away, towards a crowd of bridge crew armed with service pistols and unsheathed knives. They descended in a pack, finishing what the Dreadnought had begun.

He heard the Ultramarine scream, but only once. From the pain of being carved apart, rather than fear. Very admirable indeed.

Lhorke walked past the central auspex array table, where a legless young woman, surgically implanted to the scanner machinery around her, was shivering on her augmetic suspension cables. Her eyes were wide, unseeing. How she still lived after being at the eye of the firefight storm, he could only guess. The wires and leads linking her head to the ceiling rattled as she trembled with shock. He almost reached out a hand to comfort her, before recalling just what he was now. Dead men entombed in towering bodies of oil-bleeding iron were not, by and large, a comfort to victims of trauma.

He passed her, limping to where Lotara was rising from cover with her overprotective armsmen.

‘Captain Sarrin.’

‘Lhorke.’ She wiped her forehead with her sleeve, craning her neck to look up at him. She scarcely reached his thigh.

‘These were the last.’

‘Thank you, Legion Master.’

He almost said I need to rest, but caught the slip before it left his speaker grille. ‘I will submit myself for repairs,’ he said instead, then hesitated. ‘With your permission.’

She nodded, seeing the eerie calmness of devastation’s aftermath taking hold of her bridge. Somehow, it was worse than the gunfight.

‘I have some work to do here.’ As if just recalling, she cleared her throat and asked, ‘How many of your brothers still walk the decks?’

He performed a vox-relayed calculation, citing vital signs uploaded to his retinal feed. ‘Three,’ he said. ‘Including myself.’

Something like guilt paled her skin. ‘Thank you, Lhorke. Convey my thanks to them, as well.’

He bowed – a gesture that didn’t come naturally to the Contemptor-class ironform, nor to the warrior bound within this one – and left the bridge in her hands.

Distraction was a warrior’s worst enemy. More than once, Khârn’s gaze snapped to the wealth of inscriptions on Orfeo’s armour, unintentionally reading a detail or two. The captain had fought in more campaigns across the Eastern Fringe than Khârn was even aware had taken place. No wonder the XIII claimed five hundred planets as their kingdom.

You couldn’t parry a power blade with a chainsword; doing it once was pushing your luck, doing it twice was asking to be disarmed. The energy corona around the former would break the latter apart. Chain-blades parried poorly at the best of times, always with the risk of losing teeth if struck at the wrong angle.

The disadvantage of chainsword and gladius would have had Khârn on the defensive, but the ground was thick with corpses and unclaimed weapons. Barely twenty heartbeats had passed before he managed to steal a fallen Ultramarine’s power sword. He grinned as he thumbed the activation rune, blinking away the sweat stewing his eyes. Lightning snaked along the silver steel, rippling from the generator in the hilt and dissolving the dusty blood that had dirtied the blade.

They met again, each of them forced to fight as their weapons allowed. Orfeo led with his long sword, cleaving in a series of arcing chops, while using his gladius main-gauche to parry more than thrust. As a stabbing weapon, it was worthless without a kill-plunge to the belly.

Khârn had the advantage of reach with his two longer blades, but his chainsword was a fragile boon at best, useless against the captain’s reinforced ceramite and already spitting teeth from deflecting the shortsword’s infrequent lunges. It was almost amusing how every other warrior avoided them both now, making room for the fight between their commanders. Energy flared each time the two power swords clashed. Khârn lost track of time, focusing everything he had on the battle before him.

‘That isn’t an axe,’ Orfeo laughed at one point. He parried another of Khârn’s cuts, and the World Eater heard the smile in the other warrior’s voice. ‘Look at you with that blade. Always trying the edge. However did you earn your reputation, Khârn? Who trained you to fight as though all foes were lumber to be chopped?’

Khârn lashed back with three cuts, as quick as his burning muscles would allow. Each one clanged as it was blocked and turned aside.

‘Lhorke,’ he said. ‘Legion Master of the War Hounds.’

Their blades locked again, and Khârn found himself glad of the moment’s respite. He tried to catch his breath, but Orfeo disengaged with a flourishing spin, launching immediately into another barrage of blows.

‘Lhorke is dead,’ Orfeo voxed from his helm’s grille. ‘Lhorke died on Jeracau.’

Khârn was backing up now, his footwork fumbling on the tide of corpses beneath his boots. How long had he been fighting? It could have been hours, and he’d believe any man that told him so.

‘You run from me, World Eater? The great Khârn, fleeing from a fight?’

The Nails replied before Khârn could. They stabbed into his skull, pulling at the nerves in his brain, sending electrical fire through the blood vessels. He screamed to vent pain, charging in to swing at the advancing Ultramarine. He cut high. Orfeo parried, and cleaved low.

Fresh agony danced a line down Khârn’s side, adding a second carving along the wound he’d taken earlier that day. With a grunt, he staggered in a halting spin, bringing his blades down in time to turn back a thrust that would have cored him from spine to belly.

A kick to Orfeo’s thigh forced the swordsman to stumble, but Khârn swore as he missed the sweet spot to break the knee. Nevertheless, he took what ease he could get, moving back and casting the defanged chainsword aside. In its absence, he clutched the power blade tighter.

‘I was never much of a swordsman.’ He tried to say it through a smile, showing no pain, but the Nails turned it into a rictus, pulling at one side of his mouth in quick twitches.

‘Brother,’ came two voices at once. Khârn dared a glance away from Orfeo.

Argel Tal drew close, wings folding, his spined and calcified armour creaking. Whatever beast lived inside his heart, it made itself known, warping the silver-faced helm to the visage of a flayed skull, then Khârn’s own features, then those of Argel Tal himself, giving him a death mask of his own features cast in silver.

More World Eaters closed in, jackal-packs of them, tilting their heads or watching in mute silence. Orfeo seemed not to notice.

‘Look around you, captain,’ Khârn said quietly, and with gentle respect.

Orfeo did, turning slowly, faced with an army of ragged, bloody XII legionaries standing knee-deep in the blue and white dead. Behind them, scarlet Word Bearers crouched among the corpses and brandished silver knives. Orfeo saw them digging through the fallen, chanting in Colchisian as they cast prophecies in entrails, or leashed war totems together from Ultramarines carcasses. Wounded survivors were already being dragged for crucifixion against XVII Legion tanks.

‘The war is over,’ said Argel Tal.

Orfeo turned back to the Legion commanders. ‘Do you say so?’

Argel Tal gestured to the lone champion. ‘I believe the scene speaks for itself.’

The Ultramarine nodded. ‘Then I accept your surrender,’ he said. The World Eaters shared a low laugh.

Orfeo wasn’t finished. ‘Tell me why you came to this world.’

‘To kill it,’ replied Khârn.

‘To make it suffer,’ Argel Tal amended. ‘To make the cries of Armatura’s population pierce the veil and enrich the warp. It is all part of a great chorus, playing out across your kingdom of Ultramar.’

Orfeo’s officer crest wavered as he shook his head. ‘Madness.’

‘To the ignorant,’ Argel Tal allowed. He spoke softly, never threatening, almost regretful. ‘But you will shortly see what lies on the Other Side. Your screams will add to the song, as your spirit boils away to oblivion in the Sea of Souls.’

‘Madness,’ Orfeo said again.

‘Your brothers spoke of courage,’ interrupted Khârn. ‘Courage and honour.’

‘And you speak of knowing no fear,’ Argel Tal added, his words blending with Khârn’s. ‘Yet Macraggian poetry has always felt foul on the tongue.’

Orfeo looked between the ragged form of Khârn and the vicious thing Argel Tal had become. He pulled his helm free, breathed in the choking reek of his burning world, and lifted his gladius for the last time. It hissed as Khârn’s blood baked on the live blade.

‘Enough talk, traitors. Come, learn the price of setting foot on the Five Hundred Worlds. Live or die, it will spare me from your preaching.’

Argel Tal stepped forwards, but Khârn warned him back.

‘Let me finish this.’

But nearby legionaries were shoved aside by a taller, bulkier figure approaching. The primarch was lacerated by a hundred wounds he did not feel.

‘No,’ Angron breathed through sticky teeth. ‘Let me.’

ELEVEN

The End of Armatura
Triarii
Homecoming

‘I will remember these screams until my dying day.’

The toneless quality of Argel Tal’s voices suggested neither disgust nor pleasure, but a perspective detached from both. If anything, he sounded weary.

The Word Bearer was himself again, the silver death-mask gone, his wings melted back into the ceramite of his armour. One moment he’d walked with Khârn through the dead and the dying in what his Legion whisperingly revered as his ‘divine form’. The next, Khârn had been walking alongside his brother as he knew him before Isstvan.

Just how and when the Change took hold of the Word Bearer was something Khârn couldn’t quite grasp. Sometimes it seemed slow, sometimes it happened in the span of a blink. Sometimes it was subtle, other times overt enough that there seemed little left of the warrior Khârn admired beneath the slavering thing in Argel Tal’s armour.

The Word Bearer removed his helm, closing his pale eyes for a moment and breathing in the taste of the charred air. It smelled of victory, but that was a laughable truth. Victory and defeat smelled the same – it never mattered which side’s tanks were burning and whose blood had flowed. Death still assaulted the same senses in the same ways.

The screaming continued unabated. Khârn had been the first to turn his back on their source, and to his surprise, Argel Tal had been the second. Now they walked together, taking the names of the slain, recording them for the necrologists.

‘Your men do worse,’ Khârn pointed out. He gestured as they made their way through the plaza, where the two Legions were dealing with the distasteful duty of finishing the fight. The World Eaters were mercy-killing any survivors among their fallen foes. The Word Bearers were dragging injured Ultramarines towards scarlet tanks and gunships, to be taken back into orbit and dealt with away from prying eyes. Arguments over the choicest wounded were breaking out between the warriors in white and those in red, but the presence of their commanders restored a semblance of discipline.

‘Worse is a matter of perspective,’ Argel Tal replied.

Captain Orfeo’s screams rose above the combined cries and moans of all the other Ultramarines currently being mutilated and sawn apart by XVII Legion knives.

Khârn looked over a gladius he’d acquired from amongst the dead. ‘Why does that one warrior’s agony distress you, given what your men are doing here? Why is it that his fate leaves you sneering?’

‘You will not like the answer, brother,’ said Argel Tal, recording the name of another fallen Word Bearer as he did. ‘Don’t make me speak it.’

‘Speak it, anyway. For the sake of the next time we’re chained together in the pits.’

‘Deal with him first.’ Argel Tal gestured to a fallen World Eater, clad in the colours of a sergeant. ‘Blood of the True, is that Gharte?’

Khârn moved to the corpse, atop a loose mound of three Ultramarines. Damn it. It was Gharte.

Khârn crouched by the body, lifting the sergeant’s head in his hands and gently turning the helm this way and that. He had no idea where his own helmet was. He’d been breathing in the gritty air for so long that, despite the genetic enhancements done to his respiration, Armatura’s taste was a smoky itch in the back of his throat.

‘Captain,’ the wounded warrior voxed. ‘I can’t move.’

Gharte had no legs below his mid-thighs – Khârn couldn’t begin to guess where they were in this sea of mangled corpses – and his chest was a ruin of violated breastbone and ceramite.

‘Bide,’ he said, lowering the warrior’s helm. ‘Kargos will come.’

The warrior gripped Khârn’s collar with weak fingers. ‘The Nails are aflame, even now.’ He coughed something wet into his helm. ‘How can that be? I’m dying, and they still sing? What do they want from me?’

‘Bide,’ Khârn said again, though he knew it was useless.

‘Just give me the Peace.’ The warrior sank back to the ground. ‘Seventy years of serving the Butcher and his Nails is long enough.’

Khârn wished he’d not heard those words. Discomfort danced its tingling way down his backbone.

‘You served well, Gharte.’ Khârn disengaged the seals at the warrior’s throat, lifting the helm clear. There wasn’t much left of the sergeant’s face. Something must have reflected in Khârn’s expression, for Gharte made his devastated face into something like a grin.

‘That bad, eh?’ he asked. His gurgling laughter became another cough.

Khârn’s reply was solemn obedience. He held the gladius above Gharte’s left eye, its point a finger’s breadth above the dilated pupil.

‘Any last words?’

‘Aye. Piss on Angron’s grave when he finally lies dead.’

Khârn wished he’d not heard those words, either.

He rammed the blade down, with the sound of dry twigs breaking beneath a boot, and the faintest clink of the point striking the stone under Gharte’s head.

He rose after it, hearing Argel Tal speaking to another of the fallen.

‘Greetings,’ the Word Bearer said, pressing a boot onto an Ultramarine’s chestplate. The warrior clawed useless scrapes against Argel Tal’s leg. ‘Even in death, you still fight. So defiant, Evocatus? You should have worn Dorn’s yellow.’

Khârn drew nearer. ‘I’ll end him.’

‘No.’

The World Eater shook his head at Argel Tal’s refusal. ‘How can you hold such a depth of hatred for this Legion? Their backs are broken. They suffer as the Ravens and Salamanders suffered on the killing fields. Isn’t that enough? Is your sore pride still not avenged?’

‘Hate them?’ Argel Tal looked up, confusion slowly giving way to humour. ‘That’s what you think? Why would I hate the Ultramarines, Khârn?’

‘Monarchia. Your humiliation, kneeling before Guilliman.’

Argel Tal’s eyes glittered in amusement. Khârn was less sure of his words with each passing second.

‘Do you hate the Wolves,’ Argel Tal asked, ‘for descending upon you?’

‘That’s different.’ The World Eater bared his teeth. ‘We weren’t humiliated. The Wolves didn’t win.’

‘No? I heard a different tale. I heard it was Russ who howled in triumph when dawn brought the Night of the Wolf to an end.’

‘Lies.’ Khârn barked a nasty laugh. ‘Lies and slander.’

They regarded each other a moment, before Argel Tal cracked the ghost of a smile. ‘Thousands of the Legion detested the Ultramarines. Lorgar ordered many of us to gather when we were already en route to Calth. I, and the others who would become commanders and apostles among the Vakrah Jal. He wanted our counsel on what to do with those among the Legion he no longer trusted. Our Legion culled its ranks in a trickle down the decades, but nothing like the Isstvan Atrocity that Angron is so proud of. Lorgar knew loyalty within the Word Bearers was never in doubt. Competence was a different matter.’

Even Khârn was ignoring the struggling Ultramarine now. He was silent as Argel Tal continued.

‘Lord Aurelian asked what we should do with the warriors he felt were no longer reliable. Those whose hatred burned brighter than their sense. Tens of thousands of them, Khârn. Whole companies. Whole Chapters. Their rage was no longer pure.’

‘You killed them?’

‘Not directly. We gave them the mission they craved. They sailed with Erebus and Kor Phaeron, to martyr themselves in glory.’

‘You can’t be serious,’ said Khârn.

‘As serious as the wasteland this world has become. Your Legion was purged on Isstvan III, brother. Mine was purged at Calth.’

‘But we’ve had word from Calth. The Seventeenth won. You won.’

‘Victory is a matter of perspective.’ He scowled at Khârn’s expression. ‘I don’t understand why treachery is so unpalatable to you. You have no sense of honour to offend. You took part in the annihilation of a quarter of your own Legion-brothers, now you act affronted we allow ours to kill themselves in a sacred crusade.’

The Word Bearer looked down at the Ultramarine he was pinning to the churned earth. ‘I don’t hate the Thirteenth Legion, Khârn. The Emperor forced us to our knees, not Guilliman. Here and now, their suffering is symbolic and serves a higher purpose. Nothing more, nothing less.’

Khârn watched the fallen Space Marine scratching at Argel Tal’s greaves. ‘This torture is childish. What will one man’s pain add to the song?’

‘Everything,’ Argel Tal sounded distant, staring down at the cobalt-clad warrior. ‘Each moment of agony is a note in the melody.’

‘Enough preaching, brother. Save the mysticism for those in your Legion’s red. Just kill the poor wretch.’

He expected a weary sigh and a grudging refusal. Instead, Argel Tal drew his spear. The Word Bearer’s grip on its haft was enough to quicken the blade, generating the aura of killing lightning. With a simple downward thrust, he planted the halberd through the Ultramarine’s chest.

The warrior quivered and fell still, giving one last jerk when his killer wrenched the spear free.

‘Mercy suits you,’ Khârn told Argel Tal. ‘Slaughter is one thing, torture is another. Leave that to your Chaplains.’

‘Mercy is for the weak,’ the Word Bearer replied.

‘Then what does it make you, when I’ve witnessed you being merciful?’

Argel Tal scratched at the dark skin of his cheek. Stubble was growing there in a faint black shadow. He looked ever more like the desertborn boy-turned-warrior.

‘I have never pretended to be anything but weak, Khârn. I don’t enjoy war, yet I fight. I don’t relish torture, yet I inflict it. I don’t revere the gods, yet I serve their holy purpose. Humanity’s weakest souls will always cling to the words “I was just following orders”. They cower behind those words, making a virtue of their own weakness, lionising brutality over nobility. I know that when I die, I’ll have lived my whole life shrouded by that same excuse.’

Khârn swallowed. ‘So will I. So will any Space Marine.’

Argel Tal looked at him, as if that proved his point.

They moved on, eyes raking the ground in casual discontent. Neither relished this task, but both refused to leave it solely to their men. Neither officer would give orders they weren’t prepared to carry out themselves.

As they walked and murdered with mercy, Khârn watched the Word Bearers at work. Historically, the Legions rarely indulged in taking prisoners, but here was another excess of the new age. In contrast to their ascetic reputation, the Word Bearers now embraced every opportunity to herd the wounded into their cargo holds. A prisoner had a thousand uses beyond mere servitude in the slave decks.

Warriors of the XVII wrote parchment transcriptions of the Book of Lorgar in the blood of captured enemies. They decorated their armour with trinkets of scrimshawed bone and flayed skin. Cloaks of human leather were commonplace, many of which also served as fine tableaus for illuminated scripture. Horns of brass, bronze and ivory rose from the legionaries’ helms, cutting stark shadows against the candlelit walls aboard their voidships.

As Khârn drew breath to speak again, Orfeo’s distant screams reached a crescendo. He saw Argel Tal cringe.

‘What’s wrong with you?’

‘Your primarch is insane,’ replied the Word Bearer. ‘Worse, he’s dying.’

Khârn stopped walking. ‘What?’

Several legionaries turned to watch their officers. Argel Tal kept walking, knowing Khârn would follow. Sure enough, he was right.

‘Angron is killing that captain so horrifically because a mechanical parasite is stunting the function of his brain. My Legion inflicts suffering because pain serves a metaphysical purpose. It pleases the Pantheon. It shows devotion and invites their favour. Suffering is sacred to them. Pain is prayer.’

Khârn listened, eyes narrowed at the irrelevancy. ‘Angron is not dying,’ he said.

‘You don’t need me to tell you that he is. You’ve said yourself, he’s getting worse. What, pray tell, is the logical conclusion at the end of that degeneration?’

‘Has Lorgar told you this?’

‘Lorgar tells me almost nothing any more. He’s distracted by the great song. He hears it more clearly than he hears any of our voices, even when we stand next to him.’

The World Eater narrowed his eyes again. ‘Do you hear it?’

‘The warp’s tune? No. I hear Cyrene when I sleep. She dies every night in my dreams, but I never hear the holy hymn. That gift is my primarch’s alone. He shared it with me once, letting me sense a fragment of what he hears. The music underlying reality. The sound made by every soul that is now and that ever was.’

For once, Khârn felt no inclination to draw back from such superstitious talk. ‘And what was it like?’

Argel Tal took a slow breath. ‘Like Orfeo sounds now. Only worse.’

Khârn didn’t look back the way they’d come. Orfeo’s screams still echoed over the battlefield.

The Word Bearer spoke on, his voice more sibilant than deep; more daemon than man. Liquid silver began to bubble in the sockets where his eyes had been.

‘The warp around this world is boiling, Khârn. The amount of suffering taking place across its cities is enough to draw the Four gods’ eyes. And how many other worlds in Ultramar share this fate? How many more, before we call our crusade complete? This isn’t conjecture, nor is it blind faith. Soon we will push the surviving population into skinning pits and then heap them onto funeral pyres while they still breathe. The true Pantheon will watch, and smile, and bless us for our devotion. All that suffering, Khârn. All that pain.’

Khârn halted to ram his gladius through the neck of a crawling Ultramarine. ‘So you keep saying, but the heavens aren’t burning in a warp storm.’

‘Not yet.’ Argel Tal’s eyes still shimmered, mercury-wet.

‘I am weary of your Legion claiming sadism as a holy virtue.’

Something in Khârn’s voice made Argel Tal glance over at him. The silver dried, hardened, and flaked away. His own eyes looked back at Khârn.

‘Don’t mock me,’ the Word Bearer said. ‘I didn’t ask for this to be the underlying Truth to existence. I take no pleasure in offering agony in worship to gods that cannot be ignored and yet do not deserve to exist. But life isn’t what we wish it to be. Or do you actually want that neural implant squatting like a spider upon the cobwebbing blood vessels of your brain?’

They stared at one another for a long moment, until both broke into low chuckles. The tension dissipated, as simple as that. It had always been this way between them, since they’d found themselves knocked onto the deck within seconds of their first pit-fight. Their Legions couldn’t be more different, but they shared a bleak amusement at being carried along by the storm.

Argel Tal gently kicked a downed Ultramarine and moved on when the body remained a corpse.

‘Sometimes I ask myself how we reached this point,’ he said. ‘Fighting ignorance and slavery with genocide. We can either live in delusion and darkness, or become something we hate. My nights are haunted by the shrieking of a blind girl I failed to save, and a warrior with a mechanical parasite in his skull and the daemon wrapped around my soul are my closest brothers.’ He smiled wearily. ‘We’re definitely on the wrong side, Khârn.’

‘How can you say that?’

‘Because both sides are wrong.’

Captain Sarrin met them on the deck. They’d wanted to come up with Syrgalah, riding in the salvage ship with her wounded form rather than coming ahead on a personnel shuttle. But a summons was a summons.

Lotara intercepted them as they disembarked, practically running to the gang-ramp. Servitors and cowled Mechanicum adepts moved aside for her, recognising her from her uniform, or the Blood Hand on her chest. World Eaters were spilling from their gunships elsewhere in a stomping tide of filthy ceramite. The hangar smelled of fyceline and the chalky scent of urban ruin.

‘Keeda,’ she said. ‘Tell me the reports are wrong.’

Keeda still wore her crew overalls, with her visored helmet clipped to the side of her belt. She supported Toth, whose head was bandaged in clean linen.

‘Captain.’ Toth gave an awkward salute. The brash manufactory sounds of the Conqueror’s hangar were already playing havoc with his sore skull. The heatwashes from engines powering down didn’t help, either.

‘Just tell me,’ Lotara said.

‘He’s dead,’ admitted Keeda. ‘Syrgalah is down. The old man died with her.’

Lotara covered her mouth with both hands. Not given to dramatic displays of emotion, she still needed a moment to catch her breath.

‘Moderati Bly,’ said a voice from behind her. ‘Moderati Kol. I’ll take your report at once.’

The three of them turned to the speaker. He was short, rounded by sloth, with a widow’s peak of dark hair thinning above two bionic eyes. His machine eyes clicked and whirred as they refocused, looking between the two crew members. He favoured Lotara with a slightly more respectful ‘Captain’, followed by a crisp salute.

‘Princeps Penultima,’ Lotara greeted him in return.

‘Penultima no longer. Remember to update your archives, captain. With the passing of Venric Solostine, I am Princeps Ultima of Legio Audax.’

‘What you are, Audun, is an officious little shit grabbing for the old man’s rank pins before his bones are even cold.’

The portly Titan officer stood straighter. ‘We all mourn the loss of Princeps Solostine, flag-captain. I will let your emotional outburst pass unrecorded, but please address me with the respect due my rank in the future.’

Lotara was already ignoring him, her eyes on Keeda and Toth. ‘I’m glad you made it off that bloody rock. Will Syrgalah walk again?’

‘I think so,’ said Keeda.

‘She’s in a bad way,’ Toth confessed.

‘So are you.’ Lotara forced a smile. ‘Good luck with the Ember Queen. I’ll make sure she’s brought up with all honours, and granted priority docking.’

Audun Lyrac cleared his throat. ‘Whether she walks again or not depends on salvageability.’

Keeda went pale. Toth grunted something obscene. Lotara rounded on the new lord of the Legio Audax, but her words were drowned out by the howling engines of an incoming Stormcrow gunship. Its forward-swept wings cast a vulture’s shadow on the deck.

‘…my ship,’ Lotara finished over the quieting engines. ‘Is that clear?’

‘Uh, perfectly, ma’am.’ Audun drummed his thick fingers on his uniformed belly. He’d heard maybe one word in ten, but it didn’t pay to push the flag-captain’s temper.

Lotara looked pointedly at the two Titan crew members. ‘I want complete copies of your reports. If I don’t get them, I’ll know why.’

Toth nodded, and Keeda smiled. ‘Aye, ma’am.’

‘Good. Now go to the apothecarion and get Toth patched up.’ She stepped back, making way for them. Just as she turned to begin the long journey back to the bridge, she noticed just who was leaving the Stormcrow. The warrior’s crested helm marked him out above his brethren, but she’d have known him purely from the bronze versions of the XII Legion symbol on both of his shoulder guards.

She watched him as he descended the gang-ramp into the hangar, his walk assured, his grace undeniable, his arrogance unbounded. He spoke to his companions, ignoring the human serfs and hangar crew going about their business around him.

Very calmly, Lotara Sarrin drew her laspistol, took aim, and shot a World Eaters captain in the face.

His head snapped back from the las-beam’s impact, and she had a momentary flush of pleasure at scoring a truly wicked shot, before the World Eaters circled their captain and raised their bolters, aiming across the crowded hangar deck.

There was, very distinctly, just long enough for Lotara to think they won’t shoot, before they shot. She saw the flare of muzzle flashes as their guns kicked in their fists. Time didn’t slow down as she’d been led to believe by the war-sagas. She barely had time to blink before the bolts detonated in the air not six metres from her face, spraying her with burning, stinging shrapnel.

Serfs and thralls were scattering with the same haste as cockroaches fleeing a sudden light. She stood dumbstruck for one of the first times in her life, unsure why she was still alive, yet more annoyed they’d dared to shoot her aboard her own ship.

Another World Eater moved to stand by her side, his hand raised to ward off further attack from the captain’s bodyguards. He spoke a single word, soft and low.

‘Enough.’

The others weren’t listening, and the captain wasn’t dead. He came to his feet, storming towards her at the head of nine of his brothers. A meteor hammer rattled loose on its chain, hanging from his right fist.

‘You puling little whore,’ he snarled down at her. ‘How dare you?’ He pulled the weapon back, activating its spiked head, meaning to wipe her from the face of the deck. Lotara spat at his boots, but the World Eater at her side took another step forwards, preventing the two of them from coming to blows.

‘I said enough.’ He kept his hand raised, warning them back. ‘Stand down, Delvarus.’

The Triarii captain turned his grim-faced helm towards the Codicier, eye lenses gleaming. ‘You have no authority over me, Esca. The bitch shot me. Get out of my way.’

‘That,’ Esca replied patiently, ‘will not be happening. Move away.’

The other Triarii pulled steel, as another three World Eaters came to stand by Lotara. She looked up at them, each of them a full head and a half taller than her. All three wore Destroyers black.

‘Problem, captain?’ said the sergeant, in a voice laced by vox-corruption.

Delvarus pointed at the mortal woman in the middle of the towering pack of legionaries. ‘She–’

‘I wasn’t asking you, Captain Delvarus. I was asking Captain Sarrin.’ He looked down at her, his empty grenade bandolier clanking against his chestplate.

‘Nothing I can’t handle, Skane. But you’re welcome to stay anyway.’

More Triarii were arriving to swell the ranks of those around Delvarus. The captain’s cloak was ruined from the surface war, but he imperiously cast its ragged remnants over one shoulder.

‘This doesn’t concern either of you,’ he said. ‘Sergeant, Codicier, you’re dismissed.’

They ignored him. Lotara spat on his boots again. ‘You abandoned the ship, Delvarus. That’s dereliction of duty. Every life we lost in that boarding action is blood on your hands.’

He laughed down at her. ‘You were boarded? When I left the ship, the fight was a foregone conclusion. How did you manage to get boarded, Lotara?’

She smiled, the sweetest knife of a smile. ‘Would you prefer I took this to the primarch?’

‘Aye, perhaps I would. You think he’ll even care? He barely knows who he is, any more. Dereliction of duty may be a grave threat to an Ultramarine, but we’re a little more grounded in the realities of war. Now get out of my face, girl. I’ll let this insult pass once. Try it again, and I’ll give your skull to my artificers as a pot for night soil.’

More legionaries gathered on both sides. ‘This looks entertaining,’ said Kargos, moving next to Skane. ‘Have we missed something?’

‘She shot me,’ Delvarus said.

Kargos snorted, sounding suspiciously like a snigger. There was a similar bark of vox-chuckling from Skane’s augmetic throat.

‘Well, I’m sure you deserved it,’ the Apothecary said.

‘You aren’t funny, Kargos.’

Kargos was still grinning, iron teeth on show. ‘Maybe not, but you are. Getting shot on your own hangar deck? I only wish we still had remembrancers around to record that in your archives of personal heroism.’

Delvarus gave a snort of derision and turned away. ‘I’m done with this idiocy.’

‘Stand your ground, soldier.’

The Triarii captain halted, and turned with a feline and somehow amused slowness, to regard the woman who’d addressed him.

‘What is it, Lotara?’

‘You will address me as Captain Sarrin. And you are confined to your arming chamber until I say otherwise. Discipline exists even if you consider yourself above it, Delvarus.’

‘Enough, girl. You’re still alive. The ship’s still in one piece.’

She stepped from the protection of Skane, Esca and Kargos, until she was right before the Triarii, staring up at him with narrowed eyes. Her head reached his chestplate. Barely.

‘We lost over two thousand crew to the Thirteenth Legion’s bolters, you stupid whoreson. The Ultramarines knew where to board us, and where to strike. Two thousand men and women dead because you wanted to chase glory down there in the dust. Not slave-deck dregs and war fodder, Delvarus. Trained, vital crew from the command and primary enginarium decks. We sustained enough internal damage over several systems that the Conqueror won’t function fully until she’s been drydocked for a month or more. Am I making myself clear, you arrogant swine? You have your orders. Now get out of my sight.’

For a moment, it looked as though he’d refuse. In the end, Delvarus inclined his head in a nod, saluted her with a fist over his heart, and led his men away.

‘I’m going back to the bridge,’ she told Esca. ‘Thank you for doing… whatever it is you did. With the bolt shells, I mean.’

The Librarian bowed, his ravaged and restitched face in its usual hideous calm. ‘Hunt well, captain.’

She looked around the battle-damaged crowd of World Eaters around her, with their weapons in their hands. How many people had died with a scene just like this as the last thing they ever saw?

‘Thank you, all of you.’ They each nodded, only dispersing once she walked away.

On one of the gantries overlooking the hangar deck, a figure three times the height of a legionary stood in contemplative silence, still the way only statues and corpses can be, for he was a little of both. He watched and learned, and in knowing, he began to plan.

Perhaps sensing something, the Codicier Esca turned and looked up at the secondary loading platform, where Lhorke stood alone. He raised a hand in greeting to the former Legion Master.

Lhorke returned it, raising his iron fist.

For a time, the Chaplain lay in the gloom, recovering from the trauma of transit. His abiding memory was of a sun’s death, shrieking its radiation across the void, painting a whole world with poison. Despite the chill bathing his body, the thought brought forth a sense of contentment. It was good to serve. It was even better to serve well.

He lay there, with his heartbeat serving as a metronome for the passing of time. When the shakes abated, he rose to his feet, casting cursory glances over his undamaged armour. Even his parchment scrolls were intact. An omen?

Yes. Surely.

A good omen.

The grilled deck clanked beneath his boots as he made his way through the arched halls of the Fidelitas Lex. The first menials he saw were two slaves in Legion tunics, whispering in an alcove, sharing smuggled power packs. The trivialities of mortal life and the human communities aboard the warship meant nothing to him. Even so, he was polite and reserved. The application of violence to reach one’s ends should be used as a scalpel, not a bludgeon.

They heard his armour, his bootsteps, and tried to run. He stopped them with his measured, considerate voice. No sense harming them. All he needed was the date.

‘Wait,’ he asked them. ‘What is the flagship’s chronometric count?’

They told him, and he felt the press of tension ebbing. Calth was no more than a week ago. Good. Very good.

It was evidently their turn to speak, for the two cowering slaves abased themselves, praying to him as the messenger of the gods. One of them risked a beating by touching the holy Word inked onto parchment and bound to the Dark Apostle’s armour.

He let them live unharmed. He even blessed them in the names of the Four, and wished them long and faithful lives.

‘Thank you, great one,’ whispered the first.

‘May the gods bless you,’ the second wept. ‘My Lord Erebus.’

TWELVE

A Legion’s Leaders
My Brother, My Enemy
Salt the Earth

The four gathered together in the Peregrinus Basilica, with the three coming straight from Armatura to join the one who had prayed among the stars. The fleet drifted above them, spreading out in high orbit now the battle was over. Debris littered the void, still a danger to navigation, and the armada’s captains pulled their vessels back to avoid collisions with the graveyard of Ultramarines hulks.

Lorgar was out of his armour, clad in a hooded red robe – a simple garment, woven from the silk of Colchisian desert worms, sporting no decoration or embellishment. The priests from before the tempestuous faith wars of Lorgar’s homeworld had worn something similar. The hood was raised, leaving his features in soft shadow.

Angron, Khârn and Argel Tal still wore their battle armour – each suit emitting the unhealthy crackles and fuzzes of abused servos. The knee joint of the primarch’s bronze gladiatorial wargear sparked when he put weight on it. Khârn’s white armour was stained grey by dust and dirt, with frequent splotches of gore marking the ceramite in placidly hypnotic dappling. Argel Tal’s armour bore the same bruises, though the holy scarlet hid the damage far better. He kept moving his arm, bending the elbow with a nasty grind of fibre-bundle cabling, to keep the joint from seizing.

The formality seen so often in other Legions was absent, here. On a golden plaque by the chamber’s black iron altar, Colchisian runes stated in elegant script: ‘Here all stand equal beneath the gaze of the gods.’

Lorgar passed among the bookshelves, letting his fingers stroke over the spines of the leatherbound books in their neat rows.

Argel Tal and Khârn shared a look; Lorgar’s hand was pale skin turned golden by runic tattoos once more. No sign of the plasma burns marked his flesh.

‘Twenty-six worlds have fallen,’ said the Bearer of the Word to his brother, his son, his nephew. ‘Armatura was one of the last. The others, it seems, can be accounted as the warp delaying our fleets. But the numbers begin to reach us now and this is where we stand. Twenty-six worlds slain, their populations butchered, their pain manifesting as prayer in the Empyrean.’

Angron glanced up, his bloodshot eyes not soothed by the dark, nor by the slow dance of the two Legions’ ships above.

‘What of Calth?’

‘Calth makes twenty-seven,’ Lorgar amended.

‘No.’ The World Eater’s struggle to concentrate was like a war being waged across his ruined face. A war fought in twitches and tics and slow, low growls. ‘No, I mean the storm. You said there was a warp storm at Calth. It isn’t spreading like you promised.’

Lorgar continued reading the books’ spines as he walked. ‘The song hasn’t yet reached its crescendo, but clearly the analogy is lost on you. Imagine instead that all of this slaughter is a monument. A pyramid. It won’t be complete until the capstone is placed. Only then will it point to the stars.’

Angron grunted in annoyance. Khârn sighed.

‘Fine, fine,’ Lorgar chuckled. ‘In terms a child would understand? Everything we do here reverberates through the warp, but a veil still divides our realities. A ritualised supplication will release the energies we are harnessing, opening the way for the warp to spill through into the material realm. At Calth, Erebus and Kor Phaeron killed a sun to serve as their ritual’s capstone. When enough of the Five Hundred Worlds burn, I will fashion a capstone of my own. But it must be much, much grander than the slow death of Calth.’

He held up a healed finger, silencing their questions before they could be voiced. ‘Don’t ask what, for I don’t yet know. A death of monumentally symbolic importance, most likely.’

Angron grinned at the idea. ‘How casually you speak of destruction now. Horus would be proud.’

Lorgar’s reply was a polite smile.

‘What next, my lord?’ asked Argel Tal. His dual voices behaved strangely in the cathedral. The near-human voice, resonant and low, echoed around the chamber. The daemon’s purring hiss did not.

‘We divide the fleet again. Once we’ve recovered our forces and materiel from the surface of Armatura, and once the population’s remains are consecrated according to the patterns of the Pantheon, we will move on to the next world. But we will no longer need this armada. The Blessed Lady and the Trisagion are fleets unto themselves and no world in all of Ultramar is defended like Armatura. With the war-world dead, we are free to move in smaller fleets.’

‘And then?’ Angron pushed.

‘And then, my brother, we will simply do it all over again.’

The World Eater clacked his teeth, biting the air. ‘With your king-ships and our two Legions, we could simply kill Macragge.’

‘True,’ Lorgar conceded. ‘Though I’d ask why that would even matter. The Thirteenth recruits from everywhere across the Five Hundred Worlds. Macragge’s death would be meaningless symbolism. There’s also the matter of Guilliman himself. He already sails the stars in pursuit of us, you know. My astropathic choir sings of Calth’s retribution, riding the warp’s wind.’

Khârn finally spoke up. ‘Killing Macragge will do nothing. It is merely one world among the Five Hundred.

‘But it’s a symbol,’ said Argel Tal. ‘I agree with Lord Angron. We should annihilate Macragge next.’

‘It’s a waste of time,’ Khârn replied. ‘A symbol of what? What will its death prove that Calth and Armatura have not? Calth was a symbol of hope for the future – Armatura was their most heavily defended bastion-world for training and recruitment. We’ve proved any point we needed to make, and smashed any symbols that matter. If we need to kill populated worlds, then so be it. We have thirty fleets laying waste to Ultramar, let’s not exalt Macragge as anything more than a distant globe of uninspiring rock.’

Angron looked back to Lorgar, a sliver of drool marking the edge of his mouth. ‘Just cast your damn spell,’ he told his brother. ‘Shroud Ultramar in the chaos you promised. Spread the storm and be done with this foolish magic.’

Lorgar winced. ‘If you ever say the words spell or magic in my presence again, Angron, I may have to kill you for unforgivable ignorance. We are dealing with the metaphysics that underpin reality – the very foundations of creation – not the capering of fools conjuring coins from behind children’s ears.’

The World Eaters primarch pulled a book from the closest shelf and fanned the pages, not reading a word. ‘We are dealing,’ he said flatly, ‘with foolish mysticism.’

Lorgar’s irritated smile was visible beneath his hood. ‘Listen and learn.’

He spoke a single word, scarcely more than a whisper, but it threw Angron and the others from their feet with a hurricane-blast of wind. Three bookshelves exploded, quite literally blasting apart in a storm of splintered wood and powdered parchment. Khârn managed to arrest his skidding tumble by jamming his fingertips between two marble flagstones. Argel Tal and Angron crashed past him, their armour shedding sparks as they scraped over the cream-coloured stone.

The wind from nowhere vanished as suddenly as it arrived. Khârn was first to his feet.

‘I-I know that tongue,’ he said to Lorgar.

‘I doubt that, Khârn,’ replied the primarch with surprising gentleness.

‘Argel Tal spoke it,’ he said, ‘on Armatura.’

‘Ah. Then you do know something of its power.’ Lorgar waited until his brother and son rejoined them from across the chamber. ‘That, my brother, is what I mean. Reality obeys certain laws. Gravity. Electro-magnetism. The nuclear forces. Cause and effect. If I breathe in, my body converts air into life, unless I am too weak or diseased for the process to continue. There are millions of laws that are unknown to all but the most enlightened. Magnus knows many more than even I, but I have learned enough. It is not magic.’ He fairly sneered the word. ‘It is manipulation of the infinite potential that is the source of all realities. A blending of components from the universe of flesh and blood and the divine realm of pure aether and emotion.’

Angron was silent several moments, his brutal face troubled.

‘That noise you made,’ he said finally. ‘That “word”. What was it?’

‘It is for the best that I do not speak it again,’ said Lorgar, smiling sardonically. ‘The books I just destroyed were very valuable, and I’d rather not lose more of them.’

Seeing his brother’s expression, Lorgar’s smile became more sincere. ‘Some words and sounds shake the foundations of reality. For example, the concept and sound of a hundred and one blind men choking and gasping as they all drown at the same time serves as the name of a certain daemonic princeling. Compressing that noise and its meaning into a single sound can be enough to draw that entity’s attention and render it easier to summon. The word I just spoke was… similar. I see the question in your eyes, and yes, I can teach you this tongue.’

Khârn spoke without meaning to. ‘That’s how you’ve healed yourself.’

Lorgar nodded, though he didn’t pull the hood back. ‘It is. The pain, however, was indescribable. Were I mortal in the usual sense I’d be dead from the attempt alone. Reknitting skin and muscle meat is easy enough in principle, but everything comes at a price.’

Lorgar took the tome from Angron and placed it back on one of the surviving bookshelves.

‘We are about to be interrupted.’

They all turned as the great double doors opened. The figure that entered wore the ashen black of the XVII Legion’s Chaplains and carried a silver crozius in one hand. His helm was held in the crook of his other arm, leaving his scholarly, solemn features bare. Helmetless, he couldn’t entirely hide his surprise when he saw who stood with his primarch.

‘My lord,’ said the newcomer, bowing deeply to Lorgar.

‘Erebus.’ Lorgar beckoned him closer. ‘The suffering of Calth’s sun and the millions who died on the world itself rings through the warp. The secret song heralded your deeds.’

‘I am pleased, lord.’ Erebus offered Angron a respectful bow; Khârn and Argel Tal received glances and nods. ‘Calth succeeded beyond all expectation.’

Lorgar bared a thin crescent of porcelain-white teeth in a subtle smile. ‘Success beyond expectation? Truly? Then I would ask, if this is the case, why does the warp’s melody not sing of such an outcome?’

Erebus’s stern eyes flickered to the others gathered by his primarch. ‘We should speak, my lord.’

‘We are speaking, Erebus.’

Again, the flickered glance. ‘Alone, sire. What we speak of may not be for… the uninitiated.’

Lorgar smiled, the expression as paternal and patient as any living soul had ever been and could ever be. ‘Just speak, First Chaplain.’

They all saw it. The moment Erebus stood straighter, guarding himself, sensing something was wrong. Angron grinned at the warrior-priest’s discomfort. Khârn and Argel Tal stood in resolute silence.

‘The Ruinstorm is born,’ Erebus stated.

‘Yes,’ replied Lorgar. ‘But tell me of this grand success you spoke of. And where is your ship, Erebus? Where is Destiny’s Hand?’ Lorgar looked heavenwards, where the fleet lay at rest in the black sky. ‘Strange that I cannot see it.’

Erebus smiled, his thin lips paling as they pressed together. ‘I believe she sails with Kor Phaeron and the Infidus Imperator.’

‘Of course. And Kor Phaeron no doubt orbits Calth in victory, yes? He has sacrificed my brother Guilliman to the Pantheon, has he not?’

‘Sire–’

‘Calm, Erebus. I only wish to share this moment of triumph with you. So. Calth has fallen, the Ultramarines are finished and Guilliman is dead. That was, after all, the expectation of success that you claim to have exceeded. So you are to be commended. I’ve been worried that you’d failed to kill my brother, lost half the fleet I granted you to an Ultramarines counter-attack, and abandoned tens of thousands of my sons and mortal servants on Calth’s irradiated surface while you fled into the Maelstrom.’

Erebus swallowed and said nothing.

‘But that would be leaving them to die,’ Lorgar continued. ‘Never to be reinforced. Never to be recovered. All those Gal Vorbak who spent months of their lives fasting, praying, scarring their flesh in preparation for a chance to taste the Divine Blood… They’d be lost, wouldn’t they?’

Angron was chuckling now, taking a leering amusement in the whole scene.

‘Sire…’ Erebus began.

Lorgar raised a hand. ‘I don’t blame you, Erebus. Have no fear. You achieved the base level of success that was required of you.’

‘My lord, Kor Phaeron calls for reinforcement.’

The primarch turned his head away, the silk cloth of his hood rippling gently. It took several moments for Khârn to realise Lorgar was laughing.

‘Reinforcement,’ he chuckled. ‘The very idea.’

‘The Ultramarines are pursuing our survivors.’

Lorgar returned his gaze to his son’s rigid face.

‘I’m sure they are. That’s what happens when you run away – your enemies give chase. He is dreaming if he believes I’ll whore ships and lives away to save him from a fate he worked so hard to earn. When next you speak with him, convey my regards and inform him that my lack of sympathy is the price of his failure. You’re dismissed now, Erebus.’

‘Sire,’ Erebus said for the third time, bolstering his resolve. ‘We still have much to discuss. What of Signus Prime?’

‘That name again.’ Lorgar’s gold-flecked eyes narrowed. ‘I care nothing for Signus Prime. It is a fool’s errand.’

Erebus’s solemn confidence reasserted itself in his half-smile. ‘The Warmaster and I are confident–’

‘Erebus,’ Lorgar interrupted with a sigh. ‘You will not kill the Angel. You will not enlighten his Legion. Do you think you know my own brother better than I?’

The Chaplain showed no emotion at all, his austere mask firmly in place. ‘Lord, I have walked the paths of the Ten Thousand Futures. I have seen destinies unfolding where the Angel falls, and others where he fights at our side. If we can engineer events to play out according to those paths…’

Lorgar’s hood shifted as he shook his head. ‘You aren’t listening, Erebus.’

‘I do nothing but listen. I hear the gods as clearly as you do, Aurelian. Or did you forget that?’ He spoke the words softly, even kindly, but they rang out across the basilica with the force of a hammer blow.

Argel Tal tensed, feeling his lips peeling back from his lengthening teeth. Ceramite wrenched and squealed as ridged rune-carved bones started pushing through the surface of his armour. Great bat’s wings of blue-veined scarlet fleshmetal rose from his shoulder blades, dripping blood-sweat onto the white stone floor.

‘You!’ he snarled in two voices, the daemon’s hiss in clear dominance. ‘You dare?’

Lorgar sighed and raised a hand.

‘No. Argel Tal, Raum, both of you, stay your wrath. Please.’

Wings flexing silently, the lord of the Gal Vorbak glared at Erebus for several heartbeats. Another ugly chuckle from Angron broke the tension.

‘As you command, sire,’ Argel Tal replied at last, his voices in uneasy balance. The Change receded with the same protestation of cold metal reshaped against its will.

‘I will not argue with you, Erebus. I know you, Kor Phaeron and your old friend Calas Typhon cling to your belief that you were enlightened before all others, and are therefore uniquely placed to steer Fate itself. But I will give you this last coin of advice, to take or leave as you will. You will not enlighten Sanguinius.’

Lorgar passed a hand through the air before him. An image of a haloed warrior, garbed in blood-bright armour and framed with magnificent wings of the most pristine white, shimmered into existence.

‘Look at him and what do you see? An angel. The Angel. In a universe that the Emperor claims is godless – in an Imperium where our civilisation’s wisest and greatest have dismantled all the trappings of religion – Sanguinius is an icon of something that should not exist, glorious and supernatural. My brother knows this. He feels it. He’s too intelligent, too soulful, not to.’

Lorgar lowered his head, the shadow of his hood darkening his features down to his chin.

‘The Emperor, for all his many flaws, knows his sons well. Horus was chosen as Warmaster because he is the best of us. In Horus, all things are found in balance, and yet every facet is raised to excellence. Sanguinius is similar. His virtues eclipse the rest of us, for which of us could match his grace, his compassion, or his understanding of the human condition? And yet our brother is unbalanced. Profoundly so. He represents both the very best and the very worst of what it is to be a primarch. He is the noblest of us but also the most fearful; a glorious creature enslaved by insecurities.’

Lorgar gestured again and the glowing image of Sanguinius vanished.

‘Oh yes, the Angel is righteous and he is strong and he is beautiful in practically every way. But he has a cancerous weakness in his heart – a weakness known to only a few of us. Sanguinius is loyal to our father out of perfect love and perfect nobility, and if that were all, he might still be turned or killed as you so desire, my son. But what you fail to consider is that he is also loyal out of perfect fear. He fears the reason he has wings. He fears what they might represent. He fears something went terribly wrong during his creation and he fears the effects this may have upon his own gene-sons.’

Angron watched Lorgar with undisguised fascination, the Nail-induced fire in his skull momentarily forgotten. Erebus maintained a resolute silence.

‘The insecurity that binds Sanguinius to the Emperor, perhaps more so than any other of our father’s sons, is that he believes he has the most to prove.’

Lorgar looked down to the smooth, gold-inked skin of his hands and exhaled softly. ‘And yet, in comparison with the rest of us, that simply is not the case.’

With eyes that glinted from beneath his hood, the lord of the Word Bearers returned his gaze to Erebus. ‘Listen to me now, if never before. You and Kor Phaeron are investing too heavily in fools’ gambits. I know Kor Phaeron sought to illuminate Guilliman rather than slay him as ordered. His failure echoed through the warp: a discordant note in an already less-than-perfect performance. And I know that in making his clumsy attempt at conversion, he lost his chance to land the killing blow. History will repeat itself. Committing everything to Signus Prime will leave you no more victorious than Kor Phaeron at Calth. It is too late to change that now, but then, I’ve warned you of this before. Now go.’

The Chaplain stood stunned, his face a facade of dignified shock. He bowed low at last, and asked permission to leave.

‘Of course,’ said Lorgar softly.

Erebus turned to go but was halted by the rumbling sneer of Angron’s voice.

‘The timing of your arrival was fortuitous, priest.’ The Eater of Worlds almost spat the word. ‘Just in time to miss the fighting. Tell me, are all your prayers and little treacheries making you more preacher than warrior?’

Erebus walked from the chamber without further comment. Angron watched him leave, his metal teeth glinting in a vicious smile. As the doors closed, Lorgar turned to Argel Tal, meeting his eyes.

‘My son. My truest son.’

‘Father?’

‘Erebus will make you an offer soon. I see it in his eyes, and I hear it in his heart, though the details are beyond my ken. Refuse him. No matter the temptation; no matter what redemption his offer might seem to bring – you must refuse him.’

‘I will, lord.’

Lorgar smiled, golden and benevolent. ‘I know you will. Now, back to your duties, my friends. We must make ready to burn this world and move on to the next.’

Khârn picked his way through the mess of the Conqueror’s bridge. The bodies had been cleared and the stains scrubbed away, but he could still smell their burst flesh, their spilled blood and the refuse-stink of their emptied guts. Death lingered aboard a ship, despite the best efforts of any air-filtration vents. Cables dangled and sparked from the ceiling. Entire banks of screens and consoles were smoking lumps of metal. Las-burns and bullet-holes riddled the floor and walls, punctuated by the deeper craters of bolter fire. These were rarer, for the Ultramarines had been spoiled for choice when it came to targets.

Lotara was in her throne, above the madness, and Khârn had never seen her so angry. There was something almost predatory in the way she projected her temper as a cold seethe. She didn’t need to say anything. She didn’t even need to scowl. Her mood was apparent from the ice in her eyes and the way she sat back in her throne, staring, staring, staring.

Khârn halted in his careful tracks when he saw Lhorke standing vigil behind her throne. He ascended the stairs, paying respects to the Dreadnought before the captain.

‘Legion Master,’ he said, and felt the strangest compulsion to kneel. Too long spent with the Word Bearers, he told himself. ‘You walk.’

‘The captain woke me.’

‘I heard about Delvarus and the Triarii.’ He glanced to Lotara, who was watching him. ‘Things have changed since you last walked among us, sir.’

The Contemptor gave a resonant clunk-clunk of servos locking tight. It sounded like an expression of distaste, though Khârn wasn’t sure how.

‘So I see. You’ve been busy, Khârn.’

This wasn’t the warm-hearted reunion of brother-officers that Khârn had expected. He looked to Lotara.

‘Angron is on his way. He asks you to be ready to bombard the planet in twelve hours.’

She leaned forwards in her throne, eyes wide. ‘Is that a joke? After all this, you want me to do what I should have done at the very start?’

He didn’t feel like going into the metaphysical details of pain resonance and the spiritual reflection of emotional torment. It wasn’t that he didn’t understand it; it was that he wasn’t sure he believed any of it.

‘Lorgar’s orders.’ He was too weary to even smile. ‘The world bleeds, and all remaining life has gone to ground. He wants to burn them for the sin of cowardice.’ And to squeeze out the last trickles of suffering, he thought.

‘Khârn…’ She looked at him, helpless fury in her eyes. ‘What are we doing here? What kind of war is this?’

He didn’t have an answer for her. Nothing tangible, at least.

‘The new kind,’ he said.

She wasn’t placated. ‘A mad kind. Everything has gone wrong since Isstvan III. Since we sided with Horus.’

Khârn looked between the captain and the Contemptor, but said nothing.

The bridge’s port-side doors didn’t grind open on heavy tracks any more, they’d been removed from the wall and taken away for repair. Angron entered with a dusty-looking tech-priest behind him. The robed adept had his hands clasped together in his sleeves as he trailed after the primarch, almost cringing away from the World Eater’s muscled bulk.

‘Khârn,’ Angron growled across the debris-strewn chamber. ‘This red-robe has been hunting for you.’

The primarch left the bowing priest at the violated doors and made his way through the mess that his bridge had become. He gave a short, throaty bark of a laugh at the devastation.

‘How did this happen?’

Lotara rose from her throne, looking down at Angron from the raised central dais. ‘Delvarus and the Triarii made unauthorised planetfall to join the surface attack. We were boarded in their absence.’

Angron walked over to where Lehralla dangled from her cables, bound to the auspex console. With a gentleness none of his brothers would have believed he possessed, he rested a massive hand on her shoulder.

‘You are not hurt?’

The crippled young woman, surgically implanted onto the table, raked her filthy hair back from her face.

‘No, sire,’ she replied, utterly undaunted by the demigod before her.

Angron gave an ugly grin and looked back over the bridge. ‘And where is Delvarus now?’

‘I confined him to his quarters.’

Clearly amused, the primarch gave a short bark of laughter. ‘I like that.’ He started ascending the dais, facing Lhorke. The Contemptor towered above even the primarch, but nothing – living or dead – could ever make Angron seem small. ‘Lhorke of the War Hounds.’

‘Angron of the World Eaters.’

‘You look good, old warrior. Still in the outdated colours though, eh?’ Angron rapped his knuckles against the Dreadnought’s ironform where the collared wolf stood proud. In instinctive reaction to his discomfort at being touched, Lhorke’s combi-bolters reloaded with twin metallic rattles.

‘Do I owe you thanks for defending my ship?’ the primarch asked.

‘I did little. Your gratitude should go to the other first Dreadnoughts, and the two thousand and seventy-one souls that lost their lives in repelling the assault.’

Angron lifted a scab-knuckled hand to his temple, feeling the dull return of pain. ‘Hnnh. You’re still a miserable bastard, Lhorke.’

‘I died. A little too late to change now.’ The Dreadnought forced its ironform into a grinding bow, this one to Lotara, and made its way down the wide steps. ‘I must go. I require maintenance.’

Angron felt the deck shivering beneath the Contemptor’s tread. He remembered with a keen rush just how it felt to fight such a creation. The Isstvan campaign had been such an educational experience.

‘Captain,’ he said. ‘In twelve hours, we’ll bomb Armatura into memory. Salt the earth, Lotara.’

She looked at him as she reclined in her throne, boots thumping on one armrest.

‘As you wish.’

THIRTEEN

Bones

Argel Tal always went alone when he visited her tomb. His bootsteps echoed around the arching chamber, thrown back by the gothic walls with their spines of stone. Life-size statues of the honoured fallen watched him pass by, their wrought-iron faces staring out into the candlelit half-dark. He knew each of them by name. Several of them were friends and brothers, lost to misfortune or martyrdom.

He passed one such monument, raised to remember ‘Xaphen of the Gal Vorbak, Chaplain of the Chapter of the Serrated Sun’. The warrior-priest stood with one boot resting on the cracked chestplate of a sculpted Raven Guard, raising a crozius maul to the sky. The Chaplain’s head was lowered, not staring at the legionary he’d killed, but turned to the side with an air of contemplation. In this recreation of dark metal artistry, Xaphen looked almost soulful in regret, which amused Argel Tal no end each time he saw it. His brother had been many things in life, but regretful wasn’t one of them. No more zealous creature had ever worn the Legion’s scarlet. Xaphen had even enjoyed Isstvan, considering it a test of faith. A test he’d relished and passed, according to his own exacting standards.

The plaque beneath his name read, in jagged Colchisian cuneiform: He walked in the realm where gods and mortals meet.

Argel Tal reached out as he passed, gently touching his knuckles to his dead brother’s breastplate.

He repeated the gesture several more times as he passed the statues of Gal Vorbak butchered on Isstvan V. The first Gal Vorbak: the warriors with daemons in their hearts because they mutilated their souls on the first treacherous steps into Hell. Not like the thin-blooded daemon-hosts that he had bred for Lorgar in the years since. They were Gal Vorbak in name and blood, but not in spirit. They’d not walked the Pilgrimage. They came to their power with no comprehension of what it cost to earn.

When he finally reached her tomb, he crouched before her graven image. Where many other statues were cast in the patina-green of copper or the clean sheen of wrought-iron, she was embodied in pure marble. Her eyes were hidden behind the blindfold she’d only rarely worn, preferring to simply keep her eyes closed once she adapted to sightless life. She stood without the strident, ardent poses displayed by the hundreds of fallen Word Bearers memorialised in the great hall. Instead, she remained a frail, slender thing, dove-white in the gloom, one small hand outstretched to offer comfort to whomever rested before her.

Cyrene Valantion, the plaque read, Confessor of the Word. Martyred by the Emperor’s own guardians, for the sin of seeing the truth.

Even on her plinth, she wasn’t as tall as Argel Tal’s full height. His fingertips stroked over her marble hair with the softest brush of ceramite over stone. Not a loving touch, nor a longing one. If anything, it was apologetic.

As he always did when he visited her, he drew the sword that ended her life – the sword he carried now as his own. And as always, he felt the hot rush of temptation to just break it over his knee and leave it behind. He resisted, for the pain of bearing this blade was a lesson in itself.

The Hall of Anamnesis – called the Hall of Hindsight by disloyal slaves when no Word Bearers were nearby to overhear – housed the bones of almost a thousand Legion heroes, deep in the core of Fidelitas Lex. Only one statue stood above a defiled stone coffin, and it belonged to the only human interred among nine hundred legionaries.

They’d taken her bones. Cultists, fanatics, call them what you will; they’d stolen their way into the hall, seizing her bones and claiming her as a saint of the Pantheon. ‘The first martyr’, they called her. Her name was a sainted whisper among the Word Bearers fleet’s vast human population, for the dubious honour of being the first human slain by the Emperor’s minions for praying to the Pantheon.

As if it were that simple. He rose to his feet, eyes never leaving the statue of the slain girl.

Argel Tal would never forget her final words. He thought of them often. Not the unfinished letter he found when she was already three days dead, but the very last words to leave her bloody lips. What have they done to you?

She said it with a smile, the weak smile of a girl who knew she was dying. Her hands had fallen from his helm’s faceplate, leaving smears of blood where she’d been touching the daemonic mask his face had become.

What have they done to you?

Who did she mean? The gods? The primarchs, in their desperate civil war? His own brothers?

What have they done to you?

Thoughts of Cyrene stirred the beast within. Raum, the second soul inside his body, awakened with a bestial twitch.

Hunt?

It spoke in a snake’s licking whisper, the words caressing Argel Tal’s mind.

No. I am at her tomb. We hunted for days on Armatura. Is your hunger never sated?

Raum’s derision was weaker than its irritation. You are so maudlin, brother. Wake me when blood must flow.

He felt the presence curling upon itself, shrinking again. But not slumbering, despite what the daemon claimed. Raum was content to lie in silence, watching through Argel Tal’s eyes.

The two of them remained as they were for another few minutes. When Argel Tal heard footsteps, Raum uncoiled again in a dangerous writhe, suddenly on edge.

Someone comes. The Word Bearer felt the daemon reaching out beyond the boundaries of his skull, a hound sniffing for a scent. Ah. It is the Deceiver.

‘Hello, Erebus,’ Argel Tal said. He didn’t turn around.

‘My boy,’ came the voice from behind. ‘It is good to see you.’

He is lying.

I know.

He fears you will cast him away, as the Lorgar-Father did.

I know, Raum. I know.

Erebus stood next to him, joining his vigil over the statue of the martyred girl. ‘What happened on Armatura?’ The First Chaplain’s voice was composed, somehow cold without being hostile. ‘The World Eaters have reported devastating losses, and I hear many of them baying for our Legion’s blood. What went wrong?’

Argel Tal thumbed his tired eyes. ‘What always goes wrong with the World Eaters? They charged ahead too far, too fast. The Ultramarines and Armaturan Guard forces that sought to flank us instead spilled into the gap between the two Legions, taking the opportunity to divide and conquer. The World Eaters pushed on into a hundred ambushes, while we were locked in a slow advance against the other half of the city’s armies. By the time we broke through, let us just say that Twelfth Legion tempers had prevailed.’

‘Khârn’s report speaks ill of our Legion.’

‘Of course it does, we failed to reinforce our allies. My report will speak ill of the World Eaters for pushing ahead without us. We are hardly going to praise each other for a perfect crusade.’ Argel Tal finally turned to Erebus, his dusky features showing a slight smile. ‘What happened at Calth, master? How did you fail so catastrophically?’

Erebus turned to look at the statue of a Word Bearers captain, fallen at Isstvan V. ‘We gave birth to the warp storm that will sever Ultramar from the entire Imperium. A feat of such aetheric significance that we had to murder a sun to ignite the ritual. How is that failure?’

The daemon in Argel Tal’s body crept its way through his bloodstream, making his veins burn.

He knows he failed. Shame bleeds from him, the way warm skin steams in cold air.

‘Guilliman lives,’ Argel Tal replied to Erebus. ‘You abandoned how many thousands on Calth? And your fleet was scattered. You can forgive Lord Aurelian for seeing both sides of the coin.’

Erebus, ever solemn, walked around Cyrene’s statue. ‘In almost every future, you die at Terra.’

To that, Argel Tal only grinned. ‘I know. And there will be no grander place to be on the last day.’

Erebus raised a thin eyebrow. ‘You accept that fate?’

‘The primarch has seen it in the warp’s tides. He claims it’s merely one possible outcome, but it matches what Raum tells me. I’m destined to die in the shadow of great wings.’

It’s true, brother. We die in the shadow of great wings.

I know. I believe you.

Argel Tal gestured to the statue. ‘Why did you come? To see the Confessor?’

‘To see you, my boy.’ Erebus wore his monkish robes rather than his battle armour. The red silks fell in a long, regal flow, like a cardinal’s attire from one of Ancient Terra’s many eras of false faith.

‘Enough of the “my boy”, master. Those days are done.’

‘You wear armour,’ Erebus pointed out. ‘Even here.’

The lord of the Gal Vorbak nodded. ‘I can no longer remove it. It’s part of me, like scales or hide.’

He sensed rather than saw Erebus’s smile. ‘Fascinating,’ the Chaplain said.

‘It happened after Armatura. I don’t know why.’

‘Fascinating,’ Erebus repeated.

We should kill him, breathed Raum.

How sad that it’s actually tempting.

A bronze chain secured a great skinbound tome to Argel Tal’s waist. ‘You should read this.’ Argel Tal unhooked the book, offering it to his former mentor.

‘The Book of Lorgar.’ Erebus made no move to take it. ‘I’ve read it. I transcribed many of its pages myself.’

‘No.’ Argel Tal kept holding it out. ‘This is the version he shared with the other primarchs. This is his writing, his philosophy down in ink. Not yours, not Kor Phaeron’s, not the mere dictations of the gods. The true Book of Lorgar, the scripture that will inform the Legion for millennia to come. He calls it the Testamentum Veritas.’

Erebus took the book in both hands, but didn’t open it. ‘You have such faith in him.’

‘You speak as though you don’t.’

‘I have less faith in the Emperor’s sons each time I cross paths with them. For all their claims of being perfection incarnate, they are also humanity’s flaws writ large. Look at Horus. The galaxy burns from his ambition, not because I arranged to have him cut by an envenomed blade. The latter merely hastened the former. And look at Russ. The purity and savagery of a wolf, yet he begs at the Emperor’s boots, crying out for an alpha to lead him.’

Argel Tal had no patience for an argument over the merits and flaws of the Eighteen Sires, especially not in this sacred place. He let silence voice his disapproval for him.

‘Very well,’ Erebus conceded. ‘I wanted to speak with you because I need your help.’

Argel Tal didn’t take his eyes from the statue. ‘Then speak.’

‘As I said before Lorgar, I’ve walked the Ten Thousand Futures. In many of them, if events play out along those paths, we will lose at Terra. Horus falls and his loyal Legions are broken upon the Imperial anvil. We are not merely exiled, Argel Tal. We are torn whole from the annals of the Imperium. Our names become legend, then myth, then forgotten in full.’

The Gal Vorbak listened, as did the daemon inside him. Erebus spoke on, his scholar’s eyes looking over Cyrene’s clean marble likeness. ‘From the beginning, we’ve guided Lorgar, Mortarion, Fulgrim, Horus and the others. A coven of articulate, intelligent souls within the Legions, at the primarchs’ sides, guiding their movements and decisions. Calas Typhon stands for the Death Guard, even without their Librarius. Fabius’s vision of perfection ensnared Fulgrim’s imagination and caught the Emperor’s Children. We’ve played to their pride, as well as their fears. But now, when we should be pulling together, Lorgar is slipping loose.’

Argel Tal shook his head. ‘And you want me to steer him back? The primarch is his own man, Erebus. He’s stronger since Isstvan. End your craven need to control him and simply be proud he’s become who he was born to be.’

Erebus sensed his former pupil’s reticence, and reshaped his argument.

‘Nothing so crude,’ the Chaplain said. ‘But we must… guide him. That’s all. In all the futures where we lose, Lorgar was allowed to manipulate events to his own desires. That is why we must bring Sanguinius to his knees at Signus Prime, no matter what our father believes. We lose the war in many of the futures where the Angel reaches Terra.’

For the first time he could ever recall, Argel Tal was brutally, utterly honest with the man who’d trained him for so many years.

‘I don’t care. I am no schemer, and I trust Lorgar’s vision far above yours.’

‘But we have to forge events in accordance with–’

‘We said we don’t care.’ Argel Tal’s eyes burned molten silver. Raum’s eyes. ‘We came here to pray, Deceiver. You are fouling the sanctity of this place with your forked tongue.’

‘Deceiver?’

The silver faded. ‘It is what Raum calls you,’ Argel Tal admitted.

‘I see. Then I shall trouble you no further, my boy.’ Erebus made to leave, but hesitated at the last moment. He dared to touch Argel Tal’s shoulder; the warrior and the daemon within the officer allowed it. ‘I will do what I must to engineer events as I see fit, for I will not lose the war for humanity’s soul because others are too blind to see the light. I only wished you at my side, Argel Tal.’

Argel Tal’s eye lenses – the blue of Colchisian skies – met his former master’s. ‘It’s always death, with you. Who needs to die this time? Whose death will set fate along the path you choose?’

‘Many lives will have to end before we raise Horus’s flag over the battlements of Terra. Almost all of them fight for the other side.’

‘Almost. Not all.’

Erebus took a breath, as if unwilling to burden his Legion-brother with an unwelcome truth. ‘Not all, no.’

Argel Tal’s lip curled. ‘It’s Khârn.’ The words weren’t a question. ‘That’s why you came to me. Khârn will foul your plans somewhere down the pathways of fate, and you want him dead.’

Erebus didn’t answer, which was an answer in itself.

The silence was broken by the creaking squeals of protesting ceramite and the wet crunches of bone scraping through flesh. Gnarled, overly-knuckled fingers lengthened, unsheathing long black talons as they did. Argel Tal’s faceplate distorted into the canine maw his men had come to know as Raum’s face, before melting into Argel Tal’s own silver deathmask, hearkening back to the entombed Faero-kings from the myths of the oldest empires.

Erebus carried himself as one of the most composed, calm souls in all the Eighteen Legions. He knew secrets that he believed were known to no others, and had presided over the enlightenment of genetic demigods. Yet even he backed away from Argel Tal’s possessed form. Dark mist, cinnamon-sweet with the reek of decaying flesh, rose from the warrior’s black-veined gargoyle wings.

‘Argel Tal,’ Erebus began.

‘Be silent! Your prophecies are poison. We are sick of others whispering about the future. At least Lorgar doesn’t demand we dance to fate’s tune.’

‘But I bring a warning.’

‘You bring lies and schemes and treachery!’

Argel Tal roared, lashing out with his claw. Erebus barely managed to parry with his crozius, moving back as he deflected the blow. The daemon-thing’s talons crashed into another Word Bearer’s statue and wrenched it from its pedestal to crash across the stone floor.

Erebus clutched his crozius tighter. ‘Boy,’ he said. ‘Enough of this.’

‘Do we look like we have any wish to betray Khârn? He is the last flesh-and-blood brother we trust. He is the last to never fail us, and the last we have never failed. Xaphen lies dead; you are a viper; Aquillon fell to murder. Only Khârn still stands. With us, he holds the two Legions together. With us, he keeps the primarchs from killing one another.’

The thing that had been Argel Tal took a step closer. ‘Go from us. We hunger, and there is no finer wine on the tongue than Legion-blood; no finer taste than the salt-meat of Legion-flesh.’

Erebus took another step back, but no fear played across his features. There was only awe.

‘You have become a walking monument to the Pantheon’s divinity. How far you’ve come from the day I took you from your family.’

‘We have become the Truth. We warned you to go. Now go.’

Erebus didn’t lift his crozius again, he merely held up a hand to warn the daemon-thing from coming closer. ‘I would not ask you to shed Khârn’s blood. I know you never would. You’ve been brothers for too long, over too many compliances. That’s not why I came.’

Argel Tal stood where he was, his armoured shoulders rising and falling in rhythm to his heavy, inhuman breathing.

‘We are listening.’

‘Khârn will fall before the war’s ending. I have foreseen it many times. It will be down to you, Argel Tal, to fight at his side. You are the only one who can keep him alive.’

The monstrous figure grunted, barking a wad of ichor-saliva onto the floor. ‘Nothing can kill Khârn.’

‘There speaks a brother’s loyalty.’ Erebus risked harnessing his crozius on his back, moving slowly so as not to draw the creature’s ire. ‘I am telling you the truth, son.’

The silver deathmask warped into an expression of rippling mercury torment. ‘We are no longer your son.’

‘No. Forgive me, an old habit come to the fore.’ Erebus lifted a hand again. ‘I am telling you how to save your brother. Have I ever done you wrong? Where does this anger come from?’

It came from within, and from without. It came from the daemon in his heart, sending spite through his bloodstream. It came from rage at the way Kor Phaeron and Erebus treated the primarch. It came from irritation at the way both of them smirked knowingly and claimed to know everything about everything.

Argel Tal bit back his rage, swallowing it hard and whole. Raum scratched pain along his bones, wanting to kill, kill, kill, but that was nothing new. The daemon loathed the First Chaplain on some instinctive, unearthly level. Erebus had always revolted him, the way nocturnal creatures despised the sun.

‘The anger is Raum’s,’ Argel Tal said, though it was his as well. ‘Say what you wish to say.’

‘You can save Khârn. The vision is difficult to interpret, for the future stretches out not like a path, but a cobweb, every decision threading out to a million other possibilities. But I can tell you this for certain: Khârn dies at sunrise on a world of grey skies. In every future I have seen, he dies as dawn lightens the heavens. And he dies with a blade in his back.’

‘Who wields it?’

‘Someone that hates him. All I sense is the murderer’s emotion, not his face.’

Argel Tal settled, gently prising Raum’s grip from control over the body they shared. It was the mental equivalent of flexing one’s muscles after waking from a long slumber. Already bored and sensing no prey to toy with, the daemon allowed it with only ill-tempered muttering.

This is the offer your godling father warned you of?

So it would seem. Everything he gives comes with a cost.

You should have let me kill him.

Argel Tal smiled. Probably.

‘What amuses you?’ Erebus asked. ‘I hear that soft laugh of yours.’

‘Everything amuses me, of late. I will bear your warning in mind, master. Thank you.’

‘You still call me master. Those days are as long gone as the others, surely.’

‘A bad habit, no different from yours.’ With the burning in his veins beginning to ease, Argel Tal turned back to Cyrene’s statue. He picked up his sword from the ground, unsure when it had slipped from his grip. During the Change, most likely.

‘Let me tell you of Calth,’ Erebus said. ‘Hear my words, and judge for yourself whether I failed or not.’

Argel Tal listened in silence as Erebus told the whole tale. The ambush at the fleetyards. Burning ships raining wreckage down onto the world below. The poisoning of Calth’s sun. The birth of the kaleidoscopic Ruinstorm, a cancer just waiting to spread across healthy space.

Argel Tal waited until the very end, though in truth he heard very little after the first half. His mind was afire with one grave possibility that he didn’t dare call hope. Erebus trailed off at last, his explanation done.

‘Did we fail?’ he asked. The confidence in his voice suggested he considered his case made to perfection.

‘Torgaddon,’ Argel Tal replied. ‘You used his flesh in that ritual. You summoned a dead man’s soul.’

Erebus nodded. ‘Kor Phaeron first learned of the rite, through his own prayers. We–’

‘It doesn’t matter how.’ Argel Tal’s eye lenses burned with inner light. ‘You brought him back.’

The Chaplain nodded, seeming to know, in his limitless patience, just where this was going.

‘I did.’

He lies, Argel Tal. He lies to us both.

No. Not in this.

You think a mortal spirit can return unscarred from the Sea of Souls?

What matters, Raum, is that they can return at all.

Argel Tal ignored the snarling protests of the beast within. He gestured at the statue with the blade that had killed the girl herself.

‘Bring her back.’

Erebus breathed slowly, not making eye contact. ‘For you, my son. I will.’

FOURTEEN

Reassignment
Unsanctioned
Forge-fires

Keeda wasn’t ashamed for weeping when she first saw Syrgalah’s wreckage. The Warhound had been pulled from its recovery sarcophagus by the ceiling cranes, broken and still smoking from its wounds. One-armed, unable to stand upon her two crippled legs, with every metre of armour plating corroded, Syrgalah’s head hung slack on a neck too ruined to bear the cockpit’s weight.

No, that hadn’t been easy to watch. It was better now, but not by much. At least she was standing.

The Ember Queen was held up by solid gantries either side of her, regaining her stature despite her injuries – all part of the Machine Cult’s belief in restoring the Titan’s warrior-soul by treating it with dignity as much as through technological engineering. So she stood among her sisters, one of ninety surviving Warhounds in the dark colours of the Ember Wolves. Yet she was far, far from whole.

Eight tech-priests worked on her joints, supported by servitor teams flocking in packs behind them. Syrgalah’s metal skin crawled with humans, cyborgs and lobotomised slaves, as well as a number of drifting servo-skulls scanning whatever mechanism they were told to scan at any given moment.

Toth was with her, his new arm not yet coated by synthetic skin, its iron bones bare from the elbow down. It wasn’t taking well. Angry red veins showed along his bicep, perhaps the first signs of infection. He kept testing it, making his new fingers curl into a fist every few seconds. Clearly it still hurt, if his wincing was anything to go by.

One of the red-robed priests approached them, his features masked entirely by his hood. His spindly secondary arms folded close to his shoulders as he drew near.

‘Moderati Bly. Moderati Kol.’ His voice was a vox-ish drone, devoid of emotion, that could easily have belonged to any tech-priest either of them had met.

‘Ninth?’ Keeda asked.

He responded by pulling his hood back, revealing his shaven head, the nodal implants at his temples, and the visor across his eyes.

‘Affirmative. It is me, the Ninth.’

‘How are the repairs going?’ Toth asked.

The Ninth’s throat-speaker buzzed. ‘They proceed as you see them. No visual deception is occurring.’

Keeda smiled for the first time since they’d been brought down by that damn Reaver and its lucky shooting.

‘What Moderati Kol means is when will Syrgalah be ready to walk again?’

The Ninth turned his visored eyes to Toth. ‘Then why did he not simply phrase his inquiry using those precise words?’

Toth’s new arm tightened again. He made a fist. ‘Just answer her, Ninth. My head hurts enough as it is.’

‘Very well. L-ADX-cd-MARS-Quintessence-[Necare Modification]-I-XII-002a-2/98: VS/TK/K will be ready to walk in the next engagement, providing fleet rumour holds no incorrectness. The estimated planetfall of twenty-seven days hence allows our technicians significant time to see the repairs completed.’

Toth looked at the Titan. Sparks danced from her joints as cutting and welding tools did their work in servitors’ mono-tasked hands. ‘A month?’

‘She is Syrgalah,’ the Ninth said. ‘She has of course been prioritised above all other considerations. The Archmagos Veneratus himself is operating on her.’

The Mechanicum overseer hove into view as if summoned. Slender, many-jointed limbs sprouted from a circular generator implanted between his shoulder blades. He needed no gantry or platform for support; his stick-insect limbs magnetically sealed to Syrgalah’s armour plating and allowed him to climb the Titan as he desired. They click-clanked, click-clanked as Vel-Kheredar made his way down the Warhound’s left side. Even when he made it to the deck, he refused the use of his own legs, letting the spider-limbs take his emaciated weight as he stalked over to the small group.

Three green eye lenses – none of them of uniform size, and none of them exactly where a human’s eyes should be – looked down from the darkness of his hood.

‘Moderati Bly and Moderati Kol.’

‘Archmagos,’ both said, as they bowed. The Ninth practically prostrated himself, which drew the Archmagos’s attention in a whisper of hood-silk and a whirr of eye lenses.

‘Eralaskesian Thyle Maraldi, Ninth of that Name.’

The Ninth rose. ‘My master?’

‘To your duties.’

‘At once, my master.’ The Ninth bowed and, with a final glance to his fellow crew members, made his way back to where he worked, on the joints of Syrgalah’s mangled foot-claws. They heard him muttering and redirecting the cutting lasers of his floating servo-skulls.

Toth looked awkward at his companion’s dismissal. Keeda looked annoyed. ‘Has the Ninth displeased you, Archmagos?’

The Martian lord lost half a metre in height as his spidery legs vented air pressure from their multiple gear-filled knees. He was still taller than any legionary, but lacked their bulky width. Keeda felt the tri-eye lenses focusing on her, revolving and whirring, clicking as they captured picts for future reference.

‘From available context, it is apparent you refer to Eralaskesian Thyle Maraldi, Ninth of that Name. And you refer to his dismissal as suppositional evidence of my displeasure. Perhaps, you reason, I perceive him as requiring to continue work at once to fulfil a certain quota of effort or achievement in the reparation of the Titan you call Syrgalah.’

Toth and Keeda shared a look. His was accusatory, that she’d started this. Hers was apologetic, for the same reason.

‘Forget I spoke, Archmagos.’

‘An impossibility. My neural structure prevents erosion of recorded data.’ His eye lenses refocused again. ‘To answer – and indeed, to allay – what I perceive as your fears, I will state: no. The Ninth has not displeased me. He was ordered to return to work because he commands his team of menials more adeptly than many others on the reparation crew, and his presence is required for the most complicated procedures currently taking place.’

The Archmagos emitted a blurt of vox-casted noise, the sound like a kicked beehive. ‘I would venture that in addition to his expertise, he also works to greater skill because of an unfortunate emotional investment in the god-machine itself. To use your parlance, he cares.’

Keeda frowned. ‘Is it unfortunate, if it makes him work harder?’

‘Emotion inevitably leads to intellectual compromise and, therefore, to weakness. But now is not an appropriate juncture to partake in an exchange of the subtleties in Martian positivistic philosophy. Tell me: now you have conversed with Princeps Ultima Lyrac regarding your reassignment, have you reached a final decision? The records require updating and we await the choices both of you must make.’

‘What?’ said Keeda and Toth at the same time.

‘Reassignment?’ Toth stammered. ‘That can’t be.’

‘Ah.’ The tech-priest lord rose higher on his insectile legs again. ‘A sudden event has demanded my immediate attention elsewhere. Be well, moderati.’ He turned to escape, skittering away.

‘Wait, please!’ Keeda called. For a wonder, the robed figure actually waited. ‘There’s no sudden event, lord. You’re a terrible liar,’ she told him.

‘I am more skilled at obfuscation in binaric cant,’ the Archmagos admitted. ‘Nevertheless, this is a matter for the Princeps Ultima to discuss with you both. I supposed incorrectly, and offer apology for the errors made in this dialogic-exchange.’

Toth wasn’t listening. ‘Reassignment? That fat son of a bitch.’

‘Where is the princeps?’ Keeda asked.

‘Aboard Syrgalah. I shall have him summoned.’

She nodded. ‘My thanks, Archmagos Veneratus.’

‘Your thanks are not necessary. My primary subroutine is to facilitate exchanges between the Mechanicum’s myriad elements. A moment, if you please.’

Toth and Keeda waited together, cursing between them. It took less than a minute for Audun Lyrac to emerge from the Titan’s insides, clambering down a ladder to reach the deck. He ran an oily hand through his thinning hair.

‘Greetings to you both,’ he said, offering a salute.

Keeda and Toth returned it. In truth, she was taken aback to see that he’d been working aboard Syrgalah. His face was beaded with perspiration and his sleeves were rolled up to reveal grime marking his skin.

‘Reassignment?’ Toth snarled at his superior officer. ‘Let’s get straight to business. You’re throwing us off the command crew?’

Keeda felt her anger diminish a little at the sight of Audun blinking in surprise. He didn’t seem smug or pugnacious, just startled. The princeps bristled, standing straighter and pulling the creases from his uniform.

‘I do not answer to you, Moderati Kol.’

‘This time you do.’ It was all Toth could do not to pull his laspistol and riddle the man with burn-holes. ‘I’ve given seven years of my life to Syrgalah, and sixteen to Audax. I’m the best steersman in the Legio, and Keeda’s the best gunner. Why are you doing this? Because of my arm? Because you’re trying to piss all over the old man’s legacy and make your own name?’

‘That’s enough.’ Audun narrowed his round eyes, inflecting his voice with as much cold threat as he could muster. Keeda found it surprisingly effective. ‘If you wished to refuse the honour,’ Audun said quietly, ‘you had only to say so.’

Keeda had a sudden sinking feeling. Something didn’t feel right.

‘The honour?’ Toth fairly spat the word. ‘Are you drunk?’

Audun rolled his sleeves down and rebuttoned them at the wrists. ‘Very well. I will offer the ranks to other officers.’ He shook his head, not just unnerved at the confrontation but a little disgusted, too. ‘Was this necessary? A simple refusal would have been enough.’

Keeda, silent so far, felt her sinking feeling give a sudden lurch. ‘What ranks?’ she asked.

Audun blinked again. ‘Have you even read the offers? I transloaded them to your quarters’ communication occuli this morning, with the request you seek me out as soon as you’d decided.’

‘We heard…’ Toth trailed off.

‘So that’s a No then. You haven’t read the offers.’

Keeda swore softly. ‘You weren’t demoting us. You were giving us our own Titans.’

Audun Lyrac looked at her like she was the basest breed of idiot. ‘Of course I wasn’t demoting you. Your records are beyond exemplary, and we have eleven Titans lacking commanders after the engagements in Armatura’s cities. Your promotions didn’t even need consideration.’

Toth cleared his throat. ‘We thought–’

‘I know what you thought, Moderati Kol. It may surprise you to learn that while I don’t have Solostine’s impressive battle-record, I am not a preening fool incapable of making good decisions. I’ve been managing promotions and reassignments for twenty years while the old man devoted his entire focus to fighting. Who do you think had you both assigned to Syrgalah in the first place? When Venric asked for a new steersman, I advised him to choose you, Toth. When he needed a new gunner, I suggested you, Keeda.’

Both officers stood in awkward silence, taking the reprimand as it came.

‘Did you assume I was petty enough to throw you back into the menial ranks purely because we had a disagreeable first meeting?’

‘Uh,’ said Keeda.

‘Well,’ said Toth.

Audun sighed. ‘Go read the damn offers, both of you. If you wish to take command of Darahma and Seddah, then the Titans are yours. If you refuse, despite your clear lack of faith in me, I would welcome you serving as Syrgalah’s command crew when she walks again. And she will walk again, I promise you that. Her honour is Audax’s honour.’

With that, he waited for their salutes, and turned back to the Titan.

Keeda and Toth watched their princeps rejoining the hive of activity swarming over Syrgalah’s red and black skin.

‘Not our proudest moment,’ Toth confessed, making his new hand into another fist.

Keeda nodded. ‘Not our cleverest, either.’

The ship throbbed in transit, its engines running hot. It managed to hold itself together in the warp for now, but the Ultramarines had done their work well. At random intervals, with almost no warning, the flagship would come screaming back into realspace, trailing aethereal fire and mad laughter. Each time, the Fidelitas Lex would rip its way back to reality a moment later to guard the Conqueror while it revived its warp-engines.

Of their respective fleets, there was no sign. The primarchs had divided their Legions and warships yet again, sending more forces deeper into Ultramar to prey upon Imperial worlds while the XIII Legion was crippled at Calth. Both flagships had abandoned the need for anything but the meagrest escort squadrons, in favour of sailing alongside the Trisagion.

Lotara made her way to the Audaxica, through the wide avenue of the Conqueror’s central spinal corridor. A rat, stunted and black-furred, scuttled by her boots before disappearing through the iron grillework on the deck. She tutted.

‘Why do all Imperial vessels house colonies of rats? The Conqueror was built in orbit, and has never once landed on even a single world. Do we take crates of vermin on board when we dock for supplies?’

Behind her, Lhorke stomped on in noisy silence. He’d been awake several days now, and though he couldn’t yet sense the telltale weariness of extended activity, the headaches had already started. Whatever remained of his tortured husk in this armoured shell, it was beginning to suffer from the lack of rest.

They reached the massive, dense double doors that led into the Audaxica. Heavily-augmented Mechanicum skitarii stood watch at the sealed portal, though the group parted before her. Or did they move aside for Lhorke? Difficult to say for sure; they certainly couldn’t help themselves staring at the Contemptor.

Lotara braced herself as the Audaxica’s doors rumbled open. She knew what was coming, yet the dragon’s breath heat still hit her hard enough to rock her back on her heels. The char-scent of molten metal pushed at her, thick as treacle in her throat. The air was practically resinous with forge-smell.

The Audaxica itself was a chamber of monumental scale, wide enough to walk a pack of Titans abreast and tall enough that the arched ceiling was a dark blue, with its millions of etchings and carvings too distant to make out unaided. Colossal ground elevators transported Titans from the Audaxica to the Legio’s planetfall hangar below.

Every one of Audax’s Titans was a variant on the Warhound-pattern, bulkier from additional armour and each bearing a stylised head of dark metal resembling a jackal or a wolf baring its teeth. Lotara watched one of them rattle its way past in a gracelessly threatening hunch, splayed feet-claws crashing on the deck.

As the Titan cleared her field of vision, her gaze settled upon the motionless form of Syrgalah. She noted the showers of sparks streaming from its joints. Repairs were clearly under way. She even caught sight of Keeda and Toth pitching in, both of them up crew ladders, working on the cockpit’s interior.

Vel-Kheredar descended when she approached, his secondary limbs clicking against the Warhound’s armour, then across the deck. He brushed by Lotara without so much as a glance, coming to a halt before Lhorke.

‘Such an ironform,’ he vox-blurted, stalking in a circle around the Dreadnought. ‘Oh my, yes.’ Without asking permission, the tech-priest pressed his augmented hands to the Contemptor’s chestplate, where the symbol of the War Hounds still stood proud. ‘I can almost feel the life within.’

Lhorke tolerated this in silence. Lotara wasn’t certain how it was possible for a war machine to look irritated, but the evidence was right before her eyes.

Vel-Kheredar’s burnished hands smoothed over the Dreadnought’s head, cradling the oversized metal helm with its precious cargo of sensor nodes and visual auspex and pict-finders, linked to the foetal corpse curled up deeper within.

‘We fashion them with heads,’ Vel-Kheredar was saying, ‘to focus their awareness forwards. It helps create an impression within the corpse’s neurological sensory input/output that it is still alive, for it sees just as it saw in life: from a human perspective. Taller, though. Oh, yes. Much taller.’

Only then did he look down at Lotara. ‘How is the revenant pilot performing, Captain Sarrin? This unit is functioning within acceptable parameters, yes?’

It was ‘the unit’ that answered. Lhorke took a step back, joints giving heavy grind-snarls.

‘Get away from me, priest.’

Vel-Kheredar gave a droning vox-laugh, surprisingly human given his extensive cybernetic reconstruction.

‘Still such a temper, Legion Master.’

Lhorke’s answer was to reload his combi-bolters in twin, slow cranks. Vel-Kheredar’s tri-eye lenses rotated in some nameless and doubtlessly blunted emotion. He turned to Lotara, adjusting his height by lowering himself through venting pressure from his five stalk-legs. He was now the height of a legionary, rather than the towering Contemptor.

‘It is my supposition that you are here in answer to my request for a dialogic-exchange.’

Lotara, who was trying not to smile at Lhorke’s irritation, nodded to the Archmagos. Sweat was already painting her face from the haze of the Audaxica’s industry.

‘Do you have somewhere we can speak away from the heat?’

‘But of course. Come.’

He led them to a wide section of the floor marked by waspish hazard striping, and flipped open a compartment on the back of his mechanical forearm to reveal numerous telecommand dials. Vel-Kheredar pushed an activation rune and twisted one of the dials three notches. The deck gave an immediate shudder, juddering as the platform sank through the floor and into the steel-smelling darkness between decks.

Down.

Down, down. The relief from the forge-heat was immediate enough to make Lotara sigh.

Lhorke’s shoulder-mounted searchlight cracked into life, daggering through the black. Lotara winced when it beamed over her face. Vel-Kheredar merely refocused his eye lenses. The platform kept shuddering beneath them.

‘My ship,’ she said, ‘to coin a phrase, took a beating. What repairs can you make whilst we’re in transit?’

‘Anything that needs to be done, Captain Sarrin. It is my ship as well.’

She felt herself smiling. On Mars, this man – or whatever was left of the man within the augmetics – was a wealthy Machine Lord, owning a subterranean forge-city of several million souls all heeding his will and working towards his experimental vision. Here, in the deepest black of Ultima Segmentum, he was a much more amiable soul than his lofty position within the Machine Cult might suggest.

‘Is that some of the unfortunate affection you’re always criticising your lessers for?’

He fixed her with his triple eye lenses. ‘I don’t know. I criticise them for so many things.’

‘Did you just make a joke, Archmagos?’

‘I made the attempt. Auditory analysis notes the tonal resonance of your voice as being negatively disposed since you entered the Audaxica. I sought to defuse your discomfort through the application of humour.’

‘Very funny,’ she lied. ‘Is there word from Mars?’

‘None,’ he replied. Not that fear was within his palette of emotion, but he did harbour concern for Sacred Mars, surely blockaded by Rogal Dorn in the wake of Horus’s rebellion. His city beneath the holy red sands could withstand orbital bombardment, but the internecine unrest would be a factor to consider. The whole world was likely at war by now. ‘None at all.’

They emerged into the harsher glare of strip lighting, descending from the primary muster hangar’s ceiling towards the deck far below. Titans in varying states of readiness already lined the walls, magna-bound in place, standing sentinel until they were called for loading into the great red-iron planetary landers at the far end of the vast hangar. The landing craft were round, bulbous things, all armoured efficiency without artistry.

Lotara affected casual disinterest, not caring how unconvincing it sounded. ‘I heard the primarch has commissioned a new blade from you.’

‘Affirmative.’

The platform finally settled into the lower deck, locking in place. ‘And that Khârn has secured your services for a similar project.’

‘The resurrection of the blade Gorechild. This is also affirmative.’

Vel-Kheredar led them along the deck, his stalk-legs clicking three times for every thump of Lhorke’s armoured feet.

‘Did his servitor team find all the missing axe-teeth?’

Another binaric spurt of coded amusement. ‘Not all. He seconded one of my preferred adepts to the task, but Lord Aurelian’s orders to terminate the planet came before the excavation’s completion. I am given to understand that Centurion Khârn improvised.’

She could easily imagine just how Khârn had improvised, no doubt taking a hammer to the skulls of the mica dragons in the Legion’s Museum of Conquest, and stealing the teeth for use in the weapon’s resurrection. She was willing to wager a year’s pay that was what he’d done.

Of course, that triggered a darker thought – one she and her officers had lamented many times over shots of whatever spirit served as a nightcap in the officers’ mess. Their pay, such as it had been, came from Terra. Rebellion had its downsides.

Vel-Kheredar walked ahead, turning to face them and walking backwards without effort or concern.

‘You wished to speak with me over matters of vessel repair and weapon birth?’ The tri-eyes clicked closed and back open, in imitation of a rare blink. ‘This is uncharacteristically tedious of you, Captain Sarrin.’

She gave him her best smile, which was a weapon indeed. ‘You’ve been with the primarch from the beginning.’

‘Affirmative. In the interests of perfect clarity, I was disappointed at my appointment to the Twelfth Legion flagship. I was in contestation for assignment to the Seventh or Tenth Legions, but Kelbor-Hal – blessings upon his sacred wisdom – chose to the contrary.’

Lhorke grunted something as he followed. Some echo of Legion rivalry, perhaps. Lotara kept looking up at the backward-walking Archmagos Veneratus. The mustering hangar was tomb-quiet, but for the sounds of the trio’s passing.

‘You were with the first surgical team that examined Angron’s implants, all those decades ago.’

‘Affirmative.’

‘What did you find?’

Even without looking, Vel-Kheredar effortlessly paced around a stack of crates. ‘My findings are easily accessible in the fleet’s archives.’

‘I’ve read them,’ Lotara nodded. ‘But there’s no mention of any degenerative effects the implants might have.’

The tech-lord watched her in silence for several ticks of the augmetic metronomical machine that ran in place of his human heart. When he spoke, it was with reluctance.

‘You are unsanctioned.’

She started, as if slapped. ‘I’m what?’

Vel-Kheredar didn’t answer. He diverted his attention to Lhorke. ‘You were present at the time, Legion Master. You are aware of what I found.’

The Contemptor thudded along the deck, shoulders rolling side to side. ‘The archives say nothing of degeneration. But what I’m aware of, Archmagos, is that each time I rise from slumber, the primarch is worse.’

The priest inclined his head, but it didn’t seem to be in agreement. ‘Worse is a value measurement laden with relativistic emotional perspective.’

They passed beneath the staring eyes of the Warhound army, each head lowered as if to scent their trail as they passed, or wipe them from existence with a sweep of their weaponised arms.

Lotara wouldn’t let Vel-Kheredar shake her loose. ‘The World Eaters whisper it. Khârn has said it a dozen times or more, these last ten years. The records of compliances in the last century show a steady increase in our own casualties, as well as civilian losses. How many tactical briefings has Angron left before finishing, racked with head pains he never admits to? How many times has he failed to follow battle plans, only to lead the Legion in a frontal assault against the densest resistance, heedless of our own losses?’

She almost glared at the slender priest. ‘Tell me, in the context of the last twenty years, that he’s not getting worse. I’ve been with the fleet a fraction of the time you have, and I can see it clearly.’

Vel-Kheredar emitted an annoyed blurt of code. ‘I can confess to observing a degree of undesirably erratic behaviour in Lord Angron’s actions.’

‘Oh, stop being so damn vague,’ she scowled. ‘Did you find anything in the Nails that suggested this… degeneration?’

‘You are unsanctioned.’

Her scowl deepened. ‘Will the Nails kill him?’

‘You are unsanctioned.’

Lhorke emitted a vox-growl of his own. ‘Is Angron dying?’

‘You are unsanctioned.’

‘I’m flag-captain of the World Eaters fleet, and Lhorke is the former lord of the Legion. How can we be unsanctioned? We have the highest clearance.’

‘With respect, captain, you do not. Neither of you does.’

She breathed in through her teeth. ‘How can we get sanctioned?’

He hesitated that time. ‘You are unsanctioned.’

‘Who ordered you to keep your silence?’

He answered immediately. ‘The Omnissiah.’

Lotara hissed a triumphant Yes. Now they were getting somewhere. It wasn’t about getting the right answers, it was about asking the right questions. Vel-Kheredar’s orders were no doubt extremely, evasively specific. He wanted to talk, but a thin line of direct obedience needed to be… danced around.

‘The Emperor–’ she began.

‘Correction,’ stated Vel-Kheredar. ‘The Omnissiah, avatar of the Machine-God.’

‘Fine, fine. But the Emp– sorry, Omnissiah, demanded you sequester some of your findings?’

‘You are unsanctioned.’

‘We can guess,’ Lhorke rumbled.

‘What I can’t guess,’ Lotara mused, ‘is why?’

‘Easy enough. Morale within the Twelfth. We were a broken Legion back then, one of the last to find our lord. Bad enough that we were burdened with the only primarch to fail in conquering his homeworld. If we’d also discovered he was doomed to die before the Crusade’s end, it would have annihilated what little morale remained.’

Lotara looked up at Vel-Kheredar. ‘Is that why?’

‘You are unsanctioned,’ he said.

‘Were you absolutely certain the Nails would cause degeneration?’

‘You are unsanctioned.’

‘Well… was it just a hypothesis that you didn’t want leaked?’

Vel-Kheredar’s tri-eyes whirred as they refocused. ‘What I did or did not wish leaked is irrelevant. My personal preferences play no part in the equation, captain.’

‘The Emperor, then. When you reported to him, did you know degeneration was a certainty, or was it just a possibility?’

‘You are unsanctioned.’

‘And the Emperor ordered you into silence.’

Another hesitation. ‘He did. I defer to the wisdom of the Machine-God.’

Lotara glanced up at Lhorke by her side. ‘Now we know.’

The Dreadnought looked down at her. ‘Nothing we couldn’t have guessed.’

She gave him a look. ‘Not all of us were walking and talking a hundred years ago, Lhorke. The fact the mystery exists is all the proof I need. This is the reason Russ came for you, on the Night of the Wolf.’

‘One of many reasons.’

She let that slide. ‘Archmagos. Will the World Eaters implants kill them in the same way?’ She licked her lips, feeling them suddenly dry. ‘Will they kill Khârn?’

The robed priest seemed distracted, his eye lenses panning up one of the motionless Titans as it stood ready to walk again.

‘Their implants are primitive copies of the malignant original,’ he said. ‘They erode stability and damage the subjects’ capacity to reason. They impinge on higher brain function by rewriting emotional responses. However, they are not fatal – not degenerative in the terminal sense. The most important aspect of their implantation that they share with the original Nails is that they cannot be removed without killing the host, or – at best – inflicting severe and irreparable brain damage. But they are not, as you say, likely to kill Khârn. Or indeed any World Eater.’

Captain Lotara Sarrin punched a fist into her open palm. ‘The things you learn,’ she smiled, ‘with a little curiosity.’

Vel-Kheredar click-ticked in amused disapproval. ‘There is an ancient Terran proverb regarding curiosity, flag-captain. It involves felines and murder, thus I confess it makes little sense to me.’

‘I have a better one: “The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance”.’

‘Intriguing.’ The priest nodded. ‘A sentiment close to my heart. Who spoke those words?’

‘One of the Thousand Sons, apparently. Khârn quoted it to me once. I liked how it sounded.’

Vel-Kheredar returned to his personal chambers, craving the respite of solitude. Iron gargoyles leered down from the high walls, and his menials scattered before him, preparing the forge-fires in case he wished to work.

And he did, of course. He always wished to work. His chamber was more a foundry than anything else. His stalk-legs clanked on the deck as he moved to the workbench facing the panoramic window.

‘Remove shields,’ he commanded. Activated by his voice, the three-metre-thick armour plating blocking the windows started its laborious withdrawal. At first there was nothing but a slit of burning brightness, widening as the armour retracted. Soon enough, the warp’s boiling, thrashing light played havoc with the chamber’s shadows. Angels and devils danced across the walls, most cast by the leering gargoyles carved into the architecture. Most, not all.

Vel-Kheredar stared into the chaotic depths of the immaterium, occasionally letting his three eyes take picts for later reference. Though a baseline human would likely have been driven to madness by the sight, he did this often, and found the results hauntingly quaint. In many of the still images, he thought he could make out human faces in the murk. They were screaming, always screaming.

Vel-Kheredar set to work. He reached for the blade Gorechild with one hand, drawing his tools closer with the other.

But distraction reigned. The mortal captain’s questions drifted through his mind, looping like a corrupted playback.

He’d never actually met the Master of Mankind, but the Palatine Aquila had marked the sealed scroll handed to him by Malcador the Sigillite. A message from the Emperor’s own hand. He had it still – for who could ever disregard such a relic? – stored in his encrypted safe.

He kept faith with the secrets he was told to carry, though he never really saw what harm they might inflict. It was only a supposition, anyway. Back then, any hint of cerebral cortex degeneration was nothing more than an untested hypothesis.

He’d made an educated estimation, though. He’d made it while the primarch was still rendered somnolent by Malcador’s touch, and after the XII Legion’s Techmarines and Apothecaries had been ordered away. That made it Vel-Kheredar’s turn, and he’d done his examinations over the course of seven hours, all under the Sigillite’s watchful eyes.

‘I cannot be certain,’ he’d confessed finally to the man who was somehow both ancient and ageless at once. ‘But I can make an estimation based on the little data available.’

Angron had grunted, shifting in his sleep upon the surgical slab. Vel-Kheredar had flinched back, in an unwelcome and accidental display of unease.

Yet time was proving him correct. The primarch was, to use Lotara Sarrin’s crudely effective word, worse. Less human – if he could ever have been called such – in his responses, and increasingly slaved, emotionally and physically, to the Nails. A slow degeneration, slow enough that the erosion could be ignored for the first few decades. It had been easy to deny the Wolves, to refuse them and to fight them. Things weren’t quite so noticeable then as they’d since become. Deterioration set in quicker in the following decades, but the spread of the Crusade fleets made management of resources and punishing the wayward something of a fool’s dream. Reports didn’t always make it back to Terra. With thousands of expeditionary fleets, it mattered little.

And now they were all at war. The slow erosion had become a catastrophic decay, as the primarch’s rages burned hotter and lasted longer now he was truly free of the Emperor’s leash.

Vel-Kheredar held no grudge against the one he called Omnissiah. Ultimately, whether he truly was the avatar of the Machine-God or merely an extraordinarily knowledgeable false prophet, it mattered little. Horus and Kelbor-Hal had declared him a false messiah, and as always in matters of empire-building, politics and military power came before the truth. They weren’t mighty because they were right, they were right because they were mighty. History would be, as it always had been, written by the victors. In this case, it wasn’t just history at stake, but the metaphysical truth: victory determined just who was divinely born and who was a false god.

The Archmagos deployed secondary arms from beneath his robes, letting them unlock and uncoil from where they’d formed his ribs. Each of these new hands had thin, prehensile filament-tendrils, much more adept at finer machine work than his too-human fingers.

Gorechild. Every weapon had a soul, and this one’s was a shrieking, wrathful thing trapped in the toothless blade.

It didn’t pain him to violate XII Legion tradition regarding the ill luck of abandoned weapons, for two simple reasons. Firstly, they broke their own laws all too often in the heat of a battle. Necessity was forever the bane of tradition.

Secondly, he didn’t believe their foolish superstitions for a moment. He liked Khârn, though. The Eighth Captain was a difficult soul to dislike.

Bathed in the hellish light of the Sea of Souls, the Archmagos Veneratus – lord of a city-state on distant, sacred Mars – worked alone on an axe that had been cast aside by a genetic demigod. He cast occasional glances to where the sketched plans for a new weapon lay on the edge of his desk. A great black blade, to be forged for a primarch’s hands.

They would reach Nuceria soon. May whatever gods were true have mercy on the souls that were there when the fleet arrived.

FIFTEEN

Warnings
Brotherhood

The ninth time the Conqueror translated from the warp without warning, Khârn received word from Argel Tal aboard the Lex – a short-range vox-pulse, ship-to-ship – requesting that he come aboard the Word Bearers flagship at once.

Intrigued, he’d done exactly that. Kargos had wanted to come, as had Skane, but Khârn refused permission to both of them. They had enough difficulty getting on with the Word Bearers at the best of times, and with tensions running hot after Armatura’s cities finally fell, it was anything but the best of times.

What had really taken Khârn aback was that Esca, of all his warriors, had also asked to accompany him. The Codicier had seemed hesitant and worried, but that was nothing new where Esca was concerned.

‘I sense something foul aboard the Lex,’ he’d confessed.

‘That is no way to speak of our brother Legion,’ Khârn had said with a tired smile. The Nails gave a half-hearted pulse, as if punishing him for trying to enjoy a moment without an axe in his hand. He knew, objectively, they didn’t function like that, and it was almost certainly the Codicier’s presence that was aggravating his implants. Even so, it was hard to deny the coincidence.

‘I know we are far from close,’ Esca said, ‘but you are still my commanding officer. Be careful, captain.’

Khârn hadn’t replied. He’d not known what to say.

So he went alone. He went alone and listened to Argel Tal make a case for madness.

Khârn remained aboard the Lex as both flagships tore their way back into the warp, but with their destinations the same, it meant little.

The brothers spoke together in the foul serenity of the Lex’s winding corridors, which were forever home to chanting voices carrying through the ship’s metal bones. Sometimes Khârn heard weeping around a corner ahead, only to find the passageway empty when they reached it. Sometimes it was screaming, or earnest hymns sung in a language he couldn’t understand. Argel Tal seemed to notice none of it, and if he did, it never bothered him.

Khârn used the edge of his boot to nudge an abandoned lasgun, left to rust on the deck. Half the corridors they travelled through were thick with detritus and the mess of the foulest inhabitation. In several, they’d already stepped over corpses. Most showed the marks of the knife-wounds that had ended their lives, but Khârn had also seen signs of strangulation and gunshots.

‘Why has the Lex become such a den of filth?’ he asked.

‘Most of our ships look like this now. Too many new, faithful souls coming aboard. Their filth and waste spreads, as does sickness in the lower decks, where the cultists live herded together like beasts.’

Khârn heard the sneer in his battle-brother’s voice, despite the fact that Argel Tal’s features remained hidden behind his helm. Khârn shook his head.

‘It’s a disgrace.’

Argel Tal nodded. ‘Maybe so, but it’s difficult to manage. Our fleet’s holds are swollen with faithful mortals. Once we reach Nuceria, we’ll transfer the remaining crew and slave-castes to the Trisagion. Lord Aurelian wishes it to serve as his new flagship.’

Khârn cursed in Nagrakali. Nuceria. That was a host of fresh trouble just waiting to dawn.

‘What of the Lex?’ he asked.

‘I believe Lorgar means to make it a gift,’ the Word Bearer replied.

‘To whom?’

‘To me.’

They walked in silence a little longer, listening to the sounds of the ship. ‘It’s either cursed or haunted,’ said Khârn, trying to smile.

‘Both,’ confirmed Argel Tal with weary seriousness. ‘Thank you for staying aboard. I need your blade by my side for this.’

The World Eater fought to keep the concern from his face. The one thing Argel Tal loathed above all was pity.

‘You cannot mean to try it,’ Khârn said. ‘It can’t be done, not that it matters. The intent itself borders upon depravity.’

The Word Bearer gave a grunt that could mean everything at once or nothing at all.

Khârn carefully kicked another dead body out of the way. Clad in rags, it flopped against the wall with a dull thud. The entire ship stank of the freshly dead and the sickened living – it wasn’t quite the ripe scents of decay or disease, but carried elements of both.

Corruption. The word came to him unbidden. That’s what Khârn could smell. Corruption.

‘A few more decks,’ said Argel Tal through tightly gritted teeth.

‘You don’t even have her bones,’ Khârn said. ‘You told me devotees stole them.’

Argel Tal grunted again, this time spicing the sound with speech. ‘Where do you think we’re going, brother? What do you think we’re going to do?’

They’d descended through the ship’s filthy innards for more than an hour. The stench only grew stronger, setting Khârn’s teeth on edge.

‘Argel Tal,’ he said gently, as they traversed the chanting darkness. ‘I’m concerned for you. For your Legion.’

‘Spare me,’ the Word Bearer replied. As if reading Khârn’s thoughts – a possibility the World Eater didn’t disregard – Argel Tal turned his helm towards his brother. ‘I need no pity. I chose this path and I walk it willingly.’

Khârn breathed in the ship’s rank air. ‘Have I ever argued against the wisdom of you allowing a xenos parasite to share your body?’

‘Daemon, Khârn. It is no mere alien.’

‘Call it what you will. I’ve allowed it thus far, haven’t I?’

Argel Tal’s eye lenses were ice-blue in the gloom of the bowel-corridors. ‘Allowed it? What a curious choice of words.’

‘I could have killed you by now. I could have killed you to free you of the thing you call Raum, but I haven’t. For better or worse. I’ve trusted you. I’ve let you abide in your faith.’

A brief screech of wrenching ceramite split the air, and Argel Tal stumbled. Silver light burned for a heartbeat’s span in his eye lenses.

‘Do not threaten us.’

‘Us?’ Khârn asked.

‘Me,’ Argel Tal amended. ‘Don’t threaten me.’

‘I’m not threatening you. Stop for a moment. Stop.’ Khârn gripped his brother’s shoulder guard. ‘Take your helmet off.’

He heard Argel Tal grunt again. ‘I can’t. It’s been this way since Armatura. The Change isn’t… reverting all the way, as it once did.’

Khârn was implacable and unmoving. ‘Does Lorgar know?’

‘Does it matter?’ Argel Tal countered. ‘Come. We have to retrieve the Blessed Lady’s bones.’

Khârn watched the other stride onwards for a moment before once again falling in step alongside him.

‘How do you know where to find her remains? Haven’t you been hunting for months?’

Argel Tal muttered something.

‘What?’ Khârn asked.

‘I said, Erebus told me where to find her bones.’

The World Eater’s mouth fell open. ‘What’s wrong with you? How is this anything more than the crudest manipulation?’

‘We know it’s a trap,’ Argel Tal snarled, stopping suddenly. ‘It changes nothing. We have to bring her back.’ The Word Bearer breathed slowly, calming himself. ‘I have to bring her back.’

He turned to walk ahead, but Khârn tightened his grip, halting him in place.

‘All these accusations of the Nails killing Angron, and the implants ruining our Legion,’ the World Eater said, ‘and yet you’re warping before my eyes. I’m worried about you – about the whole Seventeenth. Your ship reeks of some unnameable malaise. You’re planning to raise the dead by giving your friend’s corpse to a man you despise, purely so he may commit some impossible act of necromantic superstition and bind you into his debt. Tell me, brother, am I doing my duty to you if I just allow this? If I help you with it?’

Argel Tal shrugged free of the other warrior’s grip. ‘Times change, Khârn. We all walk the Eightfold Path now, whether we keep our eyes open or move in ignorance; whether we desire this journey or not.’

The Eightfold Path. More religious madness.

Khârn hesitated within himself. If it was just superstitious nonsense, why then did the words seem so familiar, the way one remembers a dream for a few precious moments after waking? For a tantalising instant, the hallway’s repellent stench felt stronger. He heard a woman’s scream in the distance. She sounded young.

‘I hate this ship,’ Khârn said, adding a curse in Nagrakali. ‘I’ll come with you for this, but I do not trust Erebus. I can’t imagine why you suddenly do.’

Argel Tal was free, but didn’t keep walking. His fevered need to move forwards seemed to have abated.

‘I don’t trust him,’ the Word Bearer said in his dual voices, ‘but you’ll have to forgive me the desperation of a little hope. If he can bring her back…’

‘But at what cost?’ Khârn sighed. ‘What price will you have to pay?’

Argel Tal started walking again, slower this time. After a long moment, Khârn followed.

‘I am not going into this blind,’ said the Word Bearer eventually. ‘Erebus is not without his weaknesses. He can be out-thought, and outfought. It’s worth the risk, brother.’

Khârn said nothing. He let silence disagree on his behalf.

‘And there’s something else I need to tell you,’ Argel Tal continued. ‘Erebus was his usual serpentine self about it, hinting and suggesting rather than speaking it outright, but he wants you dead.’

Khârn cocked his head, unsure he’d heard properly. ‘Me? We’ve crossed paths once or twice in the last decade. Why would he consider me a threat?’

Argel Tal thought carefully before speaking again. ‘I detest him, but I can’t deny his genius. His mind works on a hundred levels at once and he sees the thousand different futures from every action he takes. Somehow, at some point in one of those many possible futures, your actions will lose us the war. If you die now, you won’t be there to influence the Siege of Terra.’

Khârn felt the sudden need to check his weapons: the plasma pistol and the replacement chainsword he’d taken from his personal armoury.

‘That’s what he told you?’

‘That’s what he told me.’ Argel Tal led them down a curving staircase, far too ornate and gothic to belong in the stinking underdecks of a Word Bearers capital ship. ‘I believe he hoped I’d be the one to kill you, out of affection for him and respect for his vision. But Calth rather leeched the last of my admiration for my former master.’ Argel Tal looked over at Khârn as their bootsteps echoed into the dark. ‘Just be careful.’

‘You’re the second brother to warn me with those words tonight,’ said Khârn. ‘Esca was the other.’

Argel Tal nodded.

‘You treat your Librarians shamefully, you know. Esca deserves better.’

Khârn laughed for the first time in days. ‘Lessons in morality from–’

‘From a man with a daemon in his heart,’ Argel Tal finished, smiling behind his faceplate. ‘I know, I know.’

The two warriors came to a sealed bulkhead set against the left wall. The Word Bearer stroked his hand across its surface.

‘Wait here. Kill anyone who tries to escape.’

Khârn looked at him as if to check he was serious, then nodded. ‘You owe me for this.’

‘You owe me for saving your life at Therakan. This will make us even.’

‘Therakan was three decades ago. And you still owe me for Jurade.’

Argel Tal grinned and turned the bulkhead’s locking ring with one hand.

‘This won’t take long.’

He was right. It took less than seven minutes.

Khârn stood outside the chamber, listening as the people were – for want of a better word – culled. Meaty thumps and cloth-ripping tears heralded every blow Argel Tal landed on the worshippers within. Never once did he hear the Word Bearer demand an answer or explanation. Never once did he hear them resisting, either. In his mind’s eye, he imagined ranks of ragged humans kneeling in concentric circles around a central pulpit or altar, shrieking and praying and gasping and weeping as they were slaughtered.

Perhaps they accepted their fate and welcomed passage to the afterlife. Perhaps terror kept them in place.

Candlelight bled faintly through the open slice of the bulkhead door that Argel Tal left ajar. Amongst the Colchisian cries and murmurs, he made out several repetitions of Great Lord, Great Lord. The twin tang-smells of blood and urine soured the air.

Just as six minutes passed, everything fell silent.

Before the seventh minute, Argel Tal emerged from the chamber, awash with blood and carrying a body. Whatever was left of the woman after a year of decay and many months in the reverent care of the cultists had been wrapped in a black silk shroud. The grave-smell was raw and sharp and thick enough to taste. Khârn leaned back as it washed over his senses, and reached for the helm locked to his belt. Once he was behind the familiar aura of targeting locks and inhaling the odourless air of his armour’s filtration systems, he spoke again.

‘How many were in there?’

‘A hundred and three.’ Argel Tal was already moving, cradling the shrouded corpse like a sleeping child. ‘Come on.’

Vorias and Esca waited where they weren’t welcome, but kept a respectful distance. Beneath them, the vehicle hangar was given over to several circles of World Eaters cheering on their kindred, who fought bare-chested or in bodygloves. An inactive procession of Fellblades and Land Raiders lined the walls, their turrets pointing open-mouthed at the warriors whose colours they shared.

The two Librarians remained apart, watching from the balcony deck above the hangar. Just distant enough so that none of the warriors below could sense their presence through accidental implant malfunction.

Vorias, eldest of the remaining Librarian coven, had worked with Kargos, Vel-Kheredar and the others in trying to determine just why the Nails reacted so poorly in the presence of psychic minds, but the line of research was abandoned when they had come to realise the context of their work: no one cared. No one but those cursed with a sixth sense. Besides, their efforts had always ended in vain, and killed too many ‘loyal’ World Eaters who were unfortunate enough to be near the unstable Librarians.

The primarch brought few traditions from his world into the Legion, but a mistrust of anything ‘unnatural’ was one of them. Soon enough, all of the Nail-bearing legionaries were spitting onto the deck before their own Librarians, to ward off the ‘bad luck’ of being near them.

How quickly superstitions were adopted into fact. Primitive, thought Vorias, primitive and so very sad.

Nothing had changed his perspective in the decades since. Quite the opposite, in fact. What followed was the gradual deterioration of any sense of brotherhood. With the death of kinship often came the death of loyalty, but Vorias was gene-born into the XII Legion and he’d be one until the day he died. He didn’t hate them for the way they scorned him, nor did he resent them for the way they spurned his talents as something dangerously worthless. He understood it perfectly. His presence caused them pain, and the Legion had no need of his psychic gifts. Even before Nikaea, such powers had never been factored into Angron’s battle plans, as blunt and uncomplicated as those plans were.

Vorias was sanguine, accepting the truth beneath it all: he wasn’t one of them. They were World Eaters. He was a War Hound. The Legion had moved on and left him behind with his ever-diminishing coterie of gifted brothers.

He watched Esca watching the melees below and felt the stirrings of a melancholic smile. The Codicier flinched at the hardest blows and twitched at the best strikes, as if landing them himself.

‘You wish to join them?’ the older warrior asked.

Esca’s answer was a question of his own. ‘You don’t?’

Vorias had a thin, aquiline face with eyes the same green as Terra’s extinct forests. It was in all ways a scholar’s face, the face of a man not easily riled to rage, which was true to his temperament. He was one of the few souls – human, legionary, or otherwise – with no desire to let his face reflect anything but the absolute truth of his feelings and thoughts. Those who kept his company admired that about him. His detractors considered it one of his many flaws.

‘I used to,’ he admitted, leaning on the railing as he watched the warriors below. ‘I used to crave the fellowship, the hot-blooded rush of running with the pack. But you and the others are enough for me, Esca. We need to appreciate what we have and strive for what we can achieve, rather than reach for what’s denied to us.’

Esca grinned, though his ravaged, sutured face made it more of a grimace. ‘Sounds very passive, Lectio Primus.’

‘Passivity implies apathy or cowardice,’ the slender warrior corrected. ‘I’m merely a realist.’

They watched the fighting below for another few minutes. One of the matches ended with first blood and riotous cheering. In the aftermath, Delvarus stepped into the circle, carrying his meteor hammer, already whirling the deactivated morning star in readiness.

Esca nodded down to indicate the Triarii captain. ‘Evidently, Lotara freed him from his quarters.’

Vorias gave a thin-lipped smile. ‘The flag-captain knows her trade. She shamed him in the finest way: she showed him as a warrior that couldn’t be trusted by his brothers. Very artfully done. Now we get the dubious pleasure of watching him seek to prove himself again, the only way he knows how.’

Below them, Delvarus was roaring into the crowd, baying at them, building their cheers for the fight to come. Like many World Eaters, Delvarus was inducted from a planet conquered in the Legion’s earliest decades rather than from a specific homeworld. No Legion except the Ultramarines was as diverse, coloured by so many shades of skin from so many different worlds. Where the Word Bearers were uniformly dusky-skinned from the desert world Colchis, and the Night Lords were pale from their years on sunless Nostramo, the World Eaters reflected a diversity of flesh overruled by the bonds of brotherhood.

Delvarus was unhelmed and unarmoured for the pit-fight. His dark skin marked his genesis in the jungles of whatever planet he’d once called home, and he bared iron teeth at his kindred, demanding one of them step forwards and face him.

‘His popularity seems unaffected,’ Esca pointed out.

‘You’ll see,’ Vorias replied.

Skane was the first to step forwards. The Destroyer’s pale skin showed an unhealthy lightning-storm of veins and blood-bruises staining his flesh, from proximity to his own toxically lethal weaponry. His neck was collared in dark metal, forming armour around his augmetic throat. An aggressive cancer had stolen his vocal cords, but Kargos had given him new ones.

‘First blood?’ Delvarus growled at his brother. For years, but for the rarest bouts, first blood was almost all they ever asked of him.

‘Third blood,’ Skane replied, and lifted an inactive chainsword.

The fight was painfully, though not shamefully, brief. Skane went down to third blood in two minutes, losing to Delvarus without the Triarii captain even breaking a sweat.

Before Skane had even picked himself up, another World Eater stepped forwards to take his place. Delvarus was still laughing.

‘First blood?’ he asked again.

‘Third blood.’

The fight went the same way. As did the next, and the next, and the next. As did the one to follow that.

By the seventh fight, Delvarus was breathing heavily, his skin beaded by effort. ‘Who’s next?’ he cried over the hamstrung brother at his feet. ‘Who’s next?’

‘Third blood,’ said yet another World Eater, lifting a stilled chain-axe.

This fight went to four minutes, ending with Delvarus smirking through the cheers. Tradition stated no warrior should fight more than eight bouts in a single night, else he attracted accusations of arrogance and vainglory, putting himself above his brothers. The Triarii cast his meteor hammer to the deck, raising his fists in triumph. The cheers, however, had stopped cold.

Delvarus turned to leave the circle and rejoin the crowd, but the World Eaters didn’t part to make way for him. One of them, a warrior with a face almost as badly sutured as Esca’s, thudded chest to chest with the Triarii.

‘Third blood,’ he said to Delvarus. There was a chainsword in his hand.

‘I’ve done my eight,’ the warrior grinned.

‘Third blood,’ the World Eater repeated, and shoved Delvarus back into the circle.

The Triarii reclaimed his flail, hesitating a moment before setting it whirling again. His eyes were utterly untouched by the amusement plastered across his dark features.

Above all of this, Esca started to smile.

Three more fights ended just as the first eight had. Delvarus was no longer amused, and no longer trying to leave the circle. He knew where this was going.

Another fight. And another. And another – on this, the fourteenth, Delvarus’s opponent raked the motionless teeth of his chain-axe across the Triarii’s bicep, drawing first blood. In a rage, Delvarus retaliated with first, second and third bloodings in as many swings.

‘Next,’ he breathed through clenched teeth, looking out at the ring of his brothers who stared at him in silence. He was panting now, no different from the breathlessness of the front lines. Legionaries were gene-engineered to fight for days on end against human and inhuman enemies alike, but on even ground…

When brother fought brother in a place as brutal as the XII Legion’s fighting pits, the rules changed with the game.

He beat the next opponent, and the next, and the nine that followed those. With cramping muscles, he put his twenty-fifth opponent down on the deck and caught his heaving breath.

The twenty-sixth was tied at second blood for a dangerously long time. His opponent landed a lucky kick to his chest after almost half an hour of duelling, and Delvarus staggered back against the wall of World Eaters. Where duellists were usually pushed back into the fight with cheers and good-natured jeers, he was shoved unceremoniously forwards in vicious silence, almost stumbling over onto his hands and knees. He recovered in time to block the descending blow, his flail’s chain wrapping the incoming sword and tearing it from his foe’s fingers. Delvarus cannoned a fist into the warrior’s face, breaking his nose and winning on third blood at last.

He dragged in another breath. ‘Next.’ The challenge was almost a wheeze.

Kargos stepped forwards. ‘Sanguis extremis,’ he said. ‘To the death.’

Delvarus narrowed his eyes, giving a snarl that wouldn’t have been out of place rolling from the throat of an Ancient Terran tyger, or Fenrisian wolf.

‘So eager,’ he breathed, ‘to die, Apothecary?’

Kargos gave a crooked, nasty smirk and held out his hand towards Skane. The sergeant handed him a power sword without a word.

Their weapons came alive in the same moment: Kargos’s borrowed blade and the spiked flail-head crackling with opposing power fields. Neither warrior went to parry. Neither did anything beyond trying kill strike after kill strike, weaving aside when death came too close for comfort.

Desperation gave strength to Delvarus’s sore muscles, but it couldn’t give him the agility he possessed while fresh. Kargos’s first blow came after the first minute, cutting a shallow line of sizzling flesh down the Triarii’s cheek. Delvarus’s face twitched as his Nails pulsed and he launched back at the Apothecary.

He scored the next hit, his flail’s head catching Kargos on the jaw. The barest scratch, too weak to even flare the power field, but it painted blood over Kargos’s pale skin and left his gums bleeding. That was enough to bring Delvarus’s smile back.

He was wise to Kargos’s games. He flinched aside when the Apothecary spat bloody saliva in reply, ready for the oldest of tricks that earned Kargos his pit-fighting name.

‘A filthy habit,’ Delvarus grinned. His return blow lashed through the air with a whine of energised metal, pulled back before it could crash into the deck and wedge in the iron.

Kargos’s reply came with another smile, this one with blood-reddened teeth. ‘You look tired,’ he said.

Delvarus sprayed spit as he roared in reply.

Above them, Vorias narrowed his eyes in thought. ‘Did you feel that?’ he asked softly.

Esca nodded. He’d felt something change in the air, a tightening of the atmosphere around the circle as Delvarus’s implants ramped up. The Triarii’s blows were wilder, heavier, accompanied by grunts and snarls.

‘Six seconds,’ Vorias said in the same quiet voice. ‘Maybe eight.’

It was six. Kargos parried for the first time, cleaving through the meteor hammer’s chain in one chop. The deactivated flail-head crashed into the closest World Eaters observer, raking across his bare chest.

At the mercy of his implants, Delvarus reached for Kargos with his bare hands, only to find the point of the Apothecary’s blade at his throat. Even with the Nails stealing the edge from his reason, the threat of imminent death penetrated to his hind-brain instincts, forcing him to hesitate. The silence was louder than the cheering had ever been.

‘Finish it, Bloodspitter.’ Saliva trailed in a thick string down the Triarii’s chin. ‘You’ve proven your point. All of you have. So finish it.’

Kargos kept the blade against Delvarus’s throat. ‘The other Legions have primarchs that lead them to glory. They have homeworlds to honour and cultural legacies to live by. We have scraps of stolen tradition and the trust between brothers. That’s all. Brotherhood, captain. A brotherhood you broke when you abandoned your duty and lied to your sworn kindred.’

Delvarus was clearly fighting the Nails, forcing his twitching fingers into fists to maintain a semblance of control. The sword’s tip blackened his throat where it touched and scorched the flesh.

‘I recognise my failing–’ he growled the words ‘–and will be sure to correct it.’

Quoting the traditional apology of the VI Legion earned a guttural tide of chuckles. Even Kargos smiled, and this time without the shadow of malice that had backlit every one of his expressions thus far. The Apothecary stared hard into the Triarii’s eyes.

‘Are you my brother, Delvarus?’

The Triarii exhaled, tilting his head back to bare his throat for the final thrust. ‘I am. And I’ll die as your brother. Finish it.’

Kargos deactivated the blade. He lowered it, and tossed it back to Skane at the circle’s edge.

Delvarus stared, wide-eyed, the Nails sparking in his brain. ‘Sanguis extremis,’ he said. ‘To the death. To the death.’

‘We’ve all broken traditions in our time,’ said Kargos. ‘You’re one of our best, Delvarus. Remember that. Remind us why we’ve spent so many years thinking it.’

The dark-skinned warrior met the eyes of his surrounding brothers. ‘You all stand by his words? Any who would make a liar of Kargos step forwards now.’ He spread his arms wide. ‘Plunge a blade through my breast. I will stand here and let you.’

No one came forward. A few warriors smiled, others nodded in a respect that passed for forgiveness.

‘I sense Khârn’s hand in this,’ Delvarus said to Kargos. ‘It smells like his wisdom, carried out by other hands.’ That earned more quiet laughter; no longer was it the sound of mockery.

‘I couldn’t possibly comment,’ the Apothecary replied.

Above the dispersing confrontation, Esca finally turned to Vorias. ‘They still have nobility in them. The Nails haven’t bled them dry.’

The Lectio Primus nodded. ‘Yet.’

As both Librarians turned away and left their brothers to the comfort of comradeship, Vorias spoke without looking into his protégé’s eyes.

‘Legion Master Lhorke came to me earlier today. He believes the primarch stands on the precipice, and a reckoning is long overdue.’

Esca didn’t answer at once. ‘That almost sounds like a threat,’ he said at last.

‘Yes,’ Vorias agreed. His scholarly face was cadaverous away from the hangar deck lighting, now a mask of pale angles and worn lines. ‘It does, doesn’t it?’

SIXTEEN

Regenesis
Blessed Lady
Vakrah Jal

Khârn expected chanting, candles and all the cringeworthy trappings of superstition. In this, he was not disappointed.

Erebus maintained personal quarters aboard the Fidelitas Lex, despite commanding his own warship, Destiny’s Hand. It was here that he brought Argel Tal and Khârn, and it was here that he prepared to commit blasphemy against the natural order.

Khârn knew little of Erebus beyond what Argel Tal had told him, and his Word Bearers brother was the kind of soul who disliked speaking ill of anyone without sincere and inviolate reasons to do so. Argel Tal would face down someone he despised and threaten to pull them apart, but he consistently refused to spread foul word about any other warrior once their backs were turned. ‘Defamation,’ he always claimed, ‘is for cowards and insecure children.’

Still, Argel Tal’s dislike for Erebus had come up more than once in conversation over the last year since Isstvan V, when Khârn and the Gal Vorbak warrior had renewed their acquaintance as respective subcommanders of their Legions’ forces, in readiness for the Shadow Crusade.

To Khârn’s thinking, the name Erebus chose for his battle-barge perfectly summed up the First Chaplain’s attitudes towards fate and his place in shaping it. Destiny’s Hand. Such arrogance. Such ardent, seething hubris.

Such an attitude led to… Well, it led to this.

Erebus had gathered a coven of slaves in his quarters, seventeen of them in all, each one chained by the throat to the central altar. The oldest was a crone who would never see eighty again. The youngest was a boy who couldn’t be long into double figures. Quite how they managed to chant from their parchments while breathing in the stench of the Blessed Lady’s bones was beyond Khârn. He’d seen unaugmented humans vomit at much less provocation, yet these murmuring worthies stared with dead eyes into the parchments clutched loosely in their dirt-stained hands. They chanted, but he wasn’t sure they were even reading.

Candles lined the chamber’s iron walls, each one marked with a meticulously etched Colchisian rune in its red wax. Shrieking angels and serene gargoyles formed of the same metal as the walls looked down from their perches sculpted into the ceiling. Several of the statues were reaching in motionless need, warped hands striving to touch the room’s inhabitants – perhaps to bestow a blessing, perhaps to mutilate them on devilry’s whim.

Most legionaries kept their arming chambers as places of meditation and training, filled with mementos of victories stored alongside their personal armouries. Erebus had made his haven into a heathen temple. The altar was a central table of filigreed black steel, complete with manacles for reasons Khârn didn’t care to know but had no trouble imagining. Blood channels were cut into the table’s surface: deep grooves that would funnel gore and whatever else into a shallow bronze bowl beneath the altar.

‘What’s the bowl for?’ he’d asked upon entering.

‘Scrying,’ Erebus had answered. ‘Now be silent and show some respect.’

Khârn had complied with the former. He wasn’t certain he could convincingly feign the latter.

Argel Tal remained at Khârn’s side, arms crossed over his breastplate. If his features were brightened by hope or darkened by distrust, his helm blocked all insight. Crystal blue eye lenses fixed on Erebus and the mouldering, disconnected bones resting on the burial shroud. The Word Bearer watched everything and revealed nothing.

‘Brother.’ Khârn spoke softly, so as not to interrupt the vileness taking place before him. He could hear drumming on the deck above, and weeping from another chamber nearby. A plague on this wretched vessel; this ship of the faithful damned.

Argel Tal turned with a low thrum of active armour joints. His twin voices were pitched low, leaving his human voice almost as soft as the daemon’s whisper.

‘What?’

Khârn inclined his crested helm to the chanting beggars. ‘Will they survive this ritual?’ he asked, his tone edged.

The Word Bearer looked back to the muttering choir. ‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know or you don’t care?’

‘I don’t care,’ Argel Tal admitted.

‘You’d kill them to save her soul?’ Even knowing it was too late, Khârn wouldn’t back down. ‘Is that who you are?’

Argel Tal breathed out a rueful sigh. ‘It might be. I don’t yet know. I’m willing to become it, to bring her back.’

The World Eater gestured to the chanting mortals. Chains rattled on his bracers as he swept his arm to encompass them all.

‘This is how it begins,’ Khârn said. ‘This is how the coldness you so despise in Erebus first takes root in you.’

Argel Tal shook his head. ‘Don’t act as if this is new to either of us; as though neither of us has butchered hundreds of innocents, young and old, with our own hands. This isn’t a game of selective morality, Khârn. We slaughter the innocent and guilty alike, whether they hold lasguns, bolters, or cower in their homes holding only each other.’

‘I was lost each time I killed civilians.’ Khârn gritted his teeth. ‘Lost to the Nails.’

‘You can lie to yourself and your Legion – but not to me, brother. Even if you were “lost”, does that excuse what you have done? Does it make everything better? As you tore those men, women and children apart, did any of their screams even once turn to understanding smiles? Did they reach up during their own massacres to give your their blessings, forgiving you for the fact you can’t control your own rage?’

Argel Tal looked back to the preparations as he continued. ‘We are the Legiones Astartes. We choose who lives and who dies in this galaxy. It is the way of things.’

‘This is murder,’ said Khârn. ‘Not war. Murder.’

‘Just because we are soldiers in a warzone, it is no less murder if we slaughter unarmed civilians. The context is irrelevant. But I will not argue with you.’ He nodded towards the remains on the altar. ‘Her life is worth a thousand others. These are… humanity’s dregs, but they are not here completely involuntarily. Look at them. You’d not think twice about breaking their skulls open if they were in your way. The only reason you’re roused to disgust now is because this heathen ritual makes your skin crawl.’

Khârn had no reply. His brother knew him too well.

‘It makes mine crawl, as well,’ Argel Tal confessed. ‘How many times have I told you I wished this Truth wasn’t true? But it is, Khârn. It is true – the Truth – and we face it. We will not live a lie.’

Despite their surroundings, Khârn felt himself at risk of smiling. ‘You sermonise well, brother. You should give more speeches to the Seventeenth.’

Argel Tal shuddered, his gaze never leaving the mouldering bones. ‘I’m no preacher.’

Khârn fell silent. One minute he’d tell himself he would interrupt the rite by drawing his chain-blade and threatening Erebus’s life. The next he’d confess to a curiosity of his own, fierce even in the face of the distant drums and the chanting that pressed against his senses like an unwelcome smell.

As for the Blessed Lady herself, she was a year on the wrong side of the grave. With no real experience in how religious cultures preserved the remains of their ‘saints’ as relics, Khârn had expected her bones to be bleached and polished, or for her wounded body to be preserved in stasis at the moment of her death.

The reality was altogether more macabre. Full decay hadn’t yet left her entirely fleshless – her initial interment in the mausoleum’s hermetically-sealed casket had protected her at least a little – but it was clear that the worshippers who stole her body had been praying to a decomposing corpse for almost a year. All that remained of the XVII Legion’s Confessor of the Word was a ragged skeleton, with a touch of ripped-parchment skin and rotted grey-green strings of tendon clinging to her joints. Her eyeless, jawless skull stared blindly at the gargoyles carved into the left wall. Skinless hands were nothing more than fragments of bone scattered on the black shroud. The last bits of organic matter she possessed gave off a cloying, musty reek as they broke down through the slow, slow process of inevitability. It was the befouled burial shroud that gave off the stench more than the pathetic remnants of her corpse.

Khârn knew Argel Tal as well as the Word Bearer knew him. Several long compliances and joint campaigns during the Great Crusade had seen to that, and respect had quickly grown between them. Khârn knew full well the nature of the repentant symbolism that his brother so often felt was necessary, and he could all too easily see Argel Tal wearing that burial shroud as a ceremonial cloak, whether this madness worked or not. Khârn resolved to put a stop to that, one way or the other. There was symbolism, and then there was morbid obsession. The Word Bearers – even the saner ones – often seemed to struggle telling the two apart.

‘What of the Geller field?’ he asked. With the Lex in the warp, its protective shielding guarded the hull against the touch of the Neverborn thrashing through the Sea of Souls.

‘Geller fields ward metal and flesh,’ Argel Tal replied. ‘Nothing can fully ward the human soul.’

The breeze came from nowhere. Just gently at first, tugging at the parchments bound to Erebus’s and Argel Tal’s armour; curling the edges of the scrolls held in the slaves’ hands. The temperature gauge on Khârn’s retinal display flickered, telling him it was too cold in the chamber to sustain human life, then scrambling with static a second time and reporting that it was hotter than the surface of a weak sun.

‘What are they chanting?’ Khârn asked. He spoke Colchisian close to fluently, yet struggled to make out a single word leaving the slaves’ lips.

Argel Tal’s answer was several seconds in coming. ‘Names,’ he said in Raum’s slithering voice. ‘Thousands of names.’

Khârn’s Nails gave an irritated tick-tick pulse, sending pain dancing down his spinal column. ‘What names?’

‘The names of Neverborn,’ Raum replied, his tone in the velvet border between caution and unease. ‘Daemon-names, rendered crudely by human tongues. Erebus is drawing their eyes to him, asking the denizens of the warp if they have seen Cyrene’s soul.’

‘Seen it?’

‘Captured it. Immolated it. Flayed it. Flensed it. Devoured it.’

Khârn grunted, watching as the wind from nowhere clawed at the slaves’ rags. The candles cast cavorting shadows of long-limbed things that weren’t present in the chamber. The drums grew louder – the ship’s own heartbeat pounding against the walls.

He was reaching for his weapon, whether the gesture was futile or not, when the first of the murmuring choir died.

The woman, clad in beggar’s robes, tore the parchment in her hands, crying out as she ran towards Khârn. Revelation was a sick sunrise behind her eyes.

‘Betrayer!’ she screamed. ‘Khârn the betrayer! Khârn the betrayer!’ The chain leash around her throat pulled tight when she reached the end of its slack – the sound of a splitting tree trunk cut right through the drumbeat – and the woman tumbled to the ground, her neck snapped.

Khârn’s skin prickled beneath his armour. Argel Tal – or was it Raum? – turned to regard him. Liquid mercury coalesced and clashed in the Word Bearer’s eye lenses. Neither warrior said a word. The drums intensified, furious now, mimicking a dozen hearts beating in opposition.

Across the chamber, Erebus watched the bones and only the bones. Khârn saw the Chaplain’s mouth moving, but he read from no parchment or tome. Whatever he whispered, he did so from inspiration or memory.

A dishevelled man was next. He cried out in ugly, staccato shrieks as he smashed his face repeatedly into the altar, spattering the Blessed Lady’s thigh bones with dark cranial blood and brain matter. It took him eleven impacts to kill himself; on the last, he slumped to the deck, twitching.

Khârn felt fingers scraping and scratching faintly at his armour. Uncertain target locks kept trying to track half-formed shapes of things that weren’t really there.

He drew his blade and rested a hand on Argel Tal’s shoulder guard. ‘Brother, nothing is worth this foulness.’

Argel Tal never had a chance to reply. The moment Khârn finished speaking, Erebus voiced a single word: an unknowable command in that jagged, alien tongue. The skeleton on the altar rattled, shivered.

And then, with no lungs or vocal cords, it started screaming.

In the tormented years to come, on the rare days Khârn possessed enough self-control to speak – let alone tell the tale of that night’s events – one of the few things he remembered with clarity was the way the choir died.

Fifteen men and women, raking at their own flesh with dirty fingernails and ritual knives, came apart where they stood. They burst as if shattered by the invisible hands of gods. Some of their ruined flesh was contained by their clothes, the rest slopped across the chamber. The sound of their sanctified demise was somehow porcine – a squeal of piggish panic coupled with the fatty splash of wet meat falling to the floor. Their innards rained over the altar, bathing the writhing skeleton in the viscera it so utterly lacked.

As if in sympathy, the iron drums slowed to one gigantic heartbeat, rather than battering mercilessly to represent many.

Dappled in gore, both Khârn and Argel Tal stepped back from the grotesque performance – the World Eater wiping his gauntleted fingers over his faceplate to clear his eye lenses; the latter staring at the resurrecting corpse through blood-streaked vision.

Erebus ignored the howling aetheric wind and the lamenting of souls caught in its grip. He raised his voice, aiming his crozius maul at the revenant on the altar, commanding it to reclaim its place in the world of flesh and blood and bone and steel.

Khârn saw the still-screaming corpse lift a hand – a claw of bone now articulated by fresh, bloody meat – before the chamber plunged into absolute darkness. The blackness was an entity itself, too deep and true to be the mere absence of light. His thermal vision cycled live, showing nothing. His echolocation sight clicked active, showing the same. No matter what his retinal display did to compensate for the sudden blindness, he was left in the dark.

His blade came up en garde, revving and chewing air. Something smashed it from his fists; he hoped it was Argel Tal.

The screaming became more human, echoing around the chamber rather than through Khârn’s mind. Blessedly, it ceased tearing at the Nails in his head.

He heard bare feet on the hard deck, and a young woman’s hoarse shrieking finally falling into wet breathlessness. He heard, beneath all else, a rheumy dripping that conjured thoughts of carcasses hanging in an abattoir.

When his vision returned, it was almost with reluctance, more like emerging from an ink-cloud than merely opening his eyes. Shadows recoiled from each of them, dissolving away in the candlelight and leaving ripples through the pools of blood. Not a single candle had been extinguished by the wind, or in the blackness that followed it.

Erebus stood by the altar, his expression one of immortal patience. Indulgence, even.

Crouched in the corner, naked but for her burial shroud and the scraggly protection of her hazel hair now blood-darkened to black, Cyrene Valantion shivered and stared at Khârn and Argel Tal with wide eyes the colour of burnt auburn.

She looked at them. She saw them.

‘You’re not blind,’ Argel Tal said in a stunned whisper. Not ‘You’re alive’, or ‘Are you all right’. Shock had hit him, and hit hard. ‘You’re not blind,’ he said again.

Cyrene kept shivering, kept staring, and kept her silence.

Word of her return spread like grassfire through the Word Bearers flagship. Mere minutes after they left Erebus’s chambers, mortal crew were crowding the halls, calling her name, desperate to touch her skin for luck, or steal a scrap of her burial shroud as some funereal token of the Pantheon’s favour.

Cyrene stared out at all of this with mounting horror. Before her murder in the skies above Isstvan V, she’d sailed aboard the Word Bearers warship De Profundis for over forty years. All the while, she’d been hailed as a living icon of the Legion’s past, one of the last survivors of the Perfect City, annihilated on the Emperor’s orders to punish the XVII Legion for their misplaced faith. The primarch himself had wept upon meeting her – the single, slow tear of a demigod’s sorrow – and asked her forgiveness. That story, too, had spread with the tenacity of unchecked flame. All the more fervently for the fact it was true.

Her life was a lesson for the Legion to remember, and an acknowledgement of its guilt. She was also a treasure to be protected, finding a place within the XVII Legion the way men and women of faith and courage had been finding places among holy armies since time out of mind.

She’d listened for four decades, hearing the confessions of Word Bearers, Imperial Army soldiers, and the thousands of human crew of Argel Tal’s warship. When the 301st Expeditionary Fleet linked up with other armadas prosecuting the Great Crusade, Word Bearers officers from other fleets always sought time in her presence, unburdening their hearts and consciences of the past’s sins and the treacheries yet to come. She listened for almost half a century, hearing and forgiving the trespasses of the only Legion ever to fail the Master of Mankind, and the first Legion to learn of the truth behind reality.

She’d learned that truth with them. She was as faithful as any Word Bearer, and plainly more pious than most.

Rejuvenat surgery kept her young, strong, and a frequent figure for immortalisation in the statues and stained glass windows that decorated the cathedrals and monasteries of so many Word Bearers warships.

But she’d lived those years without ever once seeing a single warrior or worker that came for her blessing. The Ultramarines incendiary weapons took her sight when they erased the Perfect City from existence. Cyrene watched her city die to an orbital bombardment many times brighter than her world’s sun, and the flash burns to her corneas and optic nerves had never healed. She’d refused augmetic replacements, for reasons of faith and the hope that her own eyes would heal.

Not once had she ever seen the interior of the vessels where she’d led sermons and taken countless confessions. She’d never seen Argel Tal, nor Khârn, nor even Lorgar. Her only experience of seeing any Space Marine in the flesh was watching the sons of Guilliman executing rioters and marching the population of the Perfect City from their homes, to minimise casualties before the skyfire began.

Now, in the corridors aboard the Lex, Khârn was glad he’d stayed for the ritual and its aftermath. He led the way back to Argel Tal’s arming chamber, fighting back the zealous crowds lining the halls. Argel Tal kept her close, guarding her with a drawn blade held crosswise before her. He’d allowed the Change to come, and shielded her with his great wings – those red-black pinions he’d been forming over the course of the year since Isstvan. They horrified Cyrene, that much was obvious; she was overcome by the immensity of everything around her.

‘Get back,’ Khârn warned the tide of humanity crushing itself against him. Grimy hands sought to push him aside in their fervency. There were even Word Bearers in the throng, chanting the Blessed Lady’s name, heralding her as the Saint Reborn.

‘Get back.’ He snarled the words, backing them up with a kick to one man’s sternum. Bones broke in the human’s chest, and the blow shoved him down to the deck, surely to die beneath the smothering tread of his fellows. Khârn felt a nasty little smirk take hold; Argel Tal was right. This wasn’t a game of selective morality.

Between the calls of Cyrene! Cyrene! and Blessed Lady! he heard a softer voice from behind, a girl’s tremulous whisper.

‘Who are you?’

He risked a glance back, just as he threw an elbow into a Word Bearer’s faceplate, sending the warrior staggering. Cyrene was pale, anaemically so, though whether from the potent stench of her entombment shroud or the insanity of her ordeal, Khârn couldn’t be sure.

‘It’s me,’ he told her. How many times had they met? How many times had he listened to her and Argel Tal debate faith, philosophy, or the nature of the soul? He’d never believed a word of it back then, but tonight’s events forced an unpleasant re-evaluation upon his scepticism. He’d let her touch his face to feel his features; he’d even let her run her fingers over the scar at the back of his head, the only wound that wouldn’t fade, where his Nails had been implanted so many years before. He’d told her of the Nails and what they did to his brain.

But here, now, she didn’t know who he was. She was looking at him, seeing him and not recognising him, rather than feeling his face or knowing him by listening to his voice.

‘Khârn,’ he said to her. ‘I’m Khârn.’

She stared at him, at the mask over his face. ‘You’re Khârn?’

He had no chance to reply. The crowd pushed against him hard enough to almost press him back into her. Khârn lashed back with his chainsword, tearing the closest human in half. He felt sick, fighting cold like this. The Nails pulsed – not with pain but with a tantalising stroke of warmth that set his heart racing – offering pleasure drip-fed into the emotional core of his brain if he’d only let go and butcher with impunity.

‘Back away,’ he growled. ‘Back away.’

He swallowed the urge, battered another two humans aside, brained a third with the hilt of his chainsword, and crashed his fist full into another worshipper’s face, snapping the man’s head back and sending him to the deck.

It wasn’t enough. The tidal push came on, humans squeezing past him, even slipping between his legs. Sheer numbers overwhelmed him, forcing the thought into his mind of peasant farmers with pitchforks dragging an armoured knight from the saddle. He’d seen that once, on a grainy hololith pict-feed, and it had left him laughing hard enough to bring tears to his eyes. It seemed somewhat less amusing now. Khârn banished the flicker of distraction and gave in to temptation. He gave in to the Nails, no different from the way an exhausted traveller surrenders to sleep. He simply stopped fighting it.

Pleasure came in an immediate trickle, revving as surely as the chainsword in his hands. Killing was exhilarating the way nothing else could be, and the Nails played their neurochemical game to make it so. He knew, in his moments of dull, grey peace, that when the Nails sang they stunted the serotonin in his brain to encourage instinctive aggression, just as he knew they deadened emotional response and electrical activity to anything but the flow of adrenaline. Amongst the archeotechnological whims of the Butcher’s Nails, these were the effects his Legion had detailed most extensively in their long-abandoned studies.

All that cold and considered knowledge meant little. The pain engine in his skull forced him to enjoy killing above everything else, and all the calm-voiced hypothesising about the whys and wherefores changed exactly nothing. Even the comfort of brotherhood paled – one of life’s few remaining pleasures outside of battle. So Khârn killed, just as his brothers always killed, because killing meant feeling something beyond slow, unfocused spite.

And as always, with the promise of pleasure came the burn of overworked muscles. Between the Nails and the combat stimulants swimming through his bloodstream, he fought harder, moved faster, struck with more fury. Pleasure was the reward for every swing of the blade.

Word Bearers were joining the worshippers now, decorum overcome by their zealous faith. One of them came at him with a chainsword of his own – Khârn cannoned his elbow into the warrior’s throat, slashing his blade across the exposed power cables on his foe’s thigh, and then reached to grasp at a human woman seeking to run past him. He balled his fist in her hair, breaking her neck with a single sharp pull.

Yet nothing he did could stem the tide. For each of them he knocked back or bludgeoned to death, more of them crawled or squeezed past in the press of bodies. The sheer amount of frantic humanity stole most of the room he needed to swing the blade or throw a fist.

The first sign of respite came from the rearmost ranks, with agonised wailing preceding the grisly smell of burning pork. Smoke, gritty enough to blacken the tongue, misted its way through the corridors, accompanied by the storm’s-breath fssshhh of flame weapons unleashed in the closest quarters.

What little Khârn could make out of the firebursts set his lips peeling back in a snarl owing as much to laughter as to rage. The flames were green: licking tongues of vital, phosphorous jade. He knew the nature of that fire, as did any soul that had fought alongside or against Argel Tal’s Chapter of Consecrated Iron in the year since their honoured founding.

Froth stung at the edges of Khârn’s mouth. Saliva ran down his chin, acidic enough to hurt. He took one man’s arm off at the shoulder, killing the poor human with a backhanded slap to the face before the man could even scream. Behind him, he heard Argel Tal’s energised blade thrumming left and right, buzzing as it fried the blood trying to stick to its sacred steel. Argel Tal killed while holding Cyrene in one possessive, protective arm, his weapon needing no chain-teeth to chew. The Custodian blade’s force field rent organic matter apart, going through bone as easily as flesh.

The two warriors turned with unspoken understanding, herding the terrified woman between them, standing back to back against the horde. Both of them lashed out with blades, boots and fists. Argel Tal had the advantage of his wings, slamming them against mortals, throwing them from their feet.

‘I see the jade fire,’ Khârn called over his shoulder. About time, he silently added.

‘Now stay alive until they reach us,’ the Word Bearer grated in reply.

Khârn’s chainsword lodged halfway through a man’s torso, slipping from his grip where blood made his clutch treacherous. The blade’s teeth clicked, caught against the bone. Khârn left it on the deck, sheathed in meat where it belonged, and resorted to killing them with his armoured hands.

It wasn’t the first time, and it wouldn’t be the last.

It was fair to say that few Word Bearers had ever impressed Khârn. They waged war with zeal – passion’s unhealthy cousin – and their chanting advances beneath morbid banners and divine sigils were difficult to admire. In some battles, a Word Bearers force could be relied upon to cleanse and purge every enemy soul, and salt the very earth on which the foe had lived. In others, they would crumble into praying, murmuring regiments and lose themselves in torture or some other ritual debasement to appease whatever gods they believed were watching. If there was a way to predict their inclinations before battle was joined, Khârn hadn’t yet discovered it.

Even the Gal Vorbak, Argel Tal’s daemon-blooded brethren, were as much animals as men. Few of the so-called ‘Blessed Sons’ restrained themselves to the degree shown by their former commander, and most were petty warlords over their own squads and hosts, ruling in their daemonic form more often than not, issuing commands not from the Legion, but from the Pantheon.

The exception to Khârn’s hesitant disgust with the XVII Legion was the Vakrah Jal. The Chapter of Consecrated Iron rose from the ashes of companies devastated on the killing fields of Isstvan V. Argel Tal had gathered hundreds of leaderless warriors and given them unity from ruination. Forsaking his oaths to the annihilated Chapter of the Serrated Sun, he gained Lord Aurelian’s permission to raise a new Chapter in its stead.

Many of them were berthed aboard the Conqueror, given the honour of duelling in the fighting pits. Only a few hundred remained aboard Fidelitas Lex, but they were making themselves known at last.

They were the bearers of the jade fire, and they went to war behind faceplates of burnished silver.

These were the warriors incinerating their way through the crowded corridors.

His boots slopped through the pools of sticky wreckage that remained. Where the floor was iron grille-work, molten flesh and metal dripped through the holes, trickling down into the nameless dark between decks. Khârn was fighting off the familiar disorientation of coming down from the Nails, but he was aware enough to note the caution in the Vakrah Jal’s movements as they approached him. Several cut right past him to reach Argel Tal and Cyrene, but a few lingered, not entirely certain of his temperament.

One of them risked touching him, resting a hand on Khârn’s back-mounted power pack.

‘Captain?’ the warrior asked. ‘Do you require an Apothecary?’

Khârn moved away from the warrior’s touch. ‘No. My thanks, though.’ His eyes were warm and weighty, threatening to close. He felt as if he could sleep for a week. Curse this damn ship – even the Nails pushed heavier on his mind here, leaving him weaker in the aftermath of their soaring song.

The warrior stepped back, his boots thudding in the organic slush as he deactivated and sheathed his curved Colchisian blade. A moment later, Khârn heard the telltale hiss of the Vakrah Jal’s wrist-mounted flamer ports shutting down. The pilot lights snapped out of existence with twin sparks. The sight almost made the World Eater grin. Nothing but the Mechanicum’s priceless best for the XVII elite.

‘Eshramar,’ he said to the Vakrah Jal sergeant.

‘Sir?’ The warrior turned his silver faceplate back to Khârn.

‘You melted half of this hallway,’ the centurion pointed out, and it was no exaggeration. The Vakrah Jal’s alchemical cling-fire had dissolved long swathes of the deck and turned the walls to slack, cooling sludge. Although the ventilators battled the spoiled-pork stink and the clouds of smoke, there was only so much air filtration could hope to achieve without hours to work on this mess.

‘We also saved your life,’ Eshramar pointed out. His voice was a vox-drawl, but there was no hiding the amusement. ‘Ungrateful Twelfth Legion bastard.’

The Nails’ bite was just fresh enough for Khârn to find that funny. His implants allowed him a smile, still stinging pleasantly from the adrenaline in his bloodstream.

‘Brother.’ He turned to Argel Tal. ‘We have to move. More will come.’

SEVENTEEN

Voices in the Night
Russ’s Lesson
Warp

Lorgar was listening to worlds die. Above and around him, kept at bay by the warded glass dome, the warp thrashed and surged in a dance of colours that couldn’t exist. He saw things in the boiling tides, as everyone did, but the tormented faces and helpless hands were easy to ignore. All that mattered was the melody.

The rest of the song continued in its arcane flow, coming closer and closer to the crescendo he required. Not long now. Soon, the tune would reach such aetheric artistry that he would be free to channel it for the material realm to hear. Each world enslaved to their suns had a part to play, which is why they had to die in perfect harmony with one another. All Lorgar lacked was a conduit to release the accrued power, and that would come in time.

Serving as conductor for an astrological orchestra was more taxing than he’d dreamed, though his blunter, more militant brothers would struggle to grasp the finer points of his efforts. Exhaustion left him wondering, even if only briefly, whether absolute peace would create a stellar song as divinely inspired as absolute war. Fate had played its hand and Chaos was destined to swallow all creation whether or not Horus and Lorgar raged against the Imperial war machine, but what if they had stayed loyal to the Emperor? What then? Would the Great Crusade have shaped a serene funeral dirge, to play behind the veil as humanity died in a defenceless harrowing?

Therein lay the fatal flaw. The Emperor’s way was compliance, not peace. The two were as repellent to one another as opposing lodestones. It didn’t matter what enlightenment the Imperium stamped out in its conquering crusade when obedience was all its lords desired. It didn’t matter what wars were fought from now into eternity. The Legiones Astartes would always march, for they were born to do so. There would always be war; even if the Great Crusade had been allowed to reach the galaxy’s every edge, there would never be peace. Discontent would seethe. Populations would rebel. Worlds would rise up. Human nature eventually sent men and women questing for the truth, and tyrants always fell to the truth.

No peace. Only war.

Lorgar felt his blood run cold. Only war. Those were words to echo into eternity.

He didn’t trust the Ten Thousand Futures the way Erebus claimed to. Too many possibilities forked from every decision made by every living thing. What use was prophecy when all it offered was what might happen? Lorgar was not so devoid of imagination that he needed the warp’s twisting guesswork to show him that. Anyone with an iota of vision could imagine what might happen. Genius lay in engineering events according to one’s own goals, not in blindly heeding the laughter of mad gods.

More than that, Lorgar sought to keep one thing in mind above all else. The gods were powerful, without doubt, but they were fickle beings. Each worked against its own kin more often than not, spilling conflicting prophecies into their prophets’ minds. Perhaps they weren’t even sentient in the way a mortal mind could encompass. They seemed as much the manifestations of primal emotion as they did individual essences.

But no, there was a wide gulf between hearing them and heeding them. Gods lied, just like men. Gods deceived and clashed and sought to advance their own dominions over their rivals’. Lorgar trusted none of their prophecies.

He’d even seen glimpses of potential futures where the Imperium came to worship the Emperor as a god. What would have to transpire in countless trillions of human hearts for that faith ever to take hold? The very faith Lorgar was chastised for spreading, the very beliefs he was punished for believing – how could mankind’s empire ever embrace their lord as a deity, after the XVII Legion had been humiliated for daring to claim such a truth?

He shook his head at the thought and sighed softly.

‘Lord?’ one of the choir asked, interpreting the sigh as one of displeasure.

Lorgar softened the interruption with a golden smile. ‘Forgive me a moment’s distraction,’ he said. ‘Please, continue.’

The choir numbered fifty-one souls, and they all spoke over one another. Each of them wore the white robes of their calling, almost priestly in their sombre regalia. They stood in loose disorder, with no discipline to their formation beyond the accidental artistry that each of them faced Lorgar, sharing their words as if they truly spoke to him.

Several mumbled. Others cried out. Most spoke in a placid monotone, bleaching their words of all emotion.

‘My legs,’ one of the choir said without any expression at all, standing perfectly straight. ‘Mikayas, help me, I can’t feel my legs.’

‘The Western Adelfia District is already lost,’ droned another, staring with eyes both wide and dead. ‘Aren’t you listening to me? The World Eaters took it an hour ago. I need more men, governor. I need more men.’

A third swayed on her feet, her unremarkable face striped by an unattended nosebleed.

‘My son,’ she whispered. ‘My son is trapped under there. Don’t shoot. Please. Don’t sh–’

Her sudden, abrupt silence made Lorgar wince.

At the choir’s edges, several of his thrall-scribes noted every word, doubtless to be pored over later for any lost significance. They paced across the cathedral floor, weaving between the astropaths, careful not to brush against any of them.

Angron entered the basilica, armoured in his usual stylised bronze and ceramite and with two oversized chainswords strapped to his back. He even wasted time with a greeting, raising his hand in the first time Lorgar could ever remember such a gesture from his broken brother. The Word Bearer tried not to let his amazement show at his brother’s new consideration.

‘Lotara says you stole her astropathic choir.’ Angron’s lipless smile was a ghastly thing indeed. ‘I see that she may have been correct.’

‘“Stole” is a strong word. “Appropriated” seems much less ignoble.’ Lorgar spared a glance for the skies above the cathedral, as the Lex ripped onwards towards Nuceria.

‘What do you need them for?’ Angron asked. His wounds from being buried alive had already faded to scrunched scar tissue pebbling his flesh, just another host of scarring to overlay the last.

The Devourers lurked behind him, stomping into the cathedral without the primarch sparing them a glance. To be one of Angron’s bodyguards was no honour, despite how fiercely the World Eaters champions had fought for it in the first, optimistic years. Angron ignored them no matter where they went, never once fighting alongside them in battle. In their Terminator plate, they’d never managed to keep up with their liege lord, and they were as prone to losing control as any other World Eater, meaning any hope of them fighting as an organised pack was a forlorn one at best.

Lorgar watched the Devourers – those warriors who’d spent a century learning to swallow their pride and pretend they weren’t ignored – speaking amongst themselves at the basilica’s entrance.

‘Hail,’ he greeted them. They seemed uneasy at being addressed, offering hesitant and wordless bows.

Angron snorted at his brother acknowledging them. ‘Bodyguards,’ he said. ‘Even their name annoys me. “Devourers”, as if I’d named them myself – as if they were the Legion’s finest.’

‘Their intentions are pure,’ Lorgar pointed out. ‘They seek to honour you. It’s not their fault you leave them behind in every battle.’

‘They’re not even the Legion’s fiercest fighters, any more. That rogue Delvarus refuses to challenge for a place in their ranks. Khârn laughed when I asked him if he’d ever considered it. And do you know Bloodspitter?’

‘I know Bloodspitter,’ Lorgar replied. Everyone knew Bloodspitter.

‘He beat one of them in the pits, and carved his name into the poor bastard’s armour with a combat knife.’

Lorgar forced a smile. ‘Yes. Delightful.’

Angron’s face wrenched again, at the mercy of misfiring muscles. ‘What primarch ever needed guarding by lesser men?’

‘Ferrus,’ Lorgar said softly. ‘Vulkan.’

Angron laughed, the sound rich and true, yet harsh as a bitter wind. ‘It’s good to hear you joke about those weaklings. I was getting bored of you mourning them.’

It was no joke, but Lorgar had no desire to shatter his brother’s fragile good humour. ‘I only mourn the dead,’ Lorgar conceded. ‘I don’t mourn Vulkan.’

‘He’s as good as dead.’ The World Eater smiled again. ‘I’m sure he wishes he were. Now, what are you doing with Lotara’s choir?’

‘Listening to them sing of other worlds and other wars.’

Angron stared, unimpressed. ‘Specifics,’ he said, ‘while I have the patience to hear such details.’

‘Just listen,’ Lorgar replied.

Angron did as he was bid. After a minute or more had passed, he nodded once. ‘You’re listening to the Five Hundred Worlds burning.’

‘Something like that. These are the voices of the freshly dead, and those soon to join them. The mortis-moments of random souls, elsewhere in Ultramar, as our fleets ravage their worlds.’

‘Morbid, priest. Even for you.’

‘We’re inflicting this destruction on them. We mustn’t consider ourselves distant from it. It may not be our hands holding the bolters and blades, but we are still the architects of this annihilation. It’s our place to listen to it, to remember the martyred dead, and to meditate on all we’ve wrought.’

‘I wish you well with it,’ said Angron. ‘But why steal Lotara’s choir? What happened to yours?’

‘They died.’

It was Angron’s turn to be surprised. ‘How did they die?’

‘Screaming.’ Lorgar showed no emotion at all. ‘What brings you here, brother?’

‘Curiosity. I’ve followed you so far. We’ve killed the worlds you wished to kill, and now you owe me an answer or two.’

Lorgar laughed. ‘You’ve killed several worlds in the last year that I wished to sail right past. Do not pretend you’ve been an obedient war hound, brother. Armatura was the first engagement I actually wished you to prosecute for me.’

The reply didn’t entirely banish Angron’s stable mood. ‘I have a question that you will answer, Lorgar.’ The World Eater finally turned to acknowledge his Terminator elite. ‘Be somewhere else,’ he told them.

They saluted, and did exactly that. Several of the Vakrah Jal stood at the basilica’s immense doors, watching the Devourers thud past. They turned to Lorgar, awaiting his order before following their cousins of the XII Legion. The primarch nodded, granting them leave to go. He looked next to the astropathic choir, who were slowly coming to their senses.

‘You may return to the Conqueror when the ships next fall from the warp. Leave us, please.’

They bowed and shuffled from the chamber in a slow, dazed procession.

Once the two brothers were alone, Lorgar raised a hand as if to stall Angron’s words. Ephemeral light ghosted into the space between them, swirling into spheres, mirroring the universe’s formation so many millions of years ago. Suns coalesced first, then the planets that depended on them. All of it drifted in a slow, stellar dance: the gravitic ballet of creation. A hundred stars rotated in the air, each with worlds revolving around them.

Angron bared his teeth at his brother’s shadowplay. ‘Ultramar?’

‘Ultramar,’ Lorgar confirmed. ‘A mere one-fifth of mighty Ultramar.’ He walked to one star, cradling it between his curled fingers. The sun paled to a murky grey, spreading white mist from its pulsing core. ‘Calth’s sun,’ he said. ‘The star Veridian.’

Angron’s mouth pulled into another sneer. ‘I am not an idiot, Lorgar.’

The Word Bearer’s smile was sincere enough. ‘Indulge me a moment more. Watch.’

Several stars paled the same way, while others played host to worlds that darkened and died in whirling clouds of subtle fire. Sure enough, tendrils of the white mist lengthened from their genesis at Calth, reaching across the heavens in slithering jealousy. They started to spread, but behaved as stunted, directionless things, never reaching any of the other orbs.

‘I once sailed to the edge of reality,’ Lorgar said softly, ‘and instead of godless, hopeless infinity, I found the remains of an empire destroyed when a god was born. The eldar gave birth to a deity that killed them because of their ignorance, Angron. The Great Eye is Slaa Neth’s afterbirth, joining reality and unreality as one holy realm. The Imperium has archived such events as warp storms, but – to my regret – I know better.’

At last, he came to an unremarkable star on the edge of his illusory display. A lone world turned around this sun: no more notable than any other globe, and less remarkable than many. Blue marked its oceans and great lakes. Green, grey and yellow marked its various landmasses, with the white of ice at both poles.

‘Here,’ said Lorgar. ‘The answer to your unspoken question.’

Angron wasn’t a creature given to hesitation, nor to patience. Even so, in that moment he seemed reluctant to speak, for once showing no annoyance at his brother’s lengthy, poetic scheming. Even the Nails were still, not forcing his face to twitch.

‘Nuceria,’ he said at last, and his voice cracked on the word. Iron teeth pushed together hard enough to give a metallic whine. ‘I have no wish to return there, Lorgar. No wish, and no need.’

Lorgar nodded, the sympathy of kinship in his eyes. ‘I know. None of us are the souls we once were, when the Emperor first brought us up into the stars. Each of his sons has grown, either learning from the past or throwing its shackles aside. But look.’

As the world drifted past, Lorgar reached out to touch it, the barest brush of his fingertips. The globe was swallowed in worms of fire, blanketing all detail beneath the burning cloud cover.

‘The conduit,’ Lorgar said. ‘It seals the pattern, and makes it whole. Watch.’

The tendrils of light straining at Calth suddenly leapt from world to world, grasping and curling across the reaches of space. As they spread across Ultramar’s borders, they looked undeniably eager – they looked hungry – clawing towards the burning orb of Nuceria. By the time they reached it, they’d formed a misty boundary between the Five Hundred Worlds and the rest of the Imperium.

Angron heard Lorgar’s gentle exhalation, even from almost twenty metres away.

‘Nothing from Terra will get in,’ the Word Bearer said, walking the misty line, ‘and nothing will get out. Not even an astropathic whisper will pierce this storm. We’ll set fire to Guilliman’s corner of the galaxy, and only you and I will know the way back through the flames.’

Angron’s voice was rusty metal, chewed up and spat out in a snarl. ‘Why Nuceria? You could choose any world near Ultramar’s borders to form the other end of this… barricade. But you chose Nuceria.’ The World Eater’s blink was lazily predatory, almost crocodilian. ‘You will answer me now, priest. Why Nuceria? What waits for us on that world that makes it such a tempting target?’

The Word Bearer lowered his hand and the illusory stellar cartography ceased to be. ‘It must be Nuceria,’ he said.

‘Not good enough.’

‘Why are you so reluctant to return?’ Lorgar asked quietly. Reluctance. This was something he’d simply not expected from his warlike brother, even on this most difficult of decisions.

‘How many times have I said this to you?’ The World Eater grunted, his throat forming a lingering ‘Hnnngh’ sound. ‘I died there. Everything after it is meaningless. Do not reduce me in your mind to a snarling, inhuman thing forever blinded by its own anger. I am still a man, no matter what they did to me. I chose to let the world live. There’s nothing there for me now.’

Lorgar nodded, sensing he had to make some small allowances to chain his brother’s temper.

‘Vengeance is there, Angron. Is that so meaningless?’

‘Hnh. Vengeance for what? Will it bring my brothers and sisters back from unfair graves? The bones of my past have long grown cold, Lorgar.’

The Word Bearer pressed harder, his eyes narrowing. ‘There was talk that the Emperor concealed the world from you. I’d always thought–’

‘You thought wrong.’ Angron spat on the mosaic deck. The saliva was red. Something in his skull was bleeding.

‘You played the Emperor’s games,’ Lorgar allowed. ‘You wore his collar before the rebellion. You tried to be the son he needed you to be. You were exactly that, beyond the moments you lost control. But now, whether you wish it or not, I need Nuceria dead. And you are the perfect architect of its demise, brother.’

Angron hesitated. Despite his words, there was no concealing the slow rise of fire in his eyes.

‘Why Nuceria?’

Lorgar looked rueful. The Word Bearer usually wore his feelings on his face, but he could be difficult to read when he chose to be, and Angron was no master at the subtleties of human expression.

‘The metaphysics are complicated,’ said Lorgar.

That had Angron growling. ‘I may not have wasted days in debate with you and Magnus inside our father’s Palace, but the Nails haven’t left me an absolute fool. I asked the question, Lorgar. You answer it. And do so without lying, if you can manage such a feat.’

The Word Bearer met his brother’s eyes, and the rarely-seen palette of emotions within their depths. Pain was there in abundance, but so was the frustration of living with a misfiring mind, and the savagery that transcended anger itself. Angron was a creature that had come to make his hatred a blade to be used in battle. He’d weaponised his own emotions, where most living beings were slaves to theirs. Lorgar couldn’t help but admire the strength in that.

‘We’re going to Nuceria,’ he said, ‘because of you. Because of the Nails.’

Angron stared, and his silence beckoned for his brother to continue.

‘They’re killing you,’ Lorgar admitted. ‘Faster than I thought. Faster than anyone realised. The rate of degeneration has accelerated even in the last few months. Your implants were never designed for a primarch’s brain matter. Your physiology is trying to heal the damage as the Nails bite deeper, but it’s a game of pushing and pulling, with both sides evenly matched.’

Angron took this with an impassive shrug. ‘Guesswork.’

‘I can see souls and hear the music of creation,’ Lorgar smiled. ‘In comparison, this is nothing. The Twelfth Legion’s archives are comprehensive enough, you know. Your behaviour tells the rest of the tale, along with the pain I sense radiating from you each and every time we meet. Your entire brain is remapped and rewired, slaved to the implants’ impulses. Tell me, when was the last time you dreamed?’

‘I don’t dream.’ The answer was immediate, almost fiercely fast. ‘I’ve never dreamed.’

Lorgar’s gentle eyes caught the warp’s kaleidoscopic light as he tilted his head. ‘Now you’re lying, brother.’

‘It’s no lie.’ Angron’s thick fingers twitched and curled, closing around the ghosts of weapons. ‘The Nails scarcely let me sleep. How would I dream?’

Lorgar didn’t miss the rising tension in his brother’s body language – the veins in his temples rising from scarred skin, the feral hunch of the shoulders, no different from a hunting cat drawing into a crouch before it struck.

‘You once told me the Nails stole your slumber,’ Lorgar conceded, ‘but you also said they let you dream.’

Angron took a step closer. He started to say ‘I meant…’ but Lorgar’s earthy glare stopped him cold.

‘They give you a serenity and peace you can find nowhere else. Humans, legionaries, primarchs… everything alive must sleep, must rest, must allow its brain a period of respite. The remapping of your mind denies you this. You don’t dream with your eyes closed. You dream with your eyes open, chasing the rush of whatever peace the Nails can give you.’ Lorgar met Angron’s eyes again. ‘Don’t insult us both by denying it. You slaver and murmur when you kill, mumbling about chasing serenity and how close it feels. I’ve heard you. I’ve looked into your heart and soul when you’re lost to the Nails. Your sons, with their crude copies of your implants, have their minds rewritten to feel joy only in adrenaline’s kiss. Those lesser implants cause pain because they scrape the nerves raw, thus your World Eaters kill because it gladdens their reforged hearts, and ceases the pain knifing into their muscles. Your Butcher’s Nails are a more sinister and predatory design, ruining all cognition, stealing any peace. They are killing you, gladiator. And you ask why I’m taking you back to Nuceria? Is it not obvious?’

Angron backed away, his eyes hot where his brother’s were cold. ‘They cannot be removed. And I would fight anyone who tried. If they are killing me, it’s a slow enough death that I feel neither fear nor regret.’

Lorgar’s stare was blazing now. ‘I will save you, Angron. Fight me, hate me, or trust me – it matters not. I will drag you into the immortality you deserve.’

‘They cannot be removed!’ Angron reached for his chainswords, stopping just short of pulling them. He ached to master his emotions, as if here and now, succumbing to rage would somehow prove Lorgar right.

‘I will not remove them,’ Lorgar stepped closer to his brother, his hands outstretched in placation. ‘But the overlords that hammered them into your skull will know more of their function. I will learn all they know of their insidious designs, and then I will burn their loathsome world until its surface is naught but glass. And you will stand with me, taking the vengeance you pretend you no longer desire. If there is a way to save you, somehow, some way, I will do it. This I swear.’

Angron swallowed. Not nervous, for he knew nothing of that particular stripe of unease, but something in Lorgar’s intense, spit-wet whispers had the World Eater grinding his teeth yet again.

‘If what you say is true, why save me?’

Disappointment was clearly etched across Lorgar’s calm features. ‘Why is that a question every one of our bloodline must ask in a disbelieving snarl?’ He sighed. ‘You are my brother. I would spare you any pain I can, and protect you from harm if I’m able.’

Angron said nothing for several heavy, heavy beats of his ursine heart. ‘Blood is not always thicker than water, Lorgar. There are many souls I honour above my own brothers.’ He started pacing, a caged animal, frustrated by the very fact his brother sought to show regard. The unfamiliarity of the moment was venomous. ‘You are weak,’ Angron said at last.

The golden primarch’s eyes unfocused, but he showed no offence beyond his faint distraction.

‘I am weak?’ he asked softly. ‘Did I hear you correctly?’

‘You heard me,’ replied Angron. ‘Let history mark my words well, for I care nothing about who sits proud on the Throne of Terra when the last day dawns. Horus is a fine commander, but that’s the limit of my admiration for that arrogant, preening bastard. I joined his rebellion because I can tolerate him easier than I can endure the abomination that names himself Master of Mankind. You want the truth of my life and death? I am Angron, the Eater of Worlds, and I am already dead. I died over a hundred years ago, in the mountains north of the city that enslaved me. I died after Desh’ea.’

Lorgar clasped his hands together, and the smile that curved his lips held nothing but amused understanding.

‘I am weak,’ Lorgar said again. ‘Me. Is that really true, brother? Am I the only primarch never to conquer his homeworld? Or is that the great and powerful Angron? Am I the first primarch to feel the breath of the Wolves on his throat, or was it Angron and his mighty sons who suffered on the Night of the Wolf, beaten bloody by Russ in the rain?’

Angron roared as he came forwards, though he drew no blade and aimed no blow. ‘I had him! I had Russ at my mercy! You dare say otherwise, when he was the one sent fleeing back to his gunship?’

Lorgar wasn’t cowed. ‘Was that how it happened, brother? Truly?’

‘I… Yes.’ Angron checked his advance, suddenly on edge. ‘We fought. Our Legions fought. The Wolves fell back. We… we chased them.’

‘If you speak the truth,’ Lorgar watched him carefully, ‘then… tell me.’ He almost asked to see, to touch minds and perceive the memory through Angron’s sensory recollections, but hesitated at the last moment. Despite their inanimate lifelessness, the Nails felt any sixth-sense intrusions and tended to bite back. Lorgar had probed and scryed enough to know the truth of that. Better to hear the tale in his brother’s words than to agitate Angron further.

‘You’re wrong.’ Angron spoke in a hoarse snarl, husky not from anger but from the weight of emotion. ‘You’re wrong, it wasn’t in the rain; it was at sunset on a day already darkened by the burning city behind us. My blade broke, but it didn’t matter. I pulled his chainsword from his fists, and broke it in my hands. We fell into the mud, brawling. We’d both known that fight would end up on the ground. I had him, Lorgar. My boot on his throat, at the very end. I stood above him at last, and Russ…’

…and Russ had to crawl away, fanged teeth clenched, breathing spit as much as breath. Strings of it tumbled from his cracked lips with each rasping exhalation. Angron chased as the Wolf King staggered to his feet, but Russ opened his arms wide, offering no fight.

‘Do you see?’ he said. No, he barked it. He barked it not like a simple beast, but with human passion backed by canine ferocity. Conviction burned in his eyes – the same instinctive viciousness of a dog defending its family. ‘Look, damn you. Look around you. Do you see what you’ve done to your sons?’

At the battle’s core, sense pierced Angron’s aching sight long enough to leave him speechless. The axe in his hand lowered, and he looked out at the ranks of Wolves facing him with their bolters raised. They came in ragged packs, abandoning the warfare to form a ring around the primarchs. Wolf after Wolf – close enough for Angron to make out the individual totems and talismans rattling against their storm-grey armour – moving to stand in ragged ranks with their brothers.

One of them, a tribal leader of some kind, stood out by the elaborate blue pack markings over his faceplate.

‘It’s over, Lord Angron,’ he said.

‘Russ.’ Angron turned to his brother, and pointed with one bloody hand over the encircling wolf packs, to where the Legions still fought across the rest of the battlefield. ‘Your Legion is bleeding.’

Russ didn’t deny it, for it was true. Beyond the encircled primarchs, the World Eaters were tearing through their cousins’ grey regiments, fighting without sign of formation, just as they fought without any regard for their primarch. Even in those early days, they were used to Angron fighting alone, and their fresh implants stole any hope of cohesive battle planning. Their stunted brains wouldn’t let them bring order to the chaos.

The few World Eaters in possession of their senses – Lhorke’s towering ironform was one, Angron noted through narrowed eyes – were throwing themselves at the Wolves entrenched around the duelling primarchs, but they lacked the numbers to break through Russ’s defensive packs.

‘My men are dying,’ Russ admitted. ‘Yet here we stand at the battle’s heart, and only one Legion is about to lose its primarch. Do you see why I came? Do you see how you’ve broken your sons?’ He threw an arm to take in a wide pass of the battlefield. ‘The Wolves are soldiers taking an objective. They fight to win, while your World Eaters fight only to kill.’

‘Victory comes,’ Angron smiled, showing a crescent of bloody teeth, ‘to the last man standing.’

Russ spared a glance to the wider battle, wincing at the devastation being inflicted upon both Legions.

‘That is true in the gladiator pits, Angron. But our father desires soldiers and generals. Not gladiators. Death is a necessity – it comes for our foes, and it comes to our own soldiers when we cannot spare them. You spend your Legion’s lives like a lord spends coin. It cannot continue.’

Angron had followed Russ’s glance, but where the Wolf King gave the battle a mere glimmer of attention, Angron was paying full and amused attention.

‘War is only won when every enemy is dead. A pacified enemy is still an enemy.’

‘More gladiator wisdom, Angron. Look at my men surrounding you. Have you honestly learned nothing from this?’

‘Your men are losing, Leman.’ He grinned at his brother. ‘Let’s take this to the last breath, eh? Let the bloodshed play out with the dance of cutting blades. We’ll see which Legion still stands.’

‘Neither will stand. But you die the moment my men open fire.’

‘Death holds no sacred mystery to me, Russ. It holds no terror.’ He laughed then, through the Nails’ pain, laughing hard enough that his eyes watered. ‘I may even welcome it! Are you empowered by our “beloved” father, dog? Can you really give me death, or has your posturing already gone too far? Will you run back to Terra and report that you lost control of your mongrel-blooded curs in the same way you slander me?’

Angron’s pain-slitted eyes locked to his brother’s, and he laughed even harder. ‘This was never meant to come to battle! I see it in your eyes – you took a step too far, little executioner, now you fear how this will all end.’ He stepped closer, his amusement turning sick and savage. ‘Executions are the murder of helpless prey, Russ. What you’ve committed to here, “brother”, is a fair fight.’

He nodded over the battlefield again. ‘And I say once more – your men are losing. You know why? Because yours have something to live for. They care. Mine fight for pleasure, knowing any life outside of war is denied to them. Their own lives are as meaningless to themselves as they are to me, and that is the gift given by the Butcher’s Nails. Warriors, not soldiers. Warriors with no fear of death, and no caution to guard against it. They don’t protect, they kill. They cast aside all thoughts of their own lives in the hunger to end others’. Remember that, Russ. Remember it well.’

‘This isn’t over,’ Russ promised.

‘Whatever soothes your bruised pride, dog.’

Leman Russ, Primarch of the Vlka Fenryka, took in one long, deep breath, and cast his howl to the sky.

‘He howled?’ asked Lorgar. His eyes were wide, pearly with soft wonder.

‘The call to retreat,’ Angron replied. ‘A fighting retreat – it took longer than you can imagine for the World Eaters to realise the battle was over. I had whole companies still trying to fight the Wolves as Russ’s Legion ran for their gunships.’ He chuckled. ‘They took a lot of trophies for their tallies. Many wear them still.’

For several moments, Lorgar had to watch his brother’s flawed face to make sure this wasn’t some elaborate jest.

‘You didn’t answer Russ’s question,’ he said. ‘Did you truly learn nothing from that fight?’

Angron blinked, the dull edge of surprise coming into his eyes. ‘What revelation should I have come to? I learned he wasn’t allowed to kill me. I learned he postured in the hope of bringing me back to Terra, collared and submissive to his whims.’

‘No.’ Lorgar was almost breathless in disbelief. ‘No, no, no. Angron, you stubborn fool. None of that matters.’

‘There were more dead Wolves on that field than dead World Eaters. That matters.’

That, thought Lorgar, was also arguable, but he let it pass. ‘Russ had you cold. You said you had him at your mercy, but he crawled free.’

‘He crawled.’ Angron chuckled again, making a meal of the word.

‘And when he rose, he had you surrounded. He could have killed you.’

‘He tried and failed.’

‘His men, Angron. His Legion could have killed you. Whether the Emperor ordered it or not, Russ spared your life. He didn’t retreat in shame, you arrogant…’ Lorgar sighed. ‘He was probably lamenting your thick skull all the way back to Terra, hoping you’d heed a rather consummate lesson in brotherhood and loyalty. Look what happened. Yes, you beat him in a duel. Yes, your men took down more of his than his of yours. And yet, who won the battle?’

‘The World Eaters,’ Angron said without hesitation.

Lorgar just stared at him for several seconds. ‘I appreciate that every living being must, by the nature of perception, understand and process life in a different way. But even for you, brother, this is achingly obtuse.’

‘You’re saying the Wolves won.’ Angron looked more amused than confused.

‘How can you not see it?’ Lorgar steepled his fingers, trying to rein in his own temper. ‘They won a victory worthy of engraving on their armour for all time. While you were glorying in your strength, Russ’s sons were loyal enough to come to him, to surround you both, to threaten your life while you stood at the vanguard of your own Legion. That may be the most comprehensive moment of outmanoeuvring in the history of the Legiones Astartes. It’s almost poetic in its elegance and emotional resonance. He proves his sons’ loyalty, while yours leave you to die. He proves the damage the Nails are doing to your Legion. He proves the tactical strength of taking an objective rather than fighting purely to kill. He spares your life in the hope you’ll see all of this, in a lesson it cost him heavily to teach you, and your reaction is to grin and claim yourself the victor.’

Angron didn’t chuckle that time. Lorgar could see it in his brother’s tensed muscles – some cognitive switch had clicked somewhere in his consciousness, and Angron’s rage was rising again.

‘Only one of us ran away that night. He’s weak.’

‘Gods’ blood.’ Lorgar was still managing, barely, to speak calmly. ‘The primarchs are the bridge between the Emperor and the species he leads. We are all weak, for we are all equal. All of us. We are humanity magnified: its virtues and its flaws.’

‘I am not weak. I have never been weak.’

‘You are not only weak if you fail to understand Russ’s lesson, you are also a fool.’

Lorgar could see in Angron’s eyes just how much it strained the World Eater to resist closing his hands around his brother’s throat. He was drawing breath to comment on Angron’s self-control when the ship shook beneath them, and they fell from the warp once more. Metal groaned beneath their boots as the ship itself writhed in torment to be plunged back into the cold un-tides of realspace. The Lex’s noble machine-spirit was coming to love its journeys through the Sea of Souls.

Angron breathed out in a slow, bearish huff. His bloodshot eyes lost their unhealthy glint, and the shaking eased in his hands.

‘Forget the Night of the Wolf. I came because of Nuceria.’

‘And I have answered you,’ Lorgar countered, still watching the way his brother’s wrath faded as the ship dropped from the warp.

The scarred primarch returned the golden one’s gaze. For the first time, Angron realised that the only injuries Lorgar had failed – or perhaps refused – to heal were the talon-gashes across his cheek, inflicted by Corax on the Killing Fields.

He was already weary of falling into Lorgar’s gentle conversational gambits, and just this once, he wouldn’t rise to his brother’s baiting words.

‘I respect you,’ he admitted. ‘But I will never like you.’ With rare concern and consideration, Angron met his brother’s eyes. ‘You do owe me, though. I saved your life. So I’ll let you save mine.’

Lorgar bowed, priest-like, as he smiled. ‘Make ready, then,’ he said. ‘We’ll reach Nuceria in a month. You are going home, Angron.’

Angron gave the low, throaty ‘Hnngh’ growl again. A slow, iron-fanged smile dawned over his devastated features. ‘I wonder if they still remember me.’

Time passed in the warp like nowhere else. Even on warded vessels, unreality’s caress would drip through to twist the hours in the muscles and minds of the mortals aboard. Tasks that took minutes might leave someone exhausted as if they’d done hours of work; sleep came uneasily to all, and dark dreams plagued many. When a crew member’s cycle of rest came, it wasn’t uncommon for them to leave their quarters at the beginning of their next shift irritable and scarcely rested at all.

Lotara Sarrin dreamed of her brother – of his death in her youth, when he’d sickened and died beyond even her father’s infinite financial resources. It was the first time in her young life she’d realised that you couldn’t heal all problems by simply hurling money at them. Towards the very end, she’d hated seeing her brother at all, and the years did nothing to soften the bite of that shame. He’d raved and cried, looking dead already, staring at them with sunken yellow eyes and shivering from a host of malfunctioning organs.

Many nights that month, she dreamed of that writhing boy, and when her insomnia was at its least merciful, keeping her awake for days on end, she heard him crying in the air ducts.

Angron cared nothing for the Conqueror’s command, trusting it to the officers trained for the task; he cared similarly little for his warriors’ training, trusting the centurions to handle the mundane aspects of Legion life. Several times, he was seen in the company of Vel-Kheredar, entering or exiting the Archmagos’s forge-chambers. Other times, he walked the wide halls of the Conqueror’s war museum, pausing for long conversations with the archivists when his skull’s aches allowed him the patience to do so. When he spent any time among his men, it was never with any preferred Chapter or company; always with his attention divided between them. The Conqueror housed precious few of his Legion, while the rest were engaged in the pacification of Ultramar, and those present saw more of their primarch in that one month than they had in the several years before. He drank with them, watched their gladiatorial duels, laughing as they laughed and sharing the warmth of brotherhood in a way few primarchs enjoyed with their men.

Lorgar’s seclusion was one of effort and focus, rather than disgust at the nearness of others. He’d taken to transcribing the melody behind the veil, writing with ink and quill upon the walls and floor of the basilica in a language that was and wasn’t the jagged rune-lore of Colchis. Magnus came to him once more, to speak of the stars and the nature of reality in the realm where gods and mortals meet. Lorgar never looked up from his transcriptions; never even noticed his brother’s manifestation. All that mattered was the song. He felt it as much as heard it now – it was a wind against his skin and a drumming in his bones. You could take a thousand orchestras on a thousand separate worlds, using instruments and melodies known only to those cultures, and you would still never come close to the scale of the orchestral undertaking playing through Lorgar’s mind. It wasn’t one song, it was a billion songs playing over each other, and it was his place to listen and ensure every note hit its beat. He heard trillions of men, women and children dying in every way it was possible to die. He heard the death-scream of whole worlds, as their surfaces burned and their cores cried out under the strain. He heard it, felt it, and wrote and wrote and wrote.

By the time the Lex finally fell from the warp in Nuceria’s system, he was left wondering if this was what madness felt like. Was this madness? Would he know? Did the insane ever know they’d fallen so far?

He didn’t stop writing, though. The cathedral was a canvas of runic text, senseless in how often it was overwritten, and although he slowed in his scrawls he didn’t quite stop.

Not yet.

Skane dreamed of home, and spent many hours watching medical diagnostic hololiths picturing the exact radiation degeneration of his body over the years. He was offered the chance to leave the Destroyers. He refused.

Delvarus dreamed of a redemption denied, and fought twice as hard in training to defy the possibility.

Kargos inspected the gene-seed vaults, indulging in a momentary melancholy at the names etched across the cryo-storage units. When he dreamed, he dreamed of past victories. The warp’s touch never seemed to play on him as it did on others.

Cyrene Valantion, She Who Lived Twice, dreamed of swimming through fire, chased by howling daemons clawing at her ankles. Her own screams woke her each night, sitting bolt upright in her new quarters, sheened with cold sweat. Some nights, she could hear the Vakrah Jal guardians outside her door ordering worshippers to clear the area. Other nights, she woke to see Argel Tal sat hunched with his back to the door, the sword that killed her in his hands. His cold blue eye lenses burned through the gloom as he watched her. The two of them would while away the following hours in quiet talk, with him telling her of the last year’s warp journeys after Isstvan, and her swearing she remembered nothing of the year she spent dead.

For her sake, he said he believed her.

Argel Tal himself spent much of his time training with the Vakrah Jal, or being ignored on his daily attempts to speak with his primarch. With the Conqueror repaired, there were fewer chances to cross over to meet with Khârn.

As for Khârn, he never told anyone of his dreams, if indeed he had any at all. He pushed his men harder than ever before, amalgamating several broken companies to reform his own. His focus was on Nuceria. Specifically, on surviving Nuceria. Despite the world’s undeniably soft defences, he couldn’t shake the threat of discomfort severe enough that it felt like a premonition.

Argel Tal’s warning stayed with him, to the point where he considered killing Erebus and simply being done with all thought of it. Kargos considered it nonsense – ‘I cannot believe you are even giving this consideration, captain’ – and Skane considered it hilarious. His augmetic throat laughed like a Rhino tank changing gears.

Twenty-seven days after the Conqueror and the Fidelitas Lex left Armatura in ashes, they broke from the warp at the edge of Nuceria’s system. The Trisagion was waiting for them.

Lorgar looked up from his scrawling, saw the distant world turning in the night, and shuddered. Here was his conduit to release the energies of a hundred massacred worlds and bathe Ultramar in holy fire. Here, on the planet where Angron was raised, Lorgar’s brother would face the most vital choice of his life.

And as always, it would come down to blood.

EIGHTEEN

Field of Bones
Betrayer
A Simple Order

Oshamay Evrel’Korshay of the Thal’kr Kin-Guard was making her rounds when the sky caught fire. She walked the city walls at sundown, speaking with her artillery crews and line captains, never kind but never unfair, always preferring professional distance to any shared warmth. Better to be admired than loved. Her artificial arm whirred and purred smoothly, obeying at will. She’d lost her flesh and blood limb nine years ago, during the trench fighting of the Last War. Since then, that name had become something of a sour-tasting joke. The War to End All Wars hadn’t been the last after all. With the city-states changing sides so often, she honestly wasn’t sure if they were all fighting a different conflict, or if the Last War merely spread down the years, its boundaries and bitterness changing with the seasons.

When the fire-rain first showed in the sky, trailing down between the evening’s first stars, her first thought was that their enemies were doing the impossible. Somehow the Great Coastal Union was attacking Desh’ea from the air, despite lacking all resources and munitions to do so. What political shifting had taken place to allow it? Had they unearthed one of the First Kingdom’s arsenal-crypts deep under the coastal waves, or buried beneath the mountains? Impossible. There could be none left, every site had been dug up or dredged centuries ago.

Even so, the very first thing she did was activate the telemetry unit built into her uniform’s metal epaulette. Its single light started blinking urgently, trading electronic panic with its main cogitator elsewhere in the city.

‘General,’ said one of the wall-gunners at her side. ‘Is it the Imperials?’

The Imperials, he said. Like a curse.

‘We are Imperials,’ she pointed out, still watching the comets fire-trailing down.

He shrugged. Compliance had held on Nuceria since their grandparents’ days, but the Imperium was a distant master at best. There’d been no visiting vessels since the Emperor – praises upon him, Lord of Old Earth! – ended the Gladiator-King’s Rebellion over a hundred years ago. Like so many worlds in the nascent Imperium, Nuceria was left alone as long as it paid its tithes in loyalty, coin, iron and flesh.

‘Maybe they’ve come back,’ he said, and she pitied him for the hope in his eyes. ‘They’ve come back to end the Last War.’

‘We don’t need their help to end the Last War.’ She trotted out the old trope without a thought, speaking on instinct. How many times had the Praxury, and his father before him, told his war council that they would never send to the Imperium for aid? Not even the forces of Ultramar, rumoured to be so achingly close by, would be summoned for assistance.

‘It must be the Imperials. The Alliance has no weapons capable of… whatever this is.’

Sirens started wailing across the city, warning of an incoming air raid. The sound was so alien it almost made her laugh, though her smile was a peeled-back thing, unpleasantly grim.

‘Give me your magnoculars,’ she ordered. He did so, and she aimed them high, staring up at the teardrop pods streaming contrails of flame through the heavens.

‘Is it them?’ the man asked. ‘The Imperials?’

‘Wish in one hand,’ she told the soldier, handing back his viewfinder, ‘and crap in the other. See which hand fills up first.’

The general made her way to the war room, generously deploying her scowl to move any junior officers out of the way. The Palace Praxica was a monument to excess, with reskium metal and black marble displayed in such quantities that they crossed the border into garishness from the moment one entered the first receiving chamber. Oshamay had no patience for yet more statues of lithe dancing girls or another mural of past Praxuries standing triumphant over battlefields where they’d never even drawn a pistol or blade.

When she entered the war room after making her way through the palace’s crowded corridors, a sea of salutes and wide eyes awaited her. She returned the only salute that mattered with her own robotic arm.

‘Our one lord,’ she greeted Praxury Tybaral Thal’kr of the First House, Protector of Desh’ea, Imperial Magnate of Nuceria.

He waved her closer, his eyes as wide as those of his servants and soldiers. Blue eyes, like his father. Dark hair, like his mother. Somewhat drowned in his purple robes of office, and clutching the aquila-topped reskium sceptre as though it were a weapon to save his life. Perhaps it would, if this really was the return of the Imperials.

He would be thirteen years old next month. Assuming, Oshamay thought, that we all survive until next month. Or the next hour.

‘General Evrel’Korshay,’ the Praxury greeted her. ‘The sky is crying fire. It’s a sign.’

‘Yes, our one lord. A sign, as you say.’ Her heart sank upon seeing him. What they really didn’t need, on the edge of this crisis, was their mad little cockroach of a king slowing them down with his idiocy. ‘With your permission, I’ve mobilised the Kin-Guard, and–’

‘No.’ The frightened boy controlled his voice to perfection, no surprise given his endless elocution training. If she couldn’t see the fear in his eyes, she’d never know from his firm voice that he was on the edge of terror.

‘Our one lord,’ she said, careful not to glance to any of his courtiers and other officers for support. ‘The city is about to come under attack.’

‘You do not know that,’ he pointed out. He limped over to the map table, messy as it was with scrolls, wincing at the gout he’d developed years before and never managed to fight off. ‘I believe the Imperials are returning to end the Last War.’

Oshamay didn’t know what the pods of fire that rained down from orbit actually were – such a technological marvel was far beyond her frame of reference, and had no mention in the city-state’s archives. Even so, when they began to light up the sky, she needed no help guessing what was going on.

‘Using transport pods for either men or materiel suggests assault, our one lord. If they came in peace, surely they’d land with a little less vim.’

She saw the doubt in his eyes. It lasted a moment, replaced almost immediately by a calcification of confidence. Heaven forbid the mad little lord ever doubted himself.

‘No,’ he said. ‘No, they are merely arriving with as much grandeur as would be expected.’

‘Then I shall mobilise the Kin-Guard as a ceremonial effort to greet them, our one lord.’

He nodded to that, unaware that Desh’ea’s soldiery had already been mobilising for ten minutes.

‘Very well.’

‘We have reports of several craft coming down in the Desh’elika Mountains, far from the main army. With your permission, I’ll send outrider skimmers to investigate.’

The boy waved acquiescence. ‘As you say. I shall receive the Imperial emissaries in the throne room. Come with me, general.’

Oshamay bowed and obeyed.

Khârn walked across the field of bones, listening to the ghosts in the wind. This high in the mountains, the wind had a howling edge. All too easy to hear the voices of the long-lost and ancient dead in its breath. They weren’t high enough for year-long snowfall, but Khârn looked up, and for a moment he was a boy again, climbing the jagged peaks where he was born, feeling close enough to touch the stars. The world that had been his cradle was halfway across the warring galaxy, but not even the Nails could steal his short-lived smile at the clear, clean memory.

The primarchs walked ahead of their shared pack, paying no attention to the mixed grouping of Khârn’s Eighth Company and Argel Tal’s immolators. Behind the squad, two Thunderhawks still glowed hot from daggerish atmospheric dives, steaming in the cold mountain air.

Bones decorated the alpine tundra. Bones with no cohesion and little suggestion of form or function. A century of weathering had eroded them to nubs and slivers, but here and there among the open graveland, the eye was drawn to something recognisably skeletal.

Khârn reached down to pick up what remained of a skull. His armoured fingertips scratched across its timeworn surface with a gentle whisper. From what was left of its structure – the side not planed smooth by the wind and rain – it had belonged to a male.

‘Don’t,’ warned Argel Tal, coming to stand with him.

‘Don’t what?’

‘Don’t touch anything. The skull. These bones.’ His brother’s helm nodded towards Angron, then looked back at the skull in Khârn’s hand. ‘This tomb site is your primarch’s heart, pulled open and laid bare. Look at him.’

Khârn did so. Angron’s back was to the others. He was swaying on his feet, thick fingers twitching. A keening, mournful whine left his clenched teeth – a sound of vulnerability without weakness; the sound of indescribable pain vocalised in bestial simplicity.

‘Tread lightly,’ Argel Tal added, ‘and touch nothing.’

Khârn crouched, replacing the skull where he found it. It stared up, accusing him with its one eye socket. With the edge of his boot, Khârn rolled it over, leaving it exactly as it had been before his interference. When he spoke again, his voice was pitched low, despite speaking over a personal vox-channel.

‘Angron should have died here. This is like walking through a memory that never happened.’

Argel Tal walked around a boulder with a pile of bones at its base. ‘I can still smell the blood that watered this worthless soil.’

‘That’s your imagination,’ Khârn told him.

Argel Tal didn’t answer.

Angron had wept once, and only once, in all the years of his life. He remembered it well, for it was his first memory outside the stifling confines of his gestation tube. He’d pulled himself from the sundered warmth of his birth-pod and into the freezing mountain air. All he could see was red, and all he could taste was his own blood. The wounds across his body froze as soon as he crawled free, ice-burned and cauterised, after a fashion. He was a boy, just a boy, and he was bleeding all over.

They’d come for him then. Spindly shadows, quick as the wind, howling and laughing and cursing in a language he couldn’t follow.

He’d killed them. Of course he’d killed them. The moment he sensed them drawing near, he smelled the metal of their weapons and struck at them, without knowing any more than that the metal-scent meant danger and death.

He’d beaten several of them to death with a rock the size of his fist. Others had tried to run, but the bleeding boy had chased them over the tundra, bringing them down and tearing at their throats with his fingers and teeth.

But he’d wept that day. Not because of his attackers, whoever they were. Not because of the pain of his wounds, though he was but a boy, and none would judge him harshly for crying a boy’s tears at the wounds he’d suffered.

No. He’d wept upon his first emergence from the pod because of the wind against his skin. Even as the gale bit his injuries with cold teeth, the feeling of freedom brought tears to his eyes. In all the decades since, he’d never shed a tear, until now. Two saltwater droplets, freezing to his mangled face the moment they trailed down.

‘All dead,’ he said softly. ‘My brothers. My sisters.’

Lorgar approached, careful where he walked, doing all he could not to disturb the sacred ground.

‘What did you name your enemies?’ he asked.

‘High-riders,’ Angron replied. ‘We called them high-riders, for how they stood above us, watching us die in the arena’s dirt.’

‘The high-riders took their dead with them,’ said the Word Bearer. ‘There aren’t enough bones to be the remains of both armies.’

‘My brothers and sisters,’ Angron said again. ‘I swore I’d stand with them. We would die together. Life had never seen such fighters, Lorgar. Klester, riding her shriekspear. Jochura with his strangling chains. Asti, Little Asti, stealing knives to throw and cut and stab. His grin warmed the cold nights. Larbedon, who lost his arm to gangrene, shouting for the high-riders to follow if they dared. He had my back, as I had his. We’d slip on the gore together, grinding the fallen beneath our boots.’

Angron shook his head as he continued. ‘Words don’t do them justice. We came from the red sands, growing in the filth, eating the shit the high-riders fed us. But we broke free. Thousands, Lorgar. Thousands of us. We were free, and we lived and laughed and we made the bastards pay. The Nails hurt – ah, how they hurt, even then. But we made the high-riders and their paperskin Kin-Guard pay.’

Lorgar listened in silence as Angron lowered his head. ‘I should have died here. I did die here. The primarch of the World Eaters is nothing but a shade. An echo. This is where I belong. The greatest battle of my life, and it was stolen from me.’

Now Lorgar spoke, not without a slight smile. ‘There will be a greater battle, brother. Terra. And I promise you, no one will deny it to you.’

‘Terra. Terra!’ Angron laughed, the sound rotten with bitterness. ‘I piss on Terra. I care nothing for Terra, or Horus, or… or Him. Him. The Emperor.’

‘Then why do I hear such hatred in your voice?’ Lorgar asked quietly.

Angron pulled the chain-blades from their scabbards on his back, clenching the handle-triggers and setting them roaring.

‘Hnngh. Hnh. He took me! He dragged me into the sky! The Emperor. The gods-damned Emperor.’

‘You’ll have your vengeance, Angron. We will stand upon Terra’s soil again before long, you have my word.’

‘My brothers,’ Angron continued, murmuring low, not hearing his brother’s oath. ‘My sisters. Slaves, all. Pit-fighting slaves. Our lives were mud to the high-riders that held chains around our throats. But our masters paid, oh how they paid. This world burned when we broke free. It burned. I promise you that.’

The other primarch nodded in slow understanding. ‘I believe you.’

Angron still wasn’t hearing anything but the ghosts in his mind. ‘The war dragged on. Season after season. City after city. The rivers ran red with high-rider blood! We fought. We fought everywhere, I swear it. The high-riders charged our shieldwall at Falkha. They charged us! Their lordlings demanded it of them, and they rose to the bait. I still hear the thunder of both lines meeting. Do you hear it?’ He turned wild eyes on Lorgar. ‘Do you hear the thunder?’

Lorgar smiled, his rune-painted face ruthlessly kind. ‘I hear it, brother.’

‘But we fled when the seasons turned. We had to run into the mountains, to the ridges, to survive the winter. Too many high-rider armies were coming for us, with their lasers and grenades and machine guns rattling all day and every night. I swore I’d die with my brothers and sisters in the mountains. We were free. It was our death. The death we earned, the death we wanted. We laughed and called them closer! High-rider bastards!’

Angron turned, living the moment a second time, vaulting onto a boulder and throwing his arms wide. He shouted – nay, screamed – his laughing challenge to the sky.

‘Come and die, dogs of Desh’ea! I am Angron of the pits, born in blood, raised in the dark, and I will die free! Come, watch me fight one last time! Is that not what you want? Is that not what you always wanted? Come closer, you dog-blooded cowards!’

Khârn watched his primarch standing against the rising wind, seeing history repeating itself to the tune of maddened memory. Angron raised his chainswords, miming the first cuts and carves of that last fight. The teeth roared with every sweep. The gathered legionaries were transfixed, staring in silence.

‘And then. And then. Hnh. The Emperor. Hnnngh. The Emperor. He stole me, trapped me, banished me to the Conqueror’s dark belly. Teleported me up into orbit, though at the time, I knew nothing of such technology. I was alone, alone in the dark. And my brothers and sisters died here. They died without me. I swore. We all swore. We swore to stand and fight and die. Together. Together.’

Angron rocked back and forth, the blades lowering, his eyes unfocusing. ‘The Emperor. High-rider dog-filth. When Horus called, I gave my word. I gave my word, because I lived when I should have died. That’s no gift. He made me a traitor! He made me betray the only oath that mattered! I lived and my brothers and sisters died here, their bones left for the vermin, the wind, the snow.’

The two brothers could have been alone for all the attention they paid to their nearby warriors. Lorgar walked to Angron again, careful not to touch him, but pitching his voice in what felt to Khârn like an insidious caress.

‘No purer emotion than rage,’ said Lorgar. ‘No more righteous ambition than vengeance.’

The light of recognition dawned in Angron’s eyes. ‘Vengeance, aye. Revenge. Food for the soul, brother.’

‘Why were you different?’ Lorgar asked. ‘Why did our father treat you as he did?’

Angron shrugged away from the insipid kindness in his brother’s tone. ‘You kept that mule Kor Phaeron. Russ kept his kin-friends. The Lion kept Luther. Humans – brothers and foster fathers – saved and raised into Legion ranks. But not me. Not Angron, no. Did the Emperor teleport his gold-wrapped Custodians down to help me and my army? No. Did he free the War Hounds and order them to battle, to fight alongside me? No. Did he save my brothers and sisters the way he spared and honoured the Lion’s closest kin? The way he honoured Kor Phaeron? No, no, and no. No mercy for Angron. Angron the Oathbreaker. Angron the Betrayer.’

The World Eater jumped from the boulder, looking down at the bones but still speaking to Lorgar. ‘Did he stay on my homeworld for weeks, as he did with you on Colchis, Vulkan on Nocturne, and Russ on Fenris? No. No contest of strength and will with the Emperor for Angron the Slave. No weeks of laughter and joy and healing the world’s wounds. Instead, he stole me from the life I’d lived and the death I’d earned. He made me break my oath to those who needed me.’

Lorgar’s eyes were fierce now. ‘But why? Why did he let your army die? Why did he steal you in a teleportation flare, when he could have remained here for a time, as he did on so many other worlds? He had a Legion – your Legion – in orbit, Angron. A single order, and they would have bloodied their blades at your side, saving your rebel army and hailing you as their gene-sire. Instead, he collared them, as he collared you.’

Angron drooled, thick and wet, down his chin. ‘I’ll never know why. He never answered me. But he’ll pay, as the high-riders paid. And when I stand before him on Terra, I will ask again. And then, Lorgar, our father will answer.’

The Word Bearer sighed, in the grip of something sublime and unshared. ‘You deserve an answer.’

‘Desh’ea,’ said Angron. ‘I have to go there. I have to see who rules the city that claimed to own me. The city that murdered my brothers and sisters.’

‘As you wish,’ Lorgar agreed. ‘As you wish.’

It galled her that the Praxury was right. Despite their hurried arrival, they did seem peaceful. Reports listed thousands upon thousands of them making planetfall on the plains outside the city, unquestionably landing an army, but making no assault upon Desh’ea itself. Stuck as she was by the royal throne, she presided over a procession of officers bringing her updates and observer reports, whispering in her ear and swapping data printouts.

The Praxury sat straight in his throne, half the height of his father and twice as ridiculous as that pompous fool had ever been. His periapt of office was an amulet of polished silver shaped into a clenched fist – young Tybaral wore it around his neck, though it hung almost to his stomach. Every now and again, he’d sigh, as if the weight of the world rested upon his shoulders.

‘How many houses have mobilised?’ Oshamay asked one of her subcommanders. He was nervous, she saw it in his eyes, but he dealt with it cleanly, purely, masking it in the efficiency of a busy soldier.

‘Perhaps half are already at the walls, general. Most of the rest are choosing to defend their own estates rather than join the communal defence force.’

She dismissed him, not surprised in the slightest that so many houses were choosing to reinforce their own estates; in fact, she was shocked so many were choosing to send their soldiers to man the walls. It wasn’t like the noble bloodlines to actually act with any unselfish vision; she knew that well from almost thirty years as an officer in the Praxury’s court.

To the next of her officers that approached, she leaned in close to speak into his ear. ‘If they do attack the city, be ready to free the slaves.’

To his credit, he didn’t ask if she was sure, or argue at the idea’s inherent madness. If the city was attacked, the several thousand slave-caste warriors in the arena’s fighting pits might at least help shore up the defenders’ numbers. And if they revolted and rioted? It hardly mattered, the city was doomed anyway.

‘I’ll see to it,’ the officer promised.

‘Good luck,’ she said. That made him hesitate – no one was used to hearing affection from the general’s thin lips. Oshamay was glad he decided not to acknowledge her momentary slip. Her nerves were as frayed as anyone’s, given what was taking shape out there on the plains.

They didn’t have to wait for long. Heralds ran through the great stone doors at the throne room’s southern entrance, escorted by soldiers running and looking back over their shoulders.

Oshamay swallowed. This didn’t look good.

‘Our one lord!’ the heralds cried, babbling and speaking over each other. The boy-king endured this display with regal, practiced patience. He never got the chance to speak, however.

The first figure to stalk through the black marble archway was so tall he had to lower his head. Oshamay felt the hundreds of courtiers’ unified intake of breath; they gasped as one, many backing away to the walls as the towering figure made its entrance. He was taller than any human, clad in armour of cold red and lustrous, clean bronze. Dreadlock-cables ran from the back half of his shaven and tattooed head, down into the active powered suit of armour. Everyone staring up in awe at the warlord knew those implants – Butcher’s Nails, the cyber-crest of a slave.

Two toothed, motorised swords were lashed to his back, though the idea of this creature, this avatar of brutality, requiring weapons to strike his foes down was laughable. He stalked down the red carpet leading to the Reskium Throne, his boots sending tremors through the stone floor. The throne’s polished surface reflected the artificial lighting strips above, and the cringing figures of almost two hundred courtiers. Several Kin-Guard soldiers went for their guns with trembling hands. Others recognised the sheer futility of the gesture. Oshamay was one of the latter.

The figure stopped, turned, regarded his surroundings. The lipless face was the visage of a broken angel, scarred and ruined, denied any echo of what might have once made it handsome.

‘So,’ he said, and his voice was the grinding of bitter stonework. ‘Who sits in ascendancy in this age?’

On the throne, the boy-king started crying. His Kin-Guard, life-sworn to defend him to their final breaths, started retreating away from the throne. The god-warrior saw their slow retreat, and it made him smile.

‘Is it you, boy? You’re Praxury of Desh’ea?’

The boy curled into his throne, crying louder. The god came closer, taking the stairs slowly, four at a time.

‘Boy,’ he said, his gravelly voice now a dusty whisper. ‘What family are you from? What blood beats in your filthy high-rider veins?’

It was Oshamay who answered in place of the crying child. She alone hadn’t cowered back from the Reskium Throne.

‘You stand before Tybaral of House Thal’kr.’ She almost managed to keep her voice level.

The god’s face tightened at the name, tautening into a grimace that failed to be either a scowl or a smile.

‘Thal’kr,’ he said. ‘That family still rules? After all this time…’

‘They still rule.’ Oshamay stood straighter, fear-tears in her eyes. Her heart beat fit to burst.

‘The Thal’kr held my leash,’ the warrior said. ‘They owned me.’

Other invaders were entering now. The first of them was as tall as the dreadlocked god, his skin pale gold where the blade-bearer’s was scarred and tanned. He carried a spiked and ridged maul over one shoulder, and a cloak the colour of bloody sunsets cast back to reveal armour of the same vascular hue. His features were sculpted in statuesque masculinity, somehow protective and serene and confident all at once. Up close, through the tears in her eyes, Oshamay saw the gold on his skin was runic script tattooed onto his flesh. The only flaw was the claw-scars along one cheek, from temple to jawline, though they added to his presence rather than stole from it. At first sight of him, dozens of courtiers fell to their knees. Others wept – not the shameful tears of fear but the silent weeping of purest awe.

Trailing behind the golden god were armoured knights in clean white and sanguine red. Thirteen of them in total – the warriors in white held axes in loose fists; the knights in red bore parchment strips bound to their battle-plate, and carried curved blades in their hands, while armoured fuel tanks sloshed on their backpacks. Each of them stared from a snarling helm with a silver faceplate. They seemed to be guarding a lone female – a precious, fragile girl of two and a half decades’ life, clad in red silk. She was willowy in shape but utterly fearless, surrounded by her protectors. Dark hair framed dusky features and dark eyes that danced from face to face, weapon to weapon, painting to painting.

‘Lorgar,’ said the dreadlocked god by the throne. He said that one word, with his shoulders shaking. Then he threw his head back, and started laughing as loud as the ghost-wind back in the mountains.

Khârn and Argel Tal hesitated – as did every World Eater and Word Bearer – when Angron’s laughter cut the sterile silence. It was more than mere laughter, it was a slice of life brought to the chamber’s mournful, stunted emptiness. Those who’d been cowering withdrew further. Those who’d been standing their ground found their skin crawling.

‘Lorgar.’ Angron was still laughing, his bloodshot eyes wet with amusement. ‘Behold, brother! Behold the last scion of the family that once owned me. How the mighty have fallen!’

Khârn watched Lorgar ascend the steps to the throne, standing next to Angron, casting the poor, crying child into the shadow of two primarchs. For the first time Khârn could ever recall, the primarch of the XVII Legion looked unsure. Doubt warred with bemusement across his features.

Understanding passed between the two warlords and Angron slapped his brother on the shoulder. The laughter faded from his throat, but never left his eyes.

‘I will handle this,’ he said to Lorgar. And then, ‘You. Woman. Come here.’

Oshamay, who’d never been spoken to like that in her life, put all her effort into swallowing the lump in her throat.

‘You’re not him,’ she stammered. ‘You can’t be him.’

Angron clacked his teeth together, a feral snapping bite aimed at the air. ‘Can’t I?’

‘Angron-Thal’kr died a hundred years ago,’ Oshamay whispered. ‘He fled at the Battle of Desh’elika Ridge.’

‘He… He…’ There was no laughter now. The life in his eyes faded, leaving them pearlescent with numbing pain. Angron brought his whole body around to face her, to look down at her. ‘He fled. You said those words to me. You said Angron-Thal’kr fled.’

General Oshamay Evrel’Korshay tried to speak but it left her clattering teeth as a weak moan while her bladder emptied itself down her thighs.

‘Speak,’ Angron almost purred, hatred souring his breath.

‘He led a rebellion of slaves. He left them to die in the mountains. He…’

‘You.’ Angron wrapped her whole head in a scar-thickened fist. ‘You lie, woman. You will– hnnngh, you will tell the truth now.’

She sobbed instead, and her crying killed her. Angron closed his fist, ending her distinguished career in a crumbling of gory skull fragments that he didn’t bother shaking from his hand. The body toppled; Angron looked at it on the floor, seeming annoyed that it had died, as though he had nothing to do with it.

‘You.’ He pointed a blood-wet hand at the closest officer. The man wore a breastplate over his black toga, marking him out as a captain. Angron recognised that much; so little had changed in the century he’d been gone.

‘Please,’ the man said. ‘Please. Please.’

The primarch’s breathing was carnosaur-low, carnosur-heavy. ‘You,’ he said again, and now his own great hands were shaking. Khârn recognised all the signs of Nails-pain. ‘You will speak,’ Angron said. ‘Tell me of this battle. The Battle of Desh’elika Ridge.’

‘You’re him,’ the officer whispered. ‘You’re him.’

‘Speak.’ The roar rocked the man onto his heels, driving him back against a pillar.

Khârn risked a glance at Argel Tal. The Word Bearer stood by Cyrene – who’d insisted she was making planetfall with them – with his silver faceplate tilted to regard the primarchs. Behind them both, Vorias and Kargos were equally emotionless behind their Sarum-pattern visages.

‘Captain,’ came Esca’s voice over the vox. The Codicier stood far back, close to the doors with several of the Vakrah Jal. ‘The fear in the chamber is threatening to reach breaking point. The human herd instinct will force them to flee.’

Khârn didn’t need to be psychic to know the Librarian was correct. He could see it in their tremulous movements, and smell the copper on their breath.

‘Kill any who bolt for the doors.’

‘Aye, captain.’

On the platform with the throne, Lorgar was a statue carved in honour of patience. Angron loomed over the whimpering Nucerian officer, closing a fist around the man’s armoured torso and dragging him from his feet.

‘You will speak,’ the primarch breathed, ‘or you will die.’

‘A hundred years ago,’ the man whined. ‘A legend. An old story. Angron-Thal’kr and the rebel army, massacred in the mountains. He… You…’

‘Say it.’ Angron shook the man, dropping him to the floor with the clang of breastplate on stone, and the snap of one leg bone. The officer cried out until Angron leered down at him, iron teeth wet with strings of saliva. ‘Speak.’

‘The army died to a man. Angron-Thal’kr left them to die–’

‘No. No! That was never my name. Never! I refuse that slave name!’ Angron crushed the man’s skull beneath a boot, smearing the wreckage across the stone. ‘Can no one speak the truth? Can no one remember anything but lies?’

He turned on the crowd, still raving, crashing his chainswords together. ‘I never ran! You filthy high-rider dogs. Is nothing sacred? Is nothing spared from your vileness? You are murderers, and the sons and daughters of murderers. Slavers, and the sons and daughters of slavers. We burned your cities! I stood and breathed in the death-smoke of Ull-Chaim on the finest day of my life. I pulled out the princeling’s eyes. Pop and crunch and scream, scream, scream.’

His voice rose, manic in imitation of a man dying in woeful pain. ‘No, Angron, no! Please! Mercy!’

Lorgar watched all of this in silence. Khârn could scarcely believe the other primarch stood so impassively.

‘Sire–’ Khârn began, but Angron slapped him aside with the flat of one chain-blade. It hit with the force of a forge hammer, hurling him back against Argel Tal and Eshramar, who awkwardly caught and righted him.

‘I never ran. Never. The Emperor… Hnnngh.’ The effort was monumental, but Angron let the chainswords fall idle, no longer gunning their motors. He was silent for a long while.

‘Khârn,’ he said at last, his voice a grating hiss. ‘Argel Tal.’

The Eighth Captain stepped forwards, as did the commander of the Vakrah Jal. ‘Sire?’ they asked in unison.

Angron looked up, his gaze one of old hurt and dull, emberish fury. He didn’t glance at the warriors – instead, he raked his eyes over the gathered courtiers, no longer recognising them as people at all.

‘I want every World Eater and Word Bearer to heed a simple order.’

‘Anything, sire,’ Khârn said.

‘Speak, and it will be done,’ said Argel Tal.

Angron looked back to the cowering child on the throne – the last living remnant of the bloodline that had owned and mutilated and ruined him.

‘Kill everyone in this city.’ Angron closed his eyes. ‘Then kill everyone on this world.’

NINETEEN

Dead Eyes
Perpetual
A Thinker’s War

There would be no great war for Nuceria. Nor, much to Lotara’s guilty disappointment, would there be any bombardment. She spent the days on the Conqueror’s bridge, watching the orbital cartography, seeing the cities burn beneath the tide of the two Legions and their Audax forces. They only had twenty thousand legionaries down there, but when you were dealing with warriors of that calibre, ‘only’ was a relative statement. Several hundred could take a world in months. Several thousand barely needed a week.

Lhorke had made planetfall with them, leaving Lotara with a curious feeling of isolation. She’d grown used to the former Legion Master remaining by the side of her throne this last month, offering his grinding, veteran observations on everything that took place. She wondered if he’d paid this much heed in the years he’d been lord of the War Hounds, standing by the thrones of her predecessors and rumbling with advice and criticism whether or not it was sought.

She’d tried playing cards with him at one point to pass the time during their month in transit. Lhorke was, she learned, a very sore loser, and his massive gauntlets precluded a card player’s finesse. In the end, they’d had to use a servitor to hold his cards. He only played once, and not for more than two minutes.

‘This is ludicrous,’ he’d stated, and that was that.

When he’d announced he was making planetfall, she’d let her raised eyebrow ask the question for her.

‘War calls,’ he’d answered.

‘And this has nothing to do with you not trusting Angron?’

‘War calls,’ he’d said again. And that, also, was that.

Desh’ea had fallen first. She’d watched it die, in the familiar way that civilisation burning always looked shamefully beautiful from orbit. The two Legions marched through the streets, massacring the population, bringing death to every slaver, and every man, woman and child that had ever tolerated slavery in their society. Her one and only transmission from Angron had come when Desh’ea was blanketed in the smoke of its last breath. He’d looked more alive than she could recall, and yet his eyes were deader than ever.

‘Justice,’ his hololithic image had said, fiercely intense. ‘Vengeance. Every slaver dead. Every wretched soul that ever cheered at the gladiator games. Every one. All of them, Lotara.’

She saw Lhorke behind the primarch, stomping past, crossing her field of vision. A Fellblade trundled by afterwards, making the image shake.

‘Will every city face the Legions?’ she’d asked.

‘Every city.’

Lotara had feigned a casual air, pretending to toy with a data-slate. She didn’t like looking into his unfocused eyes. Despite his vitality and the fire in his voice, Angron stared like a corpse, tensing with Nails-pain. She feared whatever had happened in the Praxury’s throne room had damaged what remained of his mind still further.

‘What of Lord Aurelian’s plan?’

‘Soon. Hnnh. When the cities are dead. They will burn. They will be funeral pyres for my brothers and sisters, one hundred years gone. Then we can deal with Lorgar’s madness.’

She shivered at his voice, glad she was two hundred kilometres above him. ‘Good luck, Angron.’

He’d grinned then, pleased at not being called ‘my lord’ by her for once, even as a joke. The image blanked a second later. That was the first night.

Now, six days after arrival, she paced the bridge, hoping for something – anything – to do. On the surface, with the city of Meahor being assaulted at sunrise, part of her wanted to be there to see it with her own eyes. Part of her – the much shrewder, wiser part – wanted to be nowhere near.

She stood by Lehralla’s console table. The crippled girl smiled down at her, with those watery, fey eyes of hers.

‘My captain,’ she greeted Lotara in a soft voice.

‘Scrymistress,’ Lotara replied. ‘Do you ever get bored?’

‘No, captain.’ And for a wonder, the halved girl seemed to be sincere. ‘Never.’

Lotara gave a soft laugh and moved on. She was by Vox-master Kejic’s array of frequency controls and transmission stations when the bridge’s southern doors rolled open on their sonorous tracks. Several heads turned; the main crew thoroughfare was from east to west, and few used the southern doors.

Tarn, her Master of Astropaths, stood in the entranceway. Blind as all astropaths were, their sight stolen to magnify their powers, his milky eyes were wide beneath his white hood.

‘Captain,’ he said. ‘I hear something.’

Lotara hid her sigh behind a false smile, hoping it would steal the edge from her tone.

‘Tarn, if you’ve come to give me another lecture on Lord Aurelian’s great song, you have my permission to turn around and leave me in peace.’

He clutched at his medallion of office with skinny hands, his fingers gnarled by gout.

‘No, captain. I hear something approaching.’

Across the bridge, Lehralla turned on her plinth, the cables leashing her to the ceiling lashing like snakes.

‘Warp nexus,’ the girl called. ‘Warp nexus in the fifth meridian. Hololithics activating.’

Lotara sprinted to the central hololithic table as it flickered into life.

‘What’s coming through? All eyes on the nexus. Track it and codify it at once.’ The wait was agony as she stared at the hololithic rune flickering in the air, waiting for it to resolve. A warp-wound, that much she knew. A ship breaking back into reality.

‘Scry-locked,’ Lehralla said in a distant voice. ‘I see it.’

Lotara saw it a moment later. The rune resolved, showing a transponder code; then several transponder codes; then several more.

‘Prime weapons and shields,’ she said calmly. ‘All crew to battle stations.’

Her face appeared in ghostly resolution at the edge of Khârn’s retinal display. In profile, as always, from the pict-finder mounted on the side of her throne.

‘This is Captain Sarrin to all ground forces. The Thirteenth Legion warship Courage Above All has broken warp at the system’s edge, at the head of a void armada. Their outrunners will be in range to engage in nine minutes. All Legion forces, get back to your drop-ships and landers for immediate withdrawal.’

The city Meahor stood defiant on the horizon. The two Legions had lined up in siege formation, ready for the grim march towards the walls. Audax’s Titans were with them, row upon row of Warhounds standing above the massed infantry and their armour divisions. Vindicators, Land Raiders, Fellblades, Mastodons – entire tank divisions, awaiting the order to roll forwards at dawn. No swift, clean attack for the cities of Nuceria. Each of them so far had watched their demise come rolling closer in a tide, and died when the World Eaters and Word Bearers pulled their walls down. Meahor would be the last. Now it seemed to be spared, minutes from the order to march.

‘Lotara,’ Khârn voxed back, knowing every legionary, Titan crew member and skitarii in the ranks could hear him.

‘Centurion,’ she replied. She looked eager, eyes narrowed, a huntress ready for any tricks her prey might play.

‘Extraction is impossible. Can you keep them at bay?’

‘Khârn,’ she said with a sigh, then seemed to recall the fact every single soul on the surface could hear what she was saying. ‘Captain, you have no conception of the host sailing its way into lance range. We outweigh them and outgun them, but we’ll still die deaths from a thousand cuts. If you can’t withdraw, then take the city now. Find cover, because they will break past us, no matter what I do up here.’

‘Understood.’ Khârn looked down the line of several thousand Space Marines in scruffy formation. He raised his axe, ready to give the signal to advance.

‘Wait,’ said a voice of gargling gravel.

‘Sire?’ Lotara replied. She looked away across the bridge, her voice distorting for several seconds. ‘Feyd, are those fighters in the sky?’ She turned back. ‘Angron, with all due respect, hurry up.’

‘They want us,’ the primarch replied. Khârn could see his gene-father back in the ranks, standing atop a Bloodhammer super-heavy assault carrier, both chainswords in his hands. ‘They want us dead. That means proof. It means planetfall. We’ll take the city and force them down to dig us out. Repel bombardment, at all costs. Do you understand me? Repel bombardment, even at the cost of the ship.’

‘Understood,’ Lotara said, and her image died in the retinal displays of every legionary on the surface.

Lorgar’s voice was a gentle interruption over the shared vox. ‘Guilliman is up there.’

‘Hnngh. I know. The vengeance of Calth is coming at last. Warriors of the Twelfth and Seventeenth Legions! Take the city! Charge!’

As the sun rose over the Jehzr Plains, the Legions tore their way overland, to bring down the walls of Nuceria’s last city and use its ruins as a fortress.

Aboard the Fidelitas Lex, a slender young woman walked through the mausoleum, approaching her own tomb. Her skin was dusky – a desert tribeswoman’s tan – and her long hair fell in soft brown curls, neither dark nor light but a healthy, earthy compromise between the two. She wore a robe of Word Bearers red – that unmistakable blood-claret darkness – cut in a flowing shape that clung to her waist and flared outwards from there on down. She looked a little like a bride, and a little like a priestess.

The ship shook beneath her. Another battle. How many battles had she lived through on the De Profundis, seated in the quiet of her chamber while the walls shook and the decks vibrated from cannonfire? You could get used to anything. That was the sad truth.

Her Vakrah Jal guardians waited outside the chamber, four of them in all, ready to incinerate any mortal or Word Bearer that sought to lay a hand on her or bar her way. With Argel Tal on the surface, she’d decided it was time to come see herself as she’d been… before.

When she passed the statue of Xaphen, she dared to reach out and touch its breastplate, unconsciously echoing the gesture Argel Tal always made here. He’d told her how Xaphen died. He’d even shown her the weapon that did it, and admitted the secret of how he’d managed to break the gene-coding to activate his stolen relics.

Blood. Didn’t it always come down to blood?

Her skin crawled as she caught sight of her own statue from the corner of her eye. Even without looking at its details, the thing’s presence spread the taste of bile over her tongue.

Bracing herself, she walked towards it. A robed servant stood by the pedestal, tending to the three braziers at the stone lady’s bare feet. Unless a senior Word Bearer decreed otherwise, the Hall of Anamnesis was often populated by menials and thralls tending to the monuments.

The sight of herself graven in stone felt much worse than she’d imagined. She didn’t want to look at it, let alone touch it. The sculptor’s artistry was undeniable, but therein lay the problem. It looked too real. It wasn’t a stylised statue raised in honour of her deeds. It was a tomb marker, a monument to her death. And it was blind – the stone girl’s eyes wreathed in a sculpted blindfold. That was doubly unnerving, though she wasn’t sure why. She’d spent most of her life blind, and in the month since her rebirth – what Cyrene hesitantly called her ‘reawakening’ – she had spent many hours in her chamber alone, lights dimmed and her eyes closed, listening to the ship around her. It felt more natural than seeing the million things she’d lived amongst and never witnessed before.

Despite herself, she touched the statue’s outstretched hands, fingers to fingers, flesh mirrored perfectly in stone. For a churning moment, she wasn’t sure which one of them was really her: the reborn girl or the statue of the dead one. Both, perhaps. Or neither.

‘It’s a very fine likeness,’ said the robed servant. She started at the sudden voice – Argel Tal had told her the mausoleum thralls took a vow of silence upon pain of death. He kept his face hooded, but she saw the edge of a smile in the shadow. ‘I’m sure you don’t miss the blindfold, though.’

Her blood ran colder; he’d not spoken in Gothic or Colchisian. The words were Uhturlan, the dialect of the Monarchian city-state where she’d been born on distant Khur.

‘Show yourself.’

He did. He wasn’t particularly handsome, nor was he especially youthful. He looked to be in his mid-thirties, edging towards middle-age, and like anyone spending their lives aboard the vessels of a war-fleet, he looked like he’d lived hard for those decades.

He was also, without a shade of doubt, not what he was pretending to be. His eyes were bright and alive and full of laughing lies.

‘Don’t,’ he warned her. ‘Don’t shout for your guardians.’ A moment later he added, ‘I could see you were about to.’

She’d been about to turn to see if there were any other thralls nearby, but she didn’t scare so easily as to shriek for her Vakrah Jal purely because of a deceitful rogue trying his luck. And she had a ritual qattari knife strapped to her thigh, beneath the flowing robe.

‘How do you speak the tongue of a dead city?’ she asked, folding her arms beneath her breasts, hugging herself as if cold. Hearing her language, seeing this statue… It was surreal enough to drive her to distraction.

‘I speak any tongue I put my mind to.’ His eyes locked to hers with sincerity, but without threat. ‘Pardon me for saying so, but you’re breathtaking in the flesh. I have an avowed weakness for dusky women.’

He wasn’t putting her at ease, but something in his voice was more palatable than the solemn reverence in almost every Word Bearer’s tones. Even Lorgar, upon seeing her again, had been awestruck and priestly – praying for her soul and naming her resurrection a miracle. He’d not commented on Erebus’s role in her rebirth, and never once tried to ask any of the questions so many others came to her with. Lorgar didn’t ask her if she recalled being dead, or what it was like beyond the veil. She suspected it was because he already knew.

All Lorgar had done was kneel before her, bringing himself close to her height, and kissed her closed eyes.

‘I once apologised for my sins bringing the fire that blinded you,’ he had whispered. ‘Now I apologise for them bringing the blade that harmed you. My heart sings to know you breathe again.’

She’d wanted to reply, but in a primarch’s company, she did what so many humans had done and would continue to do. She stared, shivered, and tried not to weep at his majestic, impossible presence.

Understanding her breathless indecision – as he always seemed to understand those beneath him – Lorgar had released her with an apologetic smile.

‘Go in peace, Blessed Lady. You were always a gift to my Legion, and my sons have missed you. Anything you ask of me will be yours.’

Here, in the mausoleum, Cyrene blinked to banish the memory.

‘Whatever you’re trying,’ she said to the false thrall, ‘you’ll have to try harder.’

‘This is just the opening volley, I assure you. We have to talk, Cyrene.’

She scrunched her nose at his pronunciation. Sy-Reen. Despite speaking her native language, his pronunciation held traces of Gothic clumsiness, and Gothic wasn’t kind to her name.

‘It’s Sih-renny,’ she replied.

‘Forgive me, John was always better at languages.’

‘Who’s John?’

‘A friend. An idiot, but a friend. It doesn’t matter – he’s busy. I was sent here, for you. We have to talk.’

She’d not spoken her homeland’s dialect in half a century, yet it was like honey on her tongue. ‘We’re already talking. Tell me your name, if you please.’

‘I wonder, why is it that the simplest questions have the hardest answers? Most recently, I’ve been going by Damon.’ He offered his hand for her to shake. Unfamiliar with the Terran custom, she simply glanced at it, then stared back into his eyes.

‘Just Damon.’ Disapproval made it a question.

‘Damon Prytanis,’ he said.

‘That isn’t your real name.’

‘It isn’t the name I was born with,’ he admitted with a smile, ‘but that doesn’t make it any less real, or any less mine.’

‘I am leaving,’ she lied. The qattari knife was starting to feel tempting.

‘No you’re not. And don’t reach for that blade. I’m not here to hurt you. I’m here to save you.’

‘You think I need saving?’

‘I know you need saving. Everyone does, from time to time. Do you have any idea how difficult it was for me to infiltrate the Word Bearers flagship just to have this conversation?’

Infiltrate. He said infiltrate.

He wasn’t on their side.

‘I’m not on anyone’s side,’ he said, though she hadn’t spoken a word. ‘I know,’ he added. ‘I can read your mind.’

She turned to run, but Damon reached for her wrist, holding it tight. ‘You died and came back again,’ he said to her gently. ‘We have that in common. The Cabal have taken an interest in you, and for humans that’s almost always a bad thing. But you’re like us now. The Seventeenth Legion made you into one of us. I can’t say whether they meant to. I wouldn’t even want to guess.’

‘One of what? What are you talking about?’

‘The undying. The Perpetuals.’ Damon Prytanis didn’t smile that time – he outright grinned. ‘Come with me, Cyrene.’

‘Eshramar!’ she shouted. ‘Eshramar!’

The Vakrah Jal warrior entered at the other end of the chamber, taking less than a heartbeat to see her and the danger she was in. The turbines on his back screamed into life as he started running, and after three steps he kicked off the deck, jump pack howling.

Damon refused to release Cyrene’s wrist, even as he faced the Word Bearer diving through the maze of statues, streaming smoky fire. He swore in several languages, one of which sounded like a particularly elegant eldar dialect, and none of which Cyrene understood.

The Vakrah Jal sergeant landed with a crunch of ceramite on the deck, both wrist-mounted flamers aimed at the false thrall. Alchemical fire bubbled in the connective cables along his arms, boiling, waiting to roar into the air and turn from liquid to true flame.

‘Move away from her,’ Eshramar demanded. His silver Mark III faceplate stared with surprising vehemence. Smoke wisped around the three of them, trailing from the exhaust vents in the Word Bearer’s turbine backpack.

‘Listen–’ Damon began.

‘Move away from her.’

‘Listen to me.’

‘Move away from her.’

‘Cyrene, I can explain everything,’ he said.

‘Move away from her.’

Damon raised his hands and took a single step forwards. In the same moment, Cyrene rammed her ritual knife into his shoulder. She’d been aiming for his neck, but he wove aside even with his back to her – the man’s reactions were far too fluid to be entirely human.

He didn’t scream, didn’t even curse, but he did lose his grip. She threw herself to the side.

‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Cyrene, wait!’

Eshramar closed both hands into fists, triggering the pressure pads in his gauntlets’ palms. Fire the colour of diseased jade burst from his wrist-flamers, bathing the human in a sustained, semi-liquid torrent. It dissolved the meat from his bones in the time it took Cyrene to pick herself up and turn to look back.

Damon Prytanis died before their eyes, in what might be the most painful way to meet one’s end.

It was the first time he’d died in flame, but not the first time he’d died laughing.

Lotara loved the calm that took hold in moments like this. This was what she was best at, and all she ever needed was free rein to play the game her way. Outwardly, she was relaxed in her throne, but her eyes were everywhere at once – locator and vector hololithics; targeting array displays; the multisected oculus screen; and even her own officers, to make sure they were bearing up as expected.

They had two Gloriana-class flagships and whatever in the hells the Trisagion was supposed to be. There was no way Lotara Sarrin was going down without a fight, no matter how devastatingly, hopelessly outnumbered they were. In fact, she kept finding herself wanting to laugh.

The enemy armada came running close, each squadron falling into attack formation and holding with admirable unity. Every battleship and carrier was defended by destroyers and frigates, and each squadron was led by cruisers with their own lesser escorts.

‘Forty-one,’ Lehralla said, her voice distant the way it always was when she was seeing through the ship’s scanners rather than her own eyes. ‘Forty-one enemy vessels.’

Lotara heard Ivar Tobin’s quiet curse to the side of her throne. It was, she agreed, an insane force to face practically alone. What few escorts they’d kept with them would be nothing more than sacrificial lambs in the maw of the enemy fleet, but Angron and Lorgar had needed to spread their Legions behind enemy lines, and Captain Sarrin would work with what she had left. She hadn’t earned the Blood Hand for whining about the odds.

Even so, she estimated those odds were about even. The Trisagion could take twenty lesser vessels alone, and there were many, many reasons Gloriana-class battlecruisers were used as Legion flagships. Plenty of the Ultramarines armada already looked wounded, or cobbled together from separate fleets. It wasn’t a dedicated interdiction war-fleet, it was clearly a ragtag strike force: a lance thrust to the enemy’s heart. Someone – perhaps even Lord Guilliman himself – had done the best he could with limited resources.

If she had been leading that enemy fleet, she knew how she’d roll the dice in this fight. The Ultramarines victory counted on two factors. First, that the Conqueror, the Lex and the Trisagion would be torn apart by the massed firepower of smaller ships. The XIII Legion’s cruisers and battleships would run abeam for repeated exchanges of broadsides, offering targets too big and powerful to ignore, while the rest of the fleet used calculated lance strikes from safer range. She suspected the armada would divide its assault potential, doing its damnedest to kill either the Lex or the Conqueror, and taking the other by boarding parties. The Trisagion was too vast and deadly to take with boarders or with a divided fleet, but nor would any sane void commander devote their entire focus to attacking it first. The two Legion flagships would be free to inflict unrivalled damage in the time it took to cripple the king-ship.

The second factor was planetfall. The Legiones Astartes excelled at fighting void wars and surface battles at once, and this attack run reeked of something personal. The Ultramarines were coming for revenge here, just as they were apparently pursuing Kor Phaeron all the way to the Maelstrom on the other side of Ultramar.

Several ships would make a run for Nuceria, haemorrhaging drop pods, landers and gunships, forcing planetfall by any means necessary. They’d have to come in close – close enough to brawl, just as Lotara liked it – but they’d get the job done, and Meahor would be crawling with the enemy in no time at all.

This was what she loved about void battles. Up here, in the coldness of space, you were trading death at unthinkable distances one minute, and manoeuvring city-sized warships close enough to scratch each other’s paintwork a minute later. It didn’t lack the adrenaline and frantic focus of a ground battle, it simply refined it into something much more civilised.

Void war was a thinker’s war.

Lehralla’s cabled head turned again. ‘Captain, fourteen of the enemy vessels, those in the axial formation marked now on the hololith, bear transponders correlating to the Martian Mechanicum. Several appear to be Titan-carriers.’

Lotara resisted the urge to swear at length and in great detail. Whatever broke through their blockade – and plenty was going to make it through, no question there – would make life murder for those on the surface. Ultramarines were bad enough. Ultramarines and Titans was about the worst news she could receive.

‘Inform the primarchs and Legion captains they are likely to be dealing with Titans as well,’ she ordered Kejic. ‘Weaponmaster, time to maximum range?’

‘Enemy vanguard will reach maximum lance range in one minute, fifty seconds.’

‘Good, good. Feyd, status of our fighter squadrons?’

‘All flying free, ma’am.’ The young lieutenant didn’t look up from his scanner console. ‘Captain, I have an idea regarding phase two of the engagement.’

‘As long as it’s not about capital ship movement, I wait with bated breath. Let’s hear it.’

Rather then tell her, he showed her. The tactical suggestion played out on the hololithic display as Feyd ran a simulation over the course of ten seconds. By the end, the flag-captain was smiling.

‘Do it,’ she said. Her confidence in him wasn’t idle assumption; no one oversaw a spread of fighter squadrons quite like Feyd, which was why Lotara had poached him from the battleship Interregnum for her own command crew.

She waited, drumming her fingertips on the armrest of her throne. ‘Keep an open vox-link to the Lex and Trisagion.’

‘Aye, ma’am,’ Kejic replied.

‘Are they in position?’

‘Yes, captain,’ replied Lehralla.

Lotara looked up at Tobin, ever-loyal, ever by her throne. ‘Did you imagine you’d die in Ultramar, Ivar?’

‘I try not to imagine dying at all, ma’am. Weapons primed and awaiting your mark.’

‘Thank you, Ivar. I suspect they’ll choose to board the Conqueror and destroy the Lex, given the grudge they surely carry against Lord Aurelian’s Legion, but if it happens the other way around, I’ll just say now that it’s been a pleasure serving with you.’

‘I’m honoured you’d say so, ma’am.’

The command crew exchanged glances and smiles as they listened to their ranking officers.

‘Now then.’ Lotara cleared her throat. ‘Let’s start killing.’

TWENTY

Blood in the Void
Going to the Triarii
He Dies Here

It didn’t take long for her to lose all track of the surface war. The Ultramarines fleet swept over and against them like an insect horde, robbing any attention she’d have liked to let linger on how the Legion was doing. Her world erupted in a kaleidoscopic mess of weapon flashes, shield flares and the insistent flicker of sirens. Every officer was reporting at once, while still shouting at their own underlings. The ship shook in a tempest’s grip, and the bridge smelled of unwashed skin, rancid breath, and the faint smoky spice of internal systems burning.

Lotara was a dervish, delivering a ceaseless stream of orders between tracking the constantly-updating hololithic projections. Her most pressing concern wasn’t that her ships were taking a beating, but that trying to stop the enemy getting past them was a game of fighting back an ocean tide with cupped hands and harsh language.

‘The Ceres,’ Lehralla called, twisting in her socket cradle. The legless girl had to shout over the shaking chamber. ‘The Ceres is running past us.’

Lotara gave three precious seconds to her personal hololithic display, beamed up from the microprojectors in her armrests. The Ceres, the Ceres… There. Bulk cruiser. A Dominus-class battle-barge. That meant troops, thousands of troops. Damn it, damn it, damn it.

The Ceres’s rune flickered past the sigil marking the Conqueror. There were still two Ultramarines warships between the World Eaters flagship and the ship it needed to stop, and seven others rolling above and below, in the middle of their own laborious strafing runs.

If Lotara came about, she’d abort her kill-run against the Unbroken Vigil and risk another full minute of broadsides from the… No, it didn’t matter. The Ceres had to die.

‘Come about,’ she called, ready to shoot the first officer to dare argue.

‘Come about!’ Tobin relayed the order in a roar.

The ship groaned beneath them, at the mercy of momentum, retros and protesting roll/pitch/yaw thrusters.

‘Everything on the Ceres,’ Lotara ordered. ‘Broadsides as we turn, then lances from the forward array at one-eighty degrees. Send that bitch to the ground in flames.’

‘The Legendary Son and the Glory of Fire are–’

‘I see them,’ she interrupted Feyd. ‘I’m not letting them get in our way. Engines to full burn.’

‘That will alter our turning arc to–’

‘I know where our arc will take us. I want the engines screaming. Cease starboard broadsides for immediate reload, I want them ready as we come about. We’ll only have one try at the Ceres.’

The Conqueror lumbered around, dragging itself away from the encircling Ultramarines ships, sacrificing a kill-run Lotara had spent the best part of five furious minutes setting up while under intense enemy fire. She watched the Unbroken Vigil roll aside, safe and unharmed, when she should be tumbling away in flaming pieces.

‘Ceres is manoeuvring for orbital release,’ called Lehralla, her watery doe-eyes wide at the hololithic, and her brittle teeth bared in the face of the fight.

The stars rolled across the oculus as the Conqueror turned, turned, turned, slow, slow, slow. The deck, her deck, was shaking beneath Lotara’s boots. They were taking one nightmare of a beating.

The Ceres hove into view, already kissing the atmosphere.

‘Laser batteries rea–’

‘Broadsides!’ Lotara yelled.

The Conqueror answered its captain, its cannons booming into the night’s silence. The deck heaved again, but it was a much more pleasant shudder this time. Space around the Ceres flared with luminescence as its shields resisted the torrent bursting against the ship’s hull. After three beautiful seconds of defensive pyrotechnics, the cruiser’s void shields shattered with enough force to send ripples of lightning across the ship’s armoured skin. The Conqueror hadn’t just broken through its prey’s defences – it had overloaded them through power strain. A cheer went up across the strategium at the sight.

‘Her shields are fouled.’ Lotara was almost laughing in a heady, nasty mix of relief and predatory pleasure. ‘Kill her.’

The Conqueror fired again, another broadside volley, then brought its forward weapons to bear as it finished coming about. The Ceres broke apart in high orbit, the barest touch of Nuceria’s atmosphere giving enough air for its wreckage to burn. Lotara gave it another few seconds, just to drink in the image: tens of thousands of lives ending in fire.

‘Status of the Trisagion?’ she called, turning back to the bridge.

‘Fighting like nothing I’ve ever seen before,’ Tobin replied, more than a little awed at the figures spilling down his data-feed monitor. ‘We’d have lasted less than three minutes without her. She might even win this once we’re gone.’

‘What are the odds of that?’

‘Terrible, ma’am. But there’s still a chance.’

‘And the Lex?’

At that, Tobin shook his head. ‘The Lex is dying.’

The Fidelitas Lex punched through the wreck of a smaller cruiser, ramming it aside. The Word Bearers flagship was already a ruin, its armour pitted and cracked, its shields a memory. The cathedrals and spinal fortresses barnacling along its back were gone, laid waste by the Ultramarines’ incendiary rage.

The XIII Legion armada attacked in strafing runs and protracted exchanges of broadsides, trading fire with the superior ship and accepting their own casualties as the cost of bleeding the bigger vessel dry. Each assault left the Lex weaker, firing fewer turrets and cannons, taking punishment on increasingly fragile armour. Air and water were vented in silent gushes from holes in the hull, while fuel and coolant flooded from similar wounds. Crew – many of whom were praying as they died – were sucked from the hundreds of other hull ruptures. Lotara took this all in with a glance; it looked like the Lex was being turned inside-out, its innards aflame and pulled out into the void.

But she still fought. Crawling with smaller ships, the Lex lashed back with its remaining cannons, rolling in the light of its own burning hull.

The Ultramarines commander, whoever guided the battle from the command deck of Courage Above All, had made their choice. The Conqueror would be boarded, killed from within. The Lex would die first, killed in the death of a thousand cuts and swept from the game board.

The Conqueror couldn’t rise in its sister-ship’s defence. Both flagships fought alone, starved of support and suffering the endless attacks of the XIII Legion’s ragged armada.

‘A bad end for a fine lady,’ Lotara commented, ‘even if she is full of fanatics.’

Salvation pods were streaming from the Lex’s sides and underbelly, along with heavier Mechanicum craft and bulk landers. With the legionaries already on the surface, the ship’s human population was fleeing in the vessel’s final minutes. And still she fought – rolling, turning, raging. The Ultramarines cruisers drifting past burned as badly as the warship they were killing. Dirty fighting, too close for calculations, up close and personal. Lotara felt guilty for loving every second.

‘She’s still with us,’ Tobin noted.

‘Not for long. Can we break free to support her?’

Tobin’s dry laugh was answer enough.

Lotara was staring hard at her personal hololith. ‘You’re no fun, Ivar.’

Eshramar had one duty, and it was proving the hardest one of his life. And unless it got easier, it would also be the last duty of his life. One he’d fail, as it happened.

It seemed so simple on the surface – all he had to do was get from here to there, with Cyrene in tow. The reality of the matter was that the damn ship was coming apart at the seams, and he was already exhausted from murdering his way down the crew-choked corridors. The killing had become farming, no different from the heft of a scythe and the reaping of wheat, day in and day out, from dawn until dusk. Except Eshramar’s power scimitar, those newly-forged blades given to each Vakrah Jal warrior, was harvesting life.

He incinerated his way through the densest corridors, but after the corpse-smoke had almost asphyxiated the Blessed Lady, he’d learned to temper that response.

Half the raving packs of humans they came across were trampling each other in feral panic to reach the escape hangars. The other half rounded on Cyrene and shrieked for her favour, believing touching her would grant the fortune to spare them death in the void. Eshramar killed both creeds of crowd, caring little whether they shouted for mercy or cried the Blessed Lady’s name as they died. Getting them out of the way was all that mattered.

‘This way,’ he said to her, pulling his sword from the last body in the hallway. She was struggling to walk, half-climbing over the piled, split-open cadavers. Horror widened her eyes, but that wasn’t Eshramar’s concern. He was bathed in gore, covered from helm to boots in the blood of his own flagship’s crew, but that wasn’t at the fore of his thoughts, either.

Ships died slowly – first in fire, then in silence. Eshramar knew they didn’t have long left before the Lex crumbled around them, becoming powerless and fully open to the airless void.

‘This way,’ he said again. ‘My lady, hurry.’

Cyrene scrambled over the slain, her robes slathered with their blood, her hands red to the wrists from where she kept falling. She’d been on warships for most of her life, but never on one being torn apart.

Eshramar led the way through the corridors, his wet boots thudding on the deck grilles. He was half-dragging her by the wrist, careful not to break her arm or pull it from its socket, but she still grunted with the stabs of pain as he manhandled her.

She knew where he was taking her. The Vakrah Jal had several of their Chapter’s own gunships aboard, but she sincerely doubted they’d still be there by now. It had taken them almost half an hour to cross the ship so far. Elevators were inactive, leaving hollow tube-tunnels between decks. Ventilation access crawlspaces glowed orange with distant fire in the ship’s veins. Entire swathes of decks were thick with bodies and debris.

Why even abandon ship? What was down there on Nuceria but a death delayed by a handful of hours?

That only made her run harder. She was a daughter of the Perfect City, and the Confessor of the Word. She wouldn’t die here if there were even a shred of hope.

Eshramar dragged her to a halt before a sealed bulkhead. She could see from the cant of his head that it shouldn’t have been sealed, even in an emergency lockdown. There was no handle, no transition bar, nothing.

‘I don’t…’ he said, but never finished the thought.

‘Can you burn through?’ she asked, catching her breath. Her throat tasted of blood.

His wrist-flamers were more than capable of liquefying metal, but time wasn’t on their side.

‘It will take too long.’ Eshramar turned away from the dead-end, meaning to double back and take another route. ‘Come.’

He said nothing more. His helmeted head cracked back with a dull, ringing clang, sending him staggering against the wall behind. The silver faceplate was a mangled crater around his left eye lens, and Cyrene heard the dim sound of a flatline playing from inside his armour as he slumped to the deck.

At the end of the hallway, where she and Eshramar had run in, she could make out three robed Legion thralls through the smoke. One of them lowered a heavy, long-necked rifle. The other two started running towards her.

She’d have taken Eshramar’s bolter if she’d had any hope of lifting it. Instead, Cyrene drew the qattari knife for the second time since her rebirth and ran at the men that had murdered her last guardian.

She didn’t scream or shriek or laugh. She met her attackers in fierce silence, knuckles white around the ritual knife. The same way she died a year ago.

The first of them deflected her strike with his forearm, batting the dagger from her hands.

‘Cyrene,’ he said. ‘Cyrene, wait, please.’ Damon Prytanis pulled back his hood, looking into her eyes as he had an hour before. He was absolutely untouched by the fire that had destroyed him. ‘Will you listen to me this time? Come with us.’

The Conqueror heaved again, its overburning engines bringing it deep into a slowly-scattering enemy formation. Its shields were dead. Its battlements burned with the dissipating flash-flame of void wounds. Half of its guns had fallen silent. They would never fire again.

Lotara pushed her loose hair back from her face, sucking in air through her rebreather. The ventilators were struggling to cope with the smoke hazing the bridge.

‘Come about to three-sixteen,’ she called.

‘They’re running past us,’ Tobin yelled back. ‘Captain, the Nova Warrior and the Triumph of Espandor are cutting past. Weapon batteries firing.’

‘Will it kill them?’ Lotara asked.

‘They’re damaged, but not dying. This will push them closer to the edge. Don’t hold out hopes for anything more, ma’am.’

Lotara touched a grisly, gushing slash on her temple, not remembering when she’d earned it. Her fingers came away red. Almost in a daze, she limp-ran to Lehralla’s console. The Scrymistress hung slack and dead, slouched over, held up only by the cables and wires snaking between her head and the ceiling.

Lotara reactivated the central hololith, staring through its flickering indecision and tracking the runes of enemy ships. Blood of the Emperor, how could so many of them still be alive? Surely they’d killed the whole armada and more besides.

The Conqueror turned at the heart of a spreading sphere of enemy warships. Its remaining weapons spat wrath into the void, bruising, breaking, burning the Ultramarines vessels clinging to it.

The Nova Warrior and Triumph of Espandor blinked on the ethereal display, pulsing their way past the embattled Conqueror. But Tobin was wrong. They weren’t cutting past quickly, they were making attack runs as they flew by. Given the enemy fleet’s resources, that was exactly what she’d have done, too – they couldn’t afford to keep their heaviest cruisers entirely out of the firefight, no matter the risk.

‘Move us closer,’ she called out across the bridge. ‘Get me within range for the ursus claws. It doesn’t matter who we hit in the turn, but those two barges aren’t firing their drop pods onto Nuceria while I still draw breath.’ Her smile was all white teeth in her sooty face. ‘No one runs from the Conqueror.’

‘If the Chronicle changes course…’ Tobin warned.

‘It will or it won’t, but no one runs. I want the engines howling loud.’

The World Eaters flagship leapt forwards, engines roaring hotter and harder. Beyond manoeuvring speed. Beyond attack speed. Beyond pursuit speed.

Lotara, and all the surviving bridge crew, stared at the image blooming on the oculus. She heard Feyd curse in the same moment Tobin shouted, ‘Brace, brace!’

The rising Conqueror met the descending Chronicle, both ships changing their heading along unpredicted arcs, and crashing together without void shields to cushion the impact. The strategium shook hard enough to throw everyone from their feet. Lotara’s teeth clacked together – she felt several of them break.

The shriek of tormented, agonised metal lasted almost a full minute. The two warships slid against each other, and there was almost something shark-like to how they coupled in the dark. The Chronicle came off worse, far outclassed in size, armour, momentum and weight. Its entire port side disintegrated in a tidal tear of scrap metal, exposing thousands of crew to Nuceria’s upper atmosphere. When the two ships slipped free of their grinding slide, the Chronicle rolled into a powerless fall, snatched by gravity, spearing groundwards and catching fire as it knifed through the world’s atmosphere.

The Conqueror fared better, but earned black scarring across its entire port side. Entire fortresses of cannons and crew were raked clean off the hull. At her instinctive guess, Lotara estimated they’d lost several thousand crew, and were lucky it was so few.

But they were free, and bearing down on the running cruisers. Despite being forty kilometres away from her prey, in terms of void war Lotara was practically on their backs.

She gave the nod to Tobin.

Vel-Kheredar’s finest work was arguably the weapons array he’d spent over two years installing in the refitted Conqueror, soon after she first changed her name from Adamant Resolve. The flagship of the XII Legion outgunned practically any other vessel of comparable size, even with its standard armament. What really made the difference were the pursuit talons. The harpoons carried by the Warhounds of Legio Audax served their purpose well, but the Conqueror’s ursus claws were an extension of Legiones Astartes savagery on a scale unseen anywhere else.

As the Conqueror bore down on the running cruisers, it launched its talons right at their spines. Dozens of spears, each one the size of a frigate in its own right, burst from the warship’s forward fire arc. Many missed, as they always did at such range. And many hit, as they always did when Lotara fired them in anger.

She watched the massive spears drive through the cruisers’ spines, impaling them and digging deep. Great industrial drills at the head of every harpoon came alive, grinding and eating deeper into the struck ships. Electromagnetic seals charged. The spears, skyscraper-tall and skyscraper-thick, locked home in the puncture wounds they’d caused. The chains connecting the harpoons to their mothership were an alloy of Nostraman adamantium and Ferrekesian titanium, and each of them carried the same value as the annual tithe allowances of an average frontier world. The Imperium, in its sickening scale and ambition, spared no expense for its visionaries and warriors.

The harpoon chains straightened and grew taut. That was when the Conqueror killed its thrust. Massive Mechanicum-engineered pulleys – each one dwarfing a Titan in size and strength – began ratcheting the harpoons back.

Clawing a vessel was always a matter of complex calculation. The pursuit talons were designed for the most vicious, close-range breed of warfare, and if too many spears missed – or the enemy ship had too much power – it would be the Conqueror that suffered, losing its hold – or worse, being pulled along by the running prey. Neither failure had ever happened. Lotara knew the weapons array inside and out, from the names of the work shift leaders overseeing the slave population that manned the manual loading systems to the exact classes of ship she could bring down at different levels of thrust.

Both the Nova Warrior and the Triumph of Espandor were wounded, because every ship in the sky was wounded. Thanks to the Trisagion, they’d taken heavy fire along with the rest of the Ultramarines fleet, and suffered a massed broadside beating in their attack run past the Conqueror.

Weakened as they were, they were the perfect targets.

The claws had fired, sunk in, drilled deeper and bit hard. The chains had pulled tight, and the Conqueror fired everything it had into pulling back. Slowly, inexorably, the two Ultramarines vessels were dragged back in defiance of their thrusters, losing all forward momentum and leashed off-course.

Another cheer, this one much sparser, went up across the bridge.

‘Pull them closer and finish them with lances.’ Lotara limped back to her throne. ‘Ram our way through the wreckage when you’re done and come about to break the Glory of Fire’s escort squadron. Someone give me a status report on the Lex.’

‘Dead within minutes,’ Kejic called back. ‘They’re abandoning ship, marking twelve kills.’

Twelve. Lotara gave a small smile. A good showing from the fanatics.

‘Order them to rise to minimum safe distance,’ she said. ‘I don’t want them hitting earth while our forces are still fighting on the surface.’

Kejic relayed the order, but called back almost at once, ‘They’re going down, captain. Projected markers will have them strike the eastern ocean.’

Lotara swallowed, staring right at her vox-master. ‘How far from the coast?’

Kejic looked pained. ‘Seventeen kilometres. Twenty if we’re lucky.’

‘Everything depends on how they crash. It might be nothing, it might be everything.’

Lehralla’s corpse shuddered like a string puppet as the bridge gave its heaviest shake yet.

‘Captain!’

She turned to Feyd, overseeing the weapons teams and their army of consoles. ‘Officer Hallerthan?’

‘Three strike cruisers are running past the Lex.’

It had to happen. There was always going to be planetfall. Lotara knew that. And at least they’d stopped… who knew how many other ships?

She was still annoyed.

‘Warn the Legions,’ she said. They weren’t easy words to speak. Pulling teeth might have been less effort. ‘And start your intentions for phase two – I want your fighters shooting everything out of the sky. Drop pods, gunships – whatever they see, I want it dead. Any Mechanicum craft making it past the Lex?’

Tobin hissed a curse. ‘Aye, ma’am.’

‘Very well. Ensure the Legions are aware the enemy is landing Titans. Order the Trisagion to ensure no enemy vessels are allowed enough time for pinpoint orbital bombardment. And Kejic, make sure our warriors know to brace for the Lex going down offshore.’

As the vox-master relayed her warnings, Ivar Tobin looked at his captain across the central table.

‘What do you expect them to do, captain? We’ll be fortunate if they don’t all drown.’

‘A fact I’m well aware of, commander. Status on the ursus claws?’

Outside the ship, the impaled Ultramarines cruisers were dragged closer to the Conqueror’s eclipsing shadow. The much smaller cruisers rolled and strained against their chain leashes, engines firing into futility.

The Conqueror gave a judder as its lances streamed again, knifing through the captured cruisers, bisecting them first, then taking them to pieces with the second beam.

‘Retract the claws. Have the slave teams begin rearming lost spear chutes, on the miraculous chance we get to fire again.’

Kejic was about to confirm her order when Tobin interrupted.

‘The Armsman on an intercept run.’ He pointed at the rune on the display, looking for the closest weapons officer through the smoke. ‘Another battle-barge! Kill it before it comes abeam!’

Lotara knew, even as her first officer gave the order, that he was asking the impossible.

‘No time,’ she replied, feeling a surreal, sudden calm. She lifted the vox-thief built into her dark iron throne, sending her voice crackling all the way through the wounded ship. ‘All hands, stand by to repel boarders. Captain Delvarus, respond at once.’

Her heart kept pace with the passing seconds, as no answer came.

‘Delvarus,’ she said again. ‘Respond, damn you.’ If you made planetfall, I swear I will crash the Conqueror’s wreckage down onto your miserable…

‘This is Delvarus of the Triarii.’ The voice crackled back clear and strong, despite the interference with the shipwide vox. ‘I hear you, captain.’

The first drop pod hammered into the empty marketplace, scattering handcarts and wooden tables with the force of its arrival. Sealed doors unlocked with pressurised hisses, blasting open to unfold as ramps. The first Ultramarines to set foot on Nuceria poured forth, bolters raised, a sergeant leading the way with his gladius high. They moved in the perfection of well-trained unity, drilled to exact movements through thousands of hours’ training and hundreds of battles.

The World Eaters were waiting for them. Squads broke cover, sprinting from alleyways and nearby brick buildings, chain-blades revving. Those not lost to the Nails at once had the presence of mind to note that these Ultramarines weren’t the pristine cobalt-blue warriors they’d faced on Armatura. The legionaries of the XIII wore cracked armour, still scarred and burnwashed from some horrendous battle weeks or months before.

Argel Tal saw it. Khârn did not. The World Eater broke cover with his men, laughing and howling, lifted by the adrenaline rush igniting his pleasure receptors.

Erebus, armoured for war and crouched in the alley with Argel Tal, offered his former protégé a rueful smile.

‘You fear for him. I don’t judge you for that, Argel Tal. Your loyalty is a gift.’

Argel Tal hesitated, half-risen and ready to run. ‘What?’

Erebus rose as well, gesturing with his crozius. ‘I told you, did I not? Khârn dies on a world of grey skies, in the murky light of dawn. Where do we stand now?’

Argel Tal refused the temptation to look up. ‘Lies. Guesses.’

‘Prophecy,’ Erebus said softly. ‘He dies on this world, my son. He dies today, with a blade in his back.’

Argel Tal turned back to the fight, where Ultramarines drop pods were raining fiery steel from the sky, breeding groundquakes each time one hammered home. The daemon Raum stirred within his blood, awakening to the taste of anger.

Prey comes. Let us hunt and skin and kill and feed.

These are the survivors of Calth. The warriors Erebus failed to kill.

So let us finish the Deceiver’s failed work.

I have to save my brother.

The Slayer?

Khârn, yes.

Hunt and skin and kill and feed and save the Slayer. It is all the same game on this battlefield.

The beast was right. Argel Tal started running, his eyes on Khârn in the midst of the melee. With each step his wings stretched and grew, mangling free of the ceramite; horns rose from his helmet to form a crown of curling ivory; and his faceplate smoothed into the daemonic deathmask. Like something from the pagan nightmyths of the First Kingdoms, Argel Tal charged into battle to fight at his brother’s side.

Above them, the dawning sky grew suddenly dark. Something – something vast – made its slow way through the clouds. It set fire to the sky on its way down, pushing the rippling tide of clouds apart.

‘No…’ the Word Bearer said. ‘Please, no.’

Lorgar stood alone atop a Land Raider, the wind picking at the parchments bound to his armour. From his vista, he watched the surrounding city dying purely because three Legions happened to use it as the place they met. Was that fate? The city had been destined to die this very day anyway, but to see an entire population slaughtered purely because they were in the way was…

A waste? He’d almost considered it a waste. But that wasn’t true, for their screams all melded with the great song. It didn’t matter from whence the blood flowed. Simply by attacking, Guilliman’s sons were bringing the song to its crescendo. It was coming to its apex, carried by the arrhythmic crashing of bolters and the grunts of dying men too proud to scream in pain.

Lorgar had to find Angron. It would be time soon.

His brother’s bitterness at Desh’elika Ridge had almost been enough. In the Praxury’s throne room, it had come even closer. Lorgar didn’t know how the final note would sound, but he sensed it coming, the way ozone in the crisp air heralds the coming storm.

The Ultramarines drop pods were just the first wave. The XIII Legion came down across the city, deploying in force – even mauled by the loss of Calth, they were still numerous enough to fill Nuceria’s heavens.

Behind them came gunships, drop-ships, heavy landers and the great black tower-ships of the Martian Mechanicum. Contact was sporadic with the void war above, but it was clear the enemy armada had enough strength to rain their troops onto the surface. The Ultramarines knew Angron and Lorgar were here, and they’d come to end both primarchs’ brutal reigns.

As was their way, the Ultramarines established footholds at defensible positions in the dying city, clearing room for their reinforcements to land. For every one they held, another was overrun by the World Eaters in a storm of roaring axes, or lost to the Word Bearers chanting, implacable advance. The XII Legion crashed against the XIII in rabid packs, showing why Imperial forces had feared to fight alongside them for decades. Uncontrolled, unbound, unrestrained, they butchered their way through Ultramarines strongpoints, enslaved to the joy of battle because of the pain engines in the meat of their minds.

The XVII Legion also met their enemy cousins, replacing ferocity with spite and hate. The Ultramarines returned it in kind, hungry for vengeance on those who’d defiled Calth and killed its star. Word Bearers units marched, droning black hymns and chanting sermons from the Book of Lorgar, bearing corpse-strewn icons of befouled metal and bleached bones above their regiments.

The Legio Audax walked through Meahor, jackal-keen on the prowl, ursus claws harpooning tanks and vulcan mega-bolters eviscerating infantry. The inefficiency of the way they made war had never appealed to Lorgar, but he respected his brother’s admiration for the Legio’s savagery. One of their Titans, hunchbacked and hunting, clanked along an adjacent street – from the sounds of human panic, it was wading through the native population. The taller forms of other Titans – Reavers and Warlords – strode at the city’s edge; the Ultramarines were landing their own god-machines, but too few, far too few. Audax was adept in its hunts against larger prey. The Legio loved to play as wolf packs bringing down lone bears.

Lorgar raised his gaze as the rising sun went black in the sky. Across the city, Word Bearers were looking up in the very same way, with the very same feeling uncurling in their guts. He could sense their despair – a feeling too melancholic and pained to be either fear or anger, but somehow more desperate than both. His sons’ emotions reached him in a bitter wash, making it even harder to look away.

Such a blow to morale, to see one’s flagship die.

The vast silhouette of the Fidelitas Lex cut through the clouds, big enough to stain half the sky with its immense gothic darkness, fire-ghosts dancing in its minuscule window ports. For several terrible pregnant seconds, another city hung above Meahor, shuddering on its way east, loud enough to shroud the sounds of thousands and thousands dying in terror. Almost loud enough – Lorgar actually smiled at this – to drown out the warp’s melody.

Almost.

The behemoth passed overhead, dead engines like open mouths, debris and crew raining from the falling ship as it rolled in a slow drift towards the open ocean.

Lorgar watched it trail across the grey skies, and whispered a final farewell. The Lex had served him well, but all things must come to an end. He hoped the Blessed Lady had made it to the escape pods. How bitter it would be to be reborn, only to die in the agony of fire mere weeks later.

Down it rolled, achingly slow for something of such weight and scale, shrinking towards the horizon but never disappearing. Lorgar knew that a death in gravity’s grip would deny the vessel any last claim to grace, as the weight of its immense engines inevitably dragged the stern down first, colliding with the ocean’s surface far from shore.

But far enough?

‘This is the primarch,’ he said quietly into the Legion’s vox-net, cutting through his warriors’ lamentations. ‘Even in death, the Lex shows her rage. Brace for the coming tidal wave, and remember the Canticles of Mourning. No dirges for those lost in righteous battle. Everyone to higher ground, avoid all battle in the east where the wave will crash. Take the battle to the west.’

Lorgar dropped from the battle tank’s roof, sheathing his bloodied crozius and ignoring the Ultramarines bodies he crushed underfoot.

Another drop pod slammed earthwards at the far end of the street. Without even looking, he directed a mixed group of Word Bearers and World Eaters to deal with it, and reached out with his senses, seeking Angron’s presence.

But the song distracted him. It jarred, leeching at his concentration, pressing at his skin with the same static itch as standing too close to his brother Magnus.

Lorgar reached out again, seeking the source of the discordant disruption. The answer came at once, because the answer was behind him.

The answer stood at the far end of the street, clad in bloodstained blue, dropping the corpse of the last Word Bearer from the grip of its oversized power fists. It started running towards him, shouting his name, and Lorgar knew with cold certainty that the reason the song had fallen so catastrophically out of tune was because Fate itself was laughing at him.

Princeps Ultima Audun Lyrac still felt buffeted in the seat. It wasn’t exactly enough to shake his bones from their sockets – nothing more than a slight tilt side to side with each step Syrgalah took – but it marked him from Keeda and Toth, who both suffered no such discomfort. He kept casting glances to the veteran cockpit crew, soon realising they instinctively leaned left and right in time to the Titan’s tread. A minuscule motion, barely noticeable. That was how in tune they were with Syrgalah, and he felt a stab of admittedly childish jealousy. He doubted they even knew they were doing it.

He didn’t remark on it, of course. They’d been merciless in their attitudes to his practical inexperience, and though they’d been suitably polite the last month in transit, this was his first walk. He was perspiring freely, the dampness shining on his temples. His back was similarly filmed by greasy perspiration as he tried to recline for the hundredth time in the shivering throne. Interface needles in his skull and spine gave irritated twinges as he shuffled.

All in all, he was glad he was behind his moderati in their control thrones. The last thing he needed was them seeing how awkward he felt. Syrgalah herself was a presence, a voice and a snarling smile in the back of his head. Her intelligence felt like the embers of a fire, burning slow but too hot to touch. He could sense she wanted to hunt, but was she never satisfied? He’d lost count of how many tanks they’d already destroyed.

The Titan kept pulling west, as well. It wanted to walk west, kept pulsing the word west, west, west through his mind, but that was just one of several Ultramarines landing sites. He detected nothing anomalous there. Did Syrgalah sense the coming tidal wave? Even if it struck, she could ride it out. It might reach her waist, at best. Mechanicum calculations had been vox-spurted in a torrent, and the tsunami to come was eminently survivable. The Lex had died well, and they’d all live because of it.

West, west, west.

‘What is it with this city?’ Keeda asked. She asked Toth, Audun noted, not bothering to turn and include him. ‘I thought this world was supposed to be advanced. This looks like they’ve barely pulled themselves out of an iron age. Most of these buildings are stone. Brick and mortar.’

‘Weapons.’ Toth sounded distracted. ‘Their weapons are advanced. Not by our standards, of course. Their nautical technology is supposed to be impressive, as well. A coastal people.’

‘They didn’t even have satellites.’

‘They did.’ Toth held a hand to his earpiece. ‘Just not many.’

‘Someone’s been reading the mission briefings.’

‘Shut up, Kee.’ Toth spoke without turning around. ‘Sire, Syrgalah is scry-locking onto a heat signature at the city’s edge. She keeps pulling towards it.’

Audun had to swallow before speaking, and he still worried his voice sounded tremulous.

‘I’m sensing it, too. The machine-spirit hungers for whatever prey she scents out there.’

There was a moment’s silence in the cockpit. Toth said nothing. Keeda busied herself with butchering three Ultramarines Rhinos in a torrent of white-hot bolter shells.

Audun sucked his lower lip. Was he trying too hard to speak as they did, in the same familiar terms of Titan interface? Were they laughing at him?

‘That’s it,’ Toth agreed. ‘That’s the signal I mean. Syrgalah keeps turning to face it.’

‘Do we have any ’hounds at the western edge?’

‘They’ve reported a coffin-ship. Big enough for three Warlords.’ He lifted a shoulder in a lazy shrug. ‘Nothing we can’t handle, especially if they’re down here without support. I’m getting reports that the Conqueror’s fighters are shooting down every infantry lander they can.’

Toth sounded at ease, but there it was again: the insistent pull of the Titan leaning to the west. Audun had to make a decision.

‘What Legio walks against us? The markings resemble several–’

‘Oberon,’ Keeda replied. ‘Orange and black striping, and the sigil of the cleaved crown. It’s the Legio Oberon – whatever dregs survived the Calth muster.’

Oberon. Oberon. As he silently said the name, Syrgalah gave another tug, wanting to walk west.

Oberon. An Oberon coffin-ship, ready to unload at the city’s edge. Prey so tempting that the Titan herself wanted to hunt it. Syrgalah sensed an enemy warrior-spirit even from this distance.

‘We go west.’ Audun rested his slippery hands on his own control console. ‘Bring four packs with us.’

‘Aye, sire,’ replied Toth.

Audun hesitated, working a quick calculation. ‘Amend my last order, Toth. Bring five packs with us.’

‘That’s more than a quarter of Audax.’ Keeda finally turned around, looking both surprised and alarmed.

‘You’re right. Make it six. And tell them to converge with all possible speed. We’re going in together.’

Thirty Warhounds. Would it be enough? Audun Lyrac was certain it would – he was equally certain many of them wouldn’t survive, and prayed to the Omnissiah that he wasn’t about to end his career on his very first walk.

‘Toth, I want you to ensure we advance with Legion forces in support, ready to finish the fight once we start it. World Eaters, Word Bearers, I couldn’t care less. But I want legionaries at our feet, ready to strike. Get them to run with us aboard speeders and Rhinos. We’ll only have one shot at this, and it will have to be quick.’

Toth didn’t turn back, but the smile in his voice was evident.

‘You sound like you know what Oberon is bringing to join the fight, princeps.’

‘I do. Unless I’m very much mistaken, we are about to meet the Corinthian.’

Toth and Keeda shared a grin at his proclamation. Audun knew Audax’s history and pedigree better than any soul living, except for perhaps Vel-Kheredar – ‘honours upon his name’. He knew the Legio was founded on the principles of the hunt, of cutting in quick, gutting your enemies, and pulling back before retaliation could fall. He knew Audax crews were raised and trained to work in five-Titan packs to bring down larger prey. It was more than the Legio’s speciality – it was the reason they were halfway to being legendary.

But he had never, ever seen two people eager at the prospect of facing an Imperator.

The demigod in gold and blue had the advantage of two weapons, but Lorgar’s crozius gave him a reach that his brother lacked. When they first met, there was no furious trading of frantic blows, nor were there any melodramatic speeches of vengeance avowed. The two primarchs came together once, power fist against war maul, and backed away from the resulting flare of repelling energy fields. Their warriors killed each other around them both, and neither primarch spared their sons a glance.

Lorgar flicked the clinging lightning from the head of his crozius, shaking his head in slow denial.

‘You’re ruining the song. You shouldn’t be here.’

Roboute Guilliman, Lord of the XIII Legion, stared with eyes ripened by hatred.

‘And yet, here I am.’

TWENTY-ONE

The Mark of Calth
A Redemption Unseen
Crescendo

The brothers duelled in the stone street, their boots kicking up clouds of alkaline dust. Gone was any notion of humanity or mercy from either warrior – here, at last, were two men that despised one another, fighting to end each other’s lives.

In Guilliman’s eyes, Lorgar saw a wealth of purest, depthless hatred. A hatred not formed from one action and one event, but a chemical cauldron of emotion strong enough to twist even the calmest, most composed demigod in the Imperium. Anger flared in those eyes, of course. More than anger, it was rage. Frustration tainted it further; the desperation of not understanding why this was happening, and the ferocity of one who still believes he might find a way to stop it. Hurt – somehow, seeing the hurt in Guilliman’s eyes was worst of all – also poisoned the mix and made it rancid. This wasn’t the pure rage of Corax on the killing fields – the fury of a brother betrayed. This fury was saturated into something much harsher and much more complex. It was the pain of a builder, an architect, a loyal son who had done all that was ever asked of him, and had seen his life’s work die in foolish, spurious futility.

Lorgar knew that feeling, had known it since he knelt in the ashes of the Perfect City, the entire settlement destroyed by Guilliman’s fleet on the Emperor’s orders. For the first time in all the years of their wildly disparate lives, Lorgar Aurelian and Roboute Guilliman connected as equals.

To his amazement – the shock leaving him cold-blooded – Lorgar felt ashamed. In his brother’s face he finally saw real hate, and in that moment he learned a lesson that had evaded him all these decades. Guilliman had never hated him before. The Ultramarine had never undermined his efforts; never hidden his sneers while presenting false indifference; never held a secret joy over humbling Lorgar’s religious efforts in Monarchia and the great Crusade beyond.

Guilliman hadn’t hated him. Not until now. This was hate. This was hatred in totality, fuelled by a fortune of pathos. This was a hatred deserved, and it was a hatred that would see Lorgar dead, with the song unfinished and the False Emperor still enthroned at the head of an empire he didn’t – in his ignorance – deserve to lead.

The Bearer of the Word felt a sudden, burning need to explain everything, to justify himself, to tell how this was all necessary, all of it, to enlighten humanity. The rebellion. The war. The Heresy. The truth of reality was foul but it had to be told. Gods were real, and they needed man. The human race could rise in union and immortality as the favoured race of the Pantheon, or die as the eldar died centuries before for the sin of ignorance.

Between blocking the hammerblows of his brother’s swinging fists, Lorgar started cursing the warp’s song for distracting him. It played through his skull and before his eyes, insistent and ceaseless. Everything felt significant. Nothing sounded right. Every bell-toll of his crozius crashing against Guilliman’s fists thrummed wrong, confusing the crescendo as it was supposed to be rising.

Both primarchs fought without heeding their warriors, their godlike movements an inconceivable blur to the Space Marines fighting around them. Here was a record of the very mythical action that the Terran remembrancer order had been founded to document, as two of the Emperor’s sons raised weapons in the embodiment of those most ancient legends: Akillus, Destroyer of the fortress-city Troi; or Gulyat, Giant of the Fillestyne Tribe. None had ever imagined the heroes of this new age would take the field against each other, nor could they have predicted the wellsprings of spite between them.

‘Calth.’ The word was a weapon. Guilliman breathed it, infesting it with the same hatred colouring his eyes. ‘Calth. Jursa. Kallas. Corum’s Landing. Ereth Five. Quilkhama. Tycor. Armatura. How many of my worlds, Lorgar? How many?’

Lorgar parried another swing, spinning his crozius in a heavy retort. Guilliman blocked it as easily as Lorgar had blocked the punch. Their blows rang out across the battle the way temple bells called the faithful to worship.

‘Calth,’ Guilliman said again. ‘No words now, “brother”? No reply for what your Legion has done across the Five Hundred Worlds?’

Lorgar held his tongue. Everything had changed after Isstvan. In the hours after the massacre, as he’d sat alone and let his face bleed from Corax’s murder-talons, he sensed the shifting of fate behind the veil. The futures rewiring themselves, new pathways of possibility opening up. In this last year, he finally felt himself taking the mantle of the man he’d always meant to be. He even, in his less humble moments, hungered to face Corax again. Things wouldn’t play out so perfectly in the Raven Lord’s favour next time – of that, Lorgar was sure.

‘The Mark of Calth.’ Guilliman made the title into an accusation. Reserved dignity even flavoured his wrath: he refused to fall into the emotional madness of a berserk killer, instead fighting with a fury that burned cold.

Guilliman slammed his hands together, catching the falling maul with a harsh whine of protesting energy fields. Holding it there, he looked past their joined weapons and into his brother’s eyes.

‘Look at me. Look at my face. Do you see the Mark of Calth?’

His patrician’s features were handsome in a stately, stern way, even when twisted by anger, but he could never be considered as made in the Emperor’s image to the degree that played over Lorgar’s tattooed visage. The only difference between Guilliman now and the Guilliman that had stood in the dust of Monarchia was a fine threading of dark veins along the primarch’s throat and cheeks – scarcely noticeable to any but those who knew him best.

‘Void exposure.’ The Ultramarine refused to release the weapon, despite lightning dancing down his heavy gauntlets. Lorgar gripped Illuminarum’s haft as the energy rippled down its length, biting at his gloved hands and setting fire to the parchments bound to his shoulder guards. ‘Void exposure when you killed one of my worlds, and the fleet above it.’

Lorgar didn’t spit back with harsh words. He shook his head, pitting his strength against his brother’s.

Guilliman’s statesman smile played across his features. ‘You’ve changed.’

Lorgar grunted at his brother’s accusation.

‘So everyone tells me.’

This time, it was Lorgar who disengaged. He pulled Illuminarum free, and suffered a fist to the sternum for taking the risk. The blow sucked all the breath from his body, cracked his breastplate, and left him with a bloody smile at the poetic justice. He’d cracked his brother’s breastplate in the Perfect City and now the favour was returned. Fate really was laughing at him.

‘First blood to me,’ Guilliman said.

The pity in that voice was acid in Lorgar’s ears. He tried to speak, tried to breathe, and could do neither. The song had never sounded more wrong.

Guilliman’s hands scrabbled and skidded across his armour, seeking a stranglehold to end the fight quickly. Lorgar repulsed him with a projected burst of telekinesis, weak and wavering with the song still so de-tuned, but enough to send his brother staggering. The maul followed, its power field trailing lightning as Lorgar hammered it into the side of Guilliman’s head with the force of a cannonball. There was a crack that wouldn’t have shamed a peal of thunder.

‘There’s your Mark of Calth,’ Lorgar replied, backing away to catch his breath. Air sawed in and out of his lungs. He could already taste blood – Guilliman’s blow had broken something inside him. Several ribs at the very least, and likely something more vital. He dragged in a breath, and exhaled it as blood down the front of his armour.

Both primarchs faced each other beneath the grey sky, one bleeding internally, the other with half of his face lost to blood sheeting from a fractured skull.

‘Enjoy that scar.’ Lorgar fought for his smile. ‘It will be with you until your dying day.’ He threw his arms wide, taking in the dying city. ‘Why chase me, Roboute? Why? Your fleet will fall against the Trisagion and you’ll die down here.’

‘There is a difference between confidence and arrogance, cur. Surely someone has told you that.’

The Word Bearer spat blood again. ‘But why come? Why come at all?’

‘Courage.’ Guilliman stalked forwards, ignoring his wound, and he didn’t need to struggle for a smile – it came as easily as breathing. ‘Courage and honour, Lorgar. Two virtues you have never known.’

They moved west, fighting every inch of the way, engaged in running battles with the Ultramarines who also withdrew before the coming tidal wave.

A concept often stated in the war chronicles Argel Tal studied was the notion of a warrior ‘fighting as though possessed’. Possessed, in most cases, by some unquantifiable warrior spirit, the desire to defend one’s homeland, or just to echo the essence of legendary ancestors.

Argel Tal was possessed, in the truest sense of the word, and without the parasitic symbiosis he shared with Raum, he doubted he could have kept up with Khârn. From the moment Argel Tal left Erebus’s side, he’d spent the battle in his daemonic form, too hard-pressed to exult in his strength and hating the credence he was giving to his former master’s prophetic warning. He kept telling himself it was a lie even as he acted to prevent it becoming truth.

The Eighth Captain of the XII Legion leapt fully into the visceral, laughing joy of battle, chainswords howling and tearing, wearing the blood-spray of defeated foes as medals across his white armour. He was scarcely even Khârn any more. Argel Tal’s daemon-granted sixth sense was a stunted and mulish thing, but he could rake a mind for its surface thoughts easily enough. With Khârn, he sensed nothing but a rage hot enough to scald the thoughts of any who pried into it. Familiarity taught him to recognise the Nails’ bite, and to leave well alone.

Keeping Khârn alive so far had been a crusade to match the fevered hours of Isstvan V. When Argel Tal came too close, he risked being carved open by his brother’s blades. Seven times already Khârn had attacked him in blind rage, and each time it took longer for the World Eater to realise what he was doing and turn back to the closest enemy.

When Argel Tal strayed too far, he’d lose sight of Khârn in the swarming chaos of the running street battles. Easy enough to claw his way up the side of a building to get a better view of the fighting, or take to the air on his fleshmetal wings, but each time marked him out as a target to the Ultramarines below.

He didn’t know how many he’d killed. Not enough, evidently. They kept coming.

Enough, Raum had seethed in the thick of it. The Slayer does not need us. Fight with the Vakrah Jal.

I will not risk you being wrong. I’ve failed every brother I had. Khârn is the last.

You have me.

You are madness made manifest. Argel Tal ripped his spear from the chest of a dying Ultramarine, ramming it back down through the warrior’s throat. You are Hell in my bloodstream.

Khârn was somewhere to the left, chopping his way forwards. He’d been laughing, of all things, even as he moved ahead of his sword-brothers, carving deep into a crowd of Calth-scarred Ultramarines.

Argel Tal had seen the danger that Khârn hadn’t. The Word Bearer spread his wings and kicked off from the ground, landing on the warriors seeking to outflank his brother. The first Ultramarine died with Argel Tal’s spear through his helmet, rammed clean out the back of his skull. The second and third fell to the Custodian blade – cleaving one in two, severing the other’s arm and half his head in a badly-angled blow.

The searing burst of bolter shells savaged his wings and back. Argel Tal turned with a bellow far too low to be human, and reached for the legionary with his twisted, gnarled claw around the warrior’s throat. The Ultramarine’s valiant attempt to fire again ended when the commander of the Vakrah Jal’s faceplate warped into something wolfishly metallic, and broke the Macraggian’s head in its fanged maw.

Another blade had raked across his back. Another bolter shell cracked into his shin with the force of a thunderclap. Argel Tal ignored every wound he took, clawing his way closer to Khârn. Were the Ultramarines seeking Khârn’s blood because they were slaves to some prophesied fate? Was it as prosaic a truth as that they simply recognised his officer’s crest, or his heraldry, and wanted him dead? Or was Argel Tal imagining it all, fuelled by Erebus’s whispered prediction? What hope was there of knowing in this chaos?

He couldn’t remember how long ago that had been. Five minutes. Fifteen. Fifty. The sun was up, a sliver over the horizon. Blood of the gods, this world turned slowly.

Steadily and undeniably, they were growing outnumbered. For all he knew, the Trisagion and Conqueror were as dead as the Lex, and the Ultramarines had an open run to the planet.

He saw the helms of World Eaters he’d known this last year, training and fighting at Khârn’s side. He saw Lhorke, forever where the fighting was thickest, devastating all that stood in his path. When his spear slipped from his grip, lost in the tempest, he relied solely on his Custodian blade. When that was shattered against a Terminator’s thunder hammer, he let his bestial claws lead the way. They sang like honed steel, dripping with alchemical fire from his leaking wrist-flamers. There was no pain. For that, he thanked Raum.

Across the vox, Audax was calling for aid. Several World Eaters officers resisted the Nails long enough to guide the flow towards breaking out to the west, but it could hardly be considered a unified front line.

He prayed for Cyrene, beseeching the laughing, murderous gods not to toy with her soul. Another failure – bringing her back only to lose her again.

Khârn truly was the last of his closest kindred he hadn’t yet failed, and the World Eater mattered more than any other. Khârn was as Argel Tal once was: still untouched by the warp, not yet hollowed out by the cancerous kiss of a daemon stealing his consciousness and igniting his blood at will. Raum was a blessing and a curse, for despite the strength the daemon offered, the Word Bearer wouldn’t wish this gift on anyone else.

He thought he saw Skane die. There was the briefest moment when his eyes flickered down the embattled line and his muscles bunched to run to the Destroyer sergeant’s aid. Skane, marked out by his black armour, was on his knees in the dirt, raising an arm that ended at the elbow.

Argel Tal resisted the urge, deflecting another chainsword coming for Khârn’s shoulder guard. The centurion looked over his shoulder, and for a moment Argel Tal thought the Nails had relented enough to allow Khârn time to catch his bearings. The truth came a half-second later, when Khârn lashed out at him with a twinned blade. The Word Bearer parried, snarling as the block cost him another cut to his arm from an Ultramarine in the press of armoured bodies.

‘It’s me,’ his wolfish faceplate snapped back at his maddened brother. ‘Fight the enemy, you maniac.’

Whether he understood or not, Khârn turned to the closest Ultramarine and disembowelled the warrior with both blades.

Argel Tal fought on, defending the frenzied brother who scarcely even knew he was there. But then, it was never written that redemption came easy, nor that it would always be recognised.

He had time to wrap his claws around the throat of his next foe before the vox flared into shouting activity. Argel Tal looked to the east, where the Lex’s legacy was making itself known at the coast. He saw the tidal wave bearing down on the far side of the city, and thanked the gods that the battleship had come down in a drift. If it had struck like a spear and lanced into the crust, half the planet might have shaken itself apart. At least this way, an already dying city would just add another layer of ruin to its memory.

From the vox-reports, the grey seawater hit the coast with unimaginable force. It was high enough to pound against three- and four-storey buildings, breaking them apart in the deluge, adding huge stone blocks to the vehicle-cluttered flood lashing through the streets. Towers toppled into the drink, broken at their foundations. The entire coastal district was swept clean from the city in a single blow, the bodies of Nucerian natives and shattered habitation blocks carried westwards by the tide.

The land drank it up, fought it back, but still the water kept coming. By the time it reached the embattled Legions at their fallback positions, it was a waist-high encumbrance that fouled light tanks and devastated the effectiveness of their allied skitarii.

Argel Tal fought on, sloshing through the saltwater, always following Khârn.

Khârn didn’t seem to notice it at all. He pushed ahead, wading through the deep water as if it wasn’t there.

The coffin-ship of Legio Oberon was by far the largest lander that Guilliman’s fleet had managed to get past the sundered blockade. Its retros threw up a great cloud of alkaline dust, mixing in with the gritty smoke cloud already sent up by the city battle.

The term ‘coffin-ship’ was that rarest of titles: Mechanicum slang that wasn’t coded or binaric in nature. An ugly name for an ugly vessel – what touched down at Meahor’s western edge was a fat-bellied whale of a ship, its bulbous hull streaked with scorch marks from atmospheric entry. Its deployment ramps had taken a full five minutes to lower to the ground, on hydraulics loud enough to carry over half of the city. Preparing any Titan to walk was a solemn and involved ritual requiring hundreds of souls, but an Emperor Titan was an enterprise far beyond what was required with the lesser-pattern god-machines.

Within the shell, the Corinthian stood bound and leashed in place by thousands of fibre-cables, magnetically sealed into position between three gantried pylon towers. The structures required to board the Mechanicum walker and hold it in place were little different from the support towers once used to launch rockets to Luna in the dull ages of Man, when such things were laughably considered an achievement.

Depowered as one, the binding cables came loose in a whipcracking cascade, freeing the Titan to walk at last. Each of the giant machine’s legs was a bastion in its own right, crewed by skitarii detachments of weaponised cyborgs. Its splayed, clawed toes were wide stairs leading out from the defence-towers of its legs.

Corinthian’s first step shook the ground. Its second annihilated the city wall and three tall buildings, grinding them into dust. A war-horn sounded, almost a sonic weapon in its own right, announcing its presence. The Imperator’s right arm would level an entire city district if it was allowed to fire once. Its left arm would chew through half of any army it faced. Above all of this, above even its skull-headed cockpit – which in turn was large enough to be more of a command deck – the Corinthian carried a fortress on its shoulders, with anti-air cannons and laser batteries lining the battlements.

The last sound of its cacophonic preparation ritual was the dragon’s roar of its heart-core powering up to battle readiness. Searing liquid fuel washed through its veins, pushed out from the heart, and the magnetic coils of its plasma arm started the lengthy process of charging. If it fired, they were dead. They were all dead.

‘Beautiful,’ Audun breathed, watching the majestic avatar of the Machine-God take its first steps of freedom. They were closing on the city’s edge, and Corinthian was already visible, towering over the hab-blocks. The floodwater lapped at the giant’s foot-claws, not troubling it at all.

Syrgalah ran in a lurching hunch, leading her packs through the deluged streets; ignoring the Ultramarines firing up at them from below, accidentally crushing dozens underfoot. World Eaters land speeders slashed alongside them, bulked out for troop transport. Several of the Warhounds were serving as steeds themselves, their armour plating crawling with whole squads of Destroyers and assault troops clinging on as the Titans ran. Each Titan’s footsteps sent up great splashes of saltwater – the tidal wave had settled, but refused to recede. It was here to stay; the city Meahor would end its life a flooded wreck as well as a destroyed one.

‘So very beautiful,’ Audun sighed, unable to take his eyes from the steel giant. ‘We have to take it alive.’

‘You think the Twelfth will bear that in mind?’

‘We can only pray they do, Moderati Bly.’ A moment’s concentration activated Audun’s personal vox-link to every one of his Legio’s Titans. ‘This is the Princeps Ultima. In the Omnissiah’s name, the Corinthian cannot be allowed to fire. You all know what to do. This is the breed of battle that Audax was born for. Ursus claws ready, brothers and sisters. Let the hunt begin.’

There was another moment of relative silence in the cockpit. He found himself swallowing.

‘Nicely said, sire,’ Toth ventured.

Keeda nodded. ‘Just like the old man.’

Audun Lyrac, master of a hundred war machines and several thousand augmetic warriors, felt his cheeks heat up. He mumbled thanks his moderati pretended not to hear, to spare him further embarrassment.

Of all his titles, given in glory or earned in infamy, Angron most despised being named the Red Angel. The Imperium already had an Angel in Sanguinius, and Angron had no desire to ape the fey mutant that commanded the IX Legion. For all his flaws, he was his own man, and took pride in that above all else.

Lorgar knew Angron loathed it, yet it was among his brother’s most fitting titles. When the World Eater burst forth from the Ultramarines ranks, his armour was a shattered wreck, and both of his chainswords spat gobbets of ceramite armour plating and scarlet gore. After hours in the crush of the front lines, Angron was plastered with the blood of the slain – more than bloodstained, he was bloodbathed.

On his chest hung a bandolier of skulls taken from the mass grave at Desh’elika. Blood painted them as surely as it marked Angron. Even through the Nails’ pain, that pleased him. He wanted his brothers and sisters to taste blood once more. He’d carried them with him across Nuceria, letting their empty eyes witness the razing of high-rider cities.

The World Eater launched himself at Guilliman, with his ruined face contorted to be perfectly reminiscent of an angel lost in murderous hatred. Lorgar and Roboute both turned in the same moment – one of them to meet this new threat, the other to welcome it.

Lorgar’s breath caught in his throat. Not because he was exhausted – though he was – and not because he was relieved to see Angron breaking the deadlock – though, again, he was. His breath caught as his heart started pounding in fierce thunder, falling in perfect pitch with the warp’s song once more.

The two primarchs fell into a seamless, roaring duel exactly where Lorgar and Guilliman had abandoned theirs. This high on the overlooking hill, the water was a dim and distant concern. Lorgar heard its serpent-hissing flow, but spared it no mind. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was the song.

Lorgar could barely breathe as the song realigned in his mind. Here, he thought. Now. Angron. Guilliman. Roboute wouldn’t destroy the song. He was part of the crescendo.

Two primarchs faced one, and Guilliman was cunning enough to back away and take whatever ground he could.

‘You two.’ He looked at them with eyes heavy with judgement. ‘My brothers, my brothers, what a sorry sight you’ve become. Traitors. Heretics. No better than the treasonous cultures we’ve quashed for the last two hundred years. Did you learn nothing? Either of you?’

‘Always the teacher,’ said Lorgar, and there was admiration in his smile. ‘It grieves me this was necessary, Roboute.’

Guilliman ignored him, aiming a gauntlet at Angron. ‘I’ve heard Lorgar’s puling heresies already. What brought you so low, brother? Did the machine in your skull finally refashion your loyalty into madness?’

‘Hnnngh. They let me dream. They give me peace. What would you know of struggle, Perfect Son? Hnh? When have you fought against the mutilation of your mind? When have you had to do anything more than tally compliances and polish your armour?’

‘Childish,’ Guilliman sighed, gesturing to the burning, dying city. ‘Does it really come down to this? So pitiably childish.’

‘Childish? The people of your world named you Great One. The people of mine called me Slave.’ Angron stepped closer, chainswords revving harder. ‘Which one of us landed on a paradise of civilisation to be raised by a foster father, Roboute? Which one was given armies to lead after training in the halls of the Macraggian high-riders? Which one of us inherited a strong, cultured kingdom?’

Angron sprayed bloody spit as he frothed the words. ‘And which one of us had to rise up against a kingdom with nothing but a horde of starving slaves? Which one of us was a child enslaved on a world of monsters, with his brain cut up by carving knives?’

The two primarchs met again. Guilliman’s powered gauntlets should have easily deflected Angron’s chainswords, but the World Eater’s strength drove his brother back step by step. Chain-teeth sprayed from the weapons as eagerly as the saliva from Angron’s lipless slit of a mouth.

‘Listen to your blue-clad wretches yelling of courage and honour, courage and honour, courage and honour. Do you even know the meaning of those words? Courage is fighting the kingdom that enslaves you, no matter that their armies overshadow yours by ten thousand to one. You know nothing of courage. Honour is resisting a tyrant when all others suckle and grow fat on the hypocrisy he feeds them. You know nothing of honour.’

Guilliman parried, forced back further by the storm of Angron’s blows.

‘You’re still a slave, Angron. Enslaved by your past, blind to the future. Too hateful to learn. Too spiteful to prosper.’

The Ultramarine finally landed a glancing blow, his fist pounding across Angron’s breastplate. The chain of Desh’elika skulls shattered, bone shards scattering across the dirt.

Guilliman stepped back again, his boot crushing a skull’s remnants into powder.

Angron saw it, and threw himself at his brother, his howl of wrath defying mortal origins, impossibly ripe in its anguish. Though he couldn’t know it, the sound of his cry blended perfectly with the great song.

Lorgar saw it, too. The moment Guilliman’s boot broke the skull, he felt the warp boil behind the veil. The Bearer of the Word started chanting in a language never before spoken by any living being, his words in faultless harmony with Angron’s cry of torment.

TWENTY-TWO

He Dies on this World
Claws of the Ember Wolves
Blood Rain

The hours hadn’t been kind to Argel Tal. He tasted blood, and for once it was his own. Lacerations striped his armour, gouged into the flesh beneath. One of his horns was broken halfway down, cleaved off by a power axe. Scorch marks dappled his armour from flamer wash, and the bone ridges pushing through his armour were bleeding, by means he didn’t understand and was too weak to investigate with any real intent. He kept his wings folded close to his back, doing his best to ignore the rents and blade-cuts painting them in fresh scars.

He’d kept pace with Khârn, side by side with his sword-brother to the last. He alone among the white-armoured squads didn’t laugh and howl in triumph with each life they took and each street they conquered, for he was the only one lacking crude implants rewiring his brain. Several of the World Eaters had attacked him in the disorientation of fighting while Nails-lost. Each time he’d beaten them back, forcing them to recognise him, taking another wound or three in the process.

Now they ran with Audax, converging on the vast form of the Corinthian as it took its first two steps to get clear of the coffin-ship. He crouched atop a Rhino tank with one damaged tread, straining its engine to push through the floodwaters. He’d wrenched his claws into the armour plating to hold on; World Eaters filled the hull and hung from the outside, gunning their chain-axes in readiness. Khârn was with him, released from the Nails and looking no better than his brother. A sick desperation flavoured the whole fight – warriors on both sides were throwing everything they had into the conflict, as though it were the only war that ever mattered.

The World Eater and Word Bearer crouched together, both looking up at the Imperator rising above.

‘I’ve lost contact with the Conqueror,’ Khârn admitted.

Argel Tal tried to make the link himself. Bolter fire answered; bolters and shouts of anger and pain. Lotara had a fight on her hands.

‘They were boarded,’ said the Word Bearer.

Khârn nodded. ‘I’m not worried. Delvarus stayed this time.’

There was an ugly pause between them, then Khârn turned. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Fighting,’ Argel Tal replied.

‘No. You’re fighting with us over your own men. Erebus’s prophecy is meaningless. I won’t die here, brother. Go lead your Word Bearers.’

Argel Tal shook his head. ‘Do you have any idea how close you’ve come to death this morning? How many times I’ve turned aside a spear or broken a blade?’

‘Many, I’m sure,’ said Khârn. ‘But no more than usual.’

‘You’re wrong.’ The daemonic deathmask, haunting in its perfect beauty, melted into a smile. Even that was damaged, showing cracks like tears down one cheek, splitting the fine lips. ‘And you’re a fool.’ He gripped Khârn’s forearm, forcing the World Eater to pay attention. ‘You are one of the last remaining warriors of the Twelfth Legion that can be relied upon.’

Kargos was hanging onto the tank’s side rails, and looked up at both officers as he heard Argel Tal’s words.

‘Not very complimentary,’ he ventured.

Khârn chuckled, but Argel Tal ignored the Apothecary completely.

‘The others are degenerating faster,’ the Word Bearer insisted, ‘or suffering much worse. The Legion needs you, Khârn. The rebellion needs you.’

‘I’m flattered,’ he said, though in truth he felt chilled by what sounded grievously close to a threat.

‘Enough jests,’ Argel Tal growled. ‘Times are changing, brother. Great changes are coming to the Imperium and the Legions fighting to rule it. Warriors like you and I, at the right hands of the primarchs, will be the Lords of the New Empire. It doesn’t matter if we have no ambition, or if we’ve no desire to serve in such roles. Circumstance will decide for us. The rebel Legions are growing stronger with enlightenment, but not all will survive the trials of ascension.’

Khârn wasn’t sure what this meant. It bordered on typical Word Bearers zealotry, but that was something Argel Tal was rarely guilty of spreading.

‘Are you sermonising?’ he asked.

Argel Tal’s deathmask gave him an irritated look. ‘I’m warning you.’ The Rhino jerked as it crashed through a jury-rigged barricade, but the Word Bearer paid no heed. ‘We need the World Eaters in order to win this war. It’s why Lorgar is sweating blood to save Angron’s life.’

‘And why you’re fighting to save mine.’

‘Don’t make light of this.’

Insight struck with his brother’s annoyed tone. ‘You’re doing this just to prove Erebus wrong,’ Khârn stated.

‘Not just to do that,’ Argel Tal replied, and nodded to the Corinthian now towering above them. ‘Be ready. This will not be easy.’

‘Wrong.’ Khârn was grinning now. ‘Watch and learn how hounds bring down a bear.’

The Corinthian couldn’t be allowed to fire. Nothing else mattered. It had taken one monumental step to come free of its bindings, and a second to reach the very edge of the city. Below, racing through the streets of the burning city, thirty Warhounds came on in a rush of crude mechanical precision. World Eaters and Word Bearers units raced with them, as did skitarii troop transports and skimmers in the Legio Audax’s dark red and black.

Ultramarines met the oncoming horde. Oberon skitarii, recently spilled from landers, joined their Macraggian allies. Enemy Warhounds lurched at Corinthian’s heels, raising weapons of their own.

But Lotara’s efforts left the forces making planetfall a fraction of what Guilliman’s armada had hoped to land. Without knowing the fate of their flagship above – beyond sporadic vox-transmissions of screaming and bolter fire – the World Eaters crashed through the thin lines of defence at the Imperator’s clawed feet. The defence towers that served as the Titan’s legs spat turret fire down in a ceaseless barrage. Audax Titans went down, crushing their infantry escorts as they toppled; setting fire to them as their plasma cores went critical in crowded streets. Every Audax Warhound poured fire upwards, their vulcan bolters glowing red-hot, then white-hot, still spinning and still spitting. Spent shells rained onto the streets below with foundry crashes. Warriors on the roads beneath the Titans fought shin-deep in steaming, empty shell cases.

Such was the force of the firepower turned against Corinthian that its void shields caught fire. Flames washed over the tormented energy screens, each bolt shell’s igniting impact flare blending with the others to bathe the entire kinetic barrier in orange fire. The force bubble shielding Corinthian – which wouldn’t have been out of place on a small space frigate – burst, the boom heavy and resonant enough to shatter every remaining window in a five-kilometre radius and adding a rain of glass to the tempest of shell-fall.

In the midst of this, as Khârn and Argel Tal fought back to back with blade and claw, Syrgalah sounded her war-horn. Alone, it was a pale blare against the roar of Corinthian’s deafening voice.

But a second Titan took up the cry. And a third. Soon, all eighteen remaining Warhounds were howling up at their prey. Each of them was as tall as the Titan’s knee, but together they roared loud enough to eclipse its cry of freedom.

The Imperator took another step into the city – a great stride of protesting metal and straining servos, bringing down a low-rise habitation block and flattening a World Eaters Bloodhammer tank beneath its tread. Under way now, Corinthian brought its hellstorm cannon to bear, panning across the cityscape in a slow arc. Every warrior’s teeth itched in the sky-shaking whine of accruing power.

Syrgalah fired first, and Audax followed. Ursus claws loosed skywards, harpoons punching home in Corinthian’s weapon-arms, drilling and magna-locking in place. The Warhounds back-pedalled, withdrawing in straining union, their reinforced chains lashing taut at once.

‘They’ll bring it down,’ Argel Tal called to the World Eaters around him. His deathmask was awash with skitarii blood. ‘They’ll bring it down on top of us.’

Khârn incinerated an Ultramarine with a kicking burst from his plasma pistol.

‘Wrong again,’ he called back.

Yet more harpoons fired, ramming home with leaden clangs, their chains whipping tight alongside those cables first to land. With the sound of almost divine protest, Corinthian’s massive arms – each the size of a hab-spire – began to lower. The great god-machine’s war-horn sounded again, sounding more furious than triumphant this time. Argel Tal doubted such inflection of emotion was possible, yet the impression stuck all the same. He found himself laughing through the pain, the cursing, and the grind of armour against armour.

The immense guns came lower, lower, forced down to aim at the ground – at the flooded streets beneath the Titan’s own feet. If it fired to destroy the closest Warhounds, it would annihilate its own infantry as well as its own legs. And still it struggled. Despite the incremental strength of so many smaller Titans leashing its arms in place, the Corinthian kept trying to turn and bring its fortress guns to bear. All recognised it for what it was: a move of desperate futility.

She was shackled. They’d bound an Emperor-class Titan.

The voice that came across the vox was wickedly assured, and every warrior heard the smile in the woman’s words.

‘This is Moderati Keeda Bly of the Syrgalah to all infantry forces. Everybody into the water, begin boarding-siege at once. Repeat: lay siege to the Corinthian. Try to remember that we want her alive.’

Lhorke fought alongside Vorias’s cabal of Librarians, killing the Ultramarines that battled like lions in the doomed hope of helping their primarch. His combi-bolters were almost dry; caution left him killing with his energised claws. That suited him fine, he’d fought the same way in life, and his ironform was built to wade through enemy units rather than hold back and fire from afar.

He’d tried several times to raise Lotara, or even that runt Kejic, but the Conqueror had taken to transmitting gunfire instead of language. Lhorke wished the captain well, and focused on what he could do something about.

He admired Lord Guilliman’s plan. Although it suffered from the unexpected presence of the Word Bearers king-ship, and Lotara’s tactical refusal to give ground unless she had no other choice, this was the Ultramarines’ best chance to kill both rebel primarchs before they fled Ultramar’s borders once and for all. Lhorke couldn’t begin to guess what intelligence Lord Guilliman was using in his operations, but given the Ultramarines commander’s reputation for tactical acuity across the length and breadth of the Imperium, he knew this was no thoughtless raid. At best, it was a strike that had gone at least partly awry due to the World Eaters’ fierce resistance. Much likelier, it was the vanguard assault of a much larger fleet action about to break open across the Nucerian System.

Lhorke suspected the Lord of the Five Hundred Worlds had gathered what vessels he could spare after Kor Phaeron’s ambush, drawn additional numbers from the first relief fleet bound for Calth after the massacre, and chased Lorgar directly through the XIII Legion’s own astropathic choirs. He was certain of it because it was exactly what he would have done in Guilliman’s place.

Perhaps other psykers could hear the Word Bearers’ mythical ‘song’. Perhaps they could sense the disruption of Lorgar’s sixth sense. Lhorke knew nothing of it, and cared even less. But Guilliman was here, and forcing them to fight. Courage and honour.

Vorias, Esca and the few Librarians still living among the XII Legion made valuable battle-brothers. They’d come together as a coterie-squad, sharing power and silent words between their linked minds, forming among themselves the very brotherhood they were denied by the rest of the Legion. He considered them War Hounds rather than World Eaters – that piece of positive prejudice offered on account of them lacking the Butcher’s Nails.

When the fighting allowed it, Lhorke would turn his attention to the primarchs, seeing their furious three-way battle playing out atop a mound of the dead. Even there, Guilliman had been holding his own against both of them, until Lorgar ceased his attack and started his achingly resonant chant. Angron and Roboute still fought, with the Lord of the Ultramarines giving ground each time Angron landed a blow. For all Lhorke’s disgust, he had to grant a shade of respect to his gene-sire. Guilliman had no hope against Angron. The former Legion Master wasn’t sure anyone would have had.

Despite his emotion-dulled existence in a walking coffin of cold amniotic fluid, the temptation to join that fight burned fierce in whatever withered husk remained of Lhorke’s heart. Several times, he found himself on the edge of doing it. How easy it would be to tear himself from this battle, with all the memories it dredged up of the Night of the Wolf, and pit his ironform against the genetic divinity of the warring primarchs.

What stopped him wasn’t the pull of good tactical sense, or fear of being destroyed. No, what stopped him was that of the two duelling primarchs; he wasn’t sure which one he’d really aid once he took that fateful first step closer.

Angron plunged his chainsword up under Lord Guilliman’s breastplate – a shallow stab, but a telling one. The Ultramarine crushed the impaling sword in one fist and staggered back, truly bleeding now.

Lorgar’s alien chanting continued unabated. Despite the tepid dawn, the sky was slowly growing darker.

+Something’s wrong,+ said Vorias’s voice in the Dreadnought’s mind. +Lorgar is dealing in power beyond mortal tolerance. Legion Master, if we call, will you stand with us?+

+Master? Do you feel that?+

+I’d feel that even were I back on Terra,+ Vorias answered over their telepathic bond. Psychic fire was streaming from Esca’s axes, the energy of his soul manifest as flame. Each chop that crunched home into cobalt-blue armour set the ceramite aflame, incinerating its way through any open wounds to boil the blood in his enemies’ veins.

+It’s Lorgar.+ Esca thundered a boot into another Ultramarine’s chest, hurling the legionary back into his brethren. +The power’s coming from Lorgar.+

Vorias fought with staff and blade, spinning both in arcs of lightning-wrapped metal.

+No. The power is coming from the warp. Lorgar is bringing it through.+ A bolt shell took the Lectio Primus in the back of the leg, driving him down to one knee. Vorias’s cry of pain was a silent sigh, pulsed across the link. Esca and another Codicier, Damarkien, fought their way to their wounded lord and mentor, fighting to protect him as he rose.

Esca risked a glance to the sky. The clouds themselves were lost in a slow swirl, darkening to form the un-colours seen only in the warp. With no place on this side of reality, they manifested as a hundred impossible shades of black, each one swarming with the thrashing suggestions of trapped, shrieking souls.

+What is he doing?+ Esca asked. +What’s happening?+

+I cannot breach Lorgar’s barrier of will,+ Vorias sent to them. +His strength is immense.+

Esca reached out with his senses. The moment he drew near the Bearer of the Word, a hurricane’s force repelled him back.

+The Communion,+ he said.

+We’ll die,+ Ralakas whipped the thought back. +There are hundreds of our Legion here, and not one of them will defend us while we leave our bodies prone.+

Esca wouldn’t be swayed. +The Communion could break through,+ he insisted.

Vorias’s face, aged but strong, was lined by effort. ‘Perhaps,’ he admitted aloud.

That was the moment the sky tore open. Stormclouds formed from the ghosts of a hundred murdered worlds began to rain blood on the dead city below.

Lorgar lifted his head to face the bleeding, weeping sky. The sanguine rain washed over him, warming his skin, filling his mouth. He didn’t stop chanting, speaking the true names of countless Neverborn in a breathless stream, demanding that they devote their energies to his will.

So much power. Power defying description, defying comprehension. Reality mangling itself to his desire, the power wielded as easily as opening one’s eyes, or lifting a hand. This was the game of the Four gods. They dealt with power on this scale each second of their existences, but they lacked the corporeal presence to carry out their designs in the material realm. Metaphysics was an unkind master, even to the Powers Behind All.

A beam of screaming sunlight lanced from the tortured heavens, casting its poisoned luminescence across Angron and Guilliman. Shadows lengthened beneath every warrior, beneath every building and tank, twisting into the flickering images of writhing, reaching human silhouettes. The screaming came from everywhere: every shadow-soul across the city was wailing in the rain of blood. They danced like smoke and fire, crawling and cavorting in their hunger to reach the Eater of Worlds.

The crescendo of the warp’s song, played through an instrument of perfect, depthless fury. No purer emotion than rage. Angron himself had said those words. Once the pain had passed, perhaps he’d even agree with them once again.

Angron himself still fought Guilliman, standing above the kneeling Ultramarine. Had he even noticed the storm of blood streaming from the sky in a red torrent? Sparks sprayed from Roboute’s raised gauntlets as he struggled to ward off blow after blow. He was beaten. He was down. Wounds painted him, a palette of proud defeat. Even now, his warriors were fighting to retrieve him. With the scarring across his armour and the sense of pain bleeding from his mind, Lorgar reckoned his brother would be lucky ever to walk again.

Angron looked little better. Already an icon of mutilated majesty, huge rents and gashes marked his flesh from the knuckles of Guilliman’s gauntlets.

Now. It has to be now.

Lorgar focused his concentration on the triumphant form of his mutilated brother, calling for the Neverborn to answer in kind. He locked Angron’s muscles, setting fire to the synapses in his brain. He stole the chance at a killing blow, fuelling the World Eater’s rage even higher. The screaming began: a melody of murdered worlds, finally singing in the material realm.

History repeated itself. Another primarch crawled away from Angron’s wrath – another brother who’d come into an inheritance without being cursed, without being torn from his roots and left to mourn what might have been. There was no pleasure in beating them. The rage never faded. It only deepened, turned rancid by bitterness. The hoped-for serenity of battle fled from him, deserting him with the hollow promises of a false lover.

Hatred offered no victory. Nothing did.

Even those he defied and destroyed… even they pitied him.

Forgive me. I tried to tell you. All of us dance to the warp’s tune. Even you, Angron.

This time, as Guilliman – rather than Russ – dragged himself clear, the World Eater staggered back himself, clawing at the ruin of his face and chest. He was tearing at his own armour and flesh, ripping it away in fistfuls, screaming a sound that no living thing should be able to make.

Flesh and bone, blood and soul, his body vibrated with the warp’s tidal rhythm. It rang through every atom – every subatomic particle – of his divinely-wrought form. Billions and billions of screaming souls.

And with their cries came the pain.

The first spasms wracked their way through Angron’s sinews, turning his blood to quicksilver, then to lava and at last to holy fire. His cries of thwarted rage were tainted by an agony beyond comprehension. His body started tearing itself apart, growing, rising. Perfecting, after a lifetime of broken torture.

Lorgar stared at his brother’s agony with guilty joy.

You were always the conduit, No one else hates the way you do, with the same depthless strength. No one else feels such pain, violated by life’s treacheries. It had to be you, in the deepest moment of rage and sorrow. There could be no other conduit.

Guilliman was escaping into his sons’ defiant phalanxes, retreating in enviable unity as they waded down the flooded roads. Lorgar saw the expression of disgusted awe on his brother’s face as the wounded Ultramarine stared at Angron atop the mound of dead sons from all three bloodlines. The XIII Legion still fired even in retreat – their shells crashed against Angron’s bared muscle-meat, staining his skinless flesh black, bursting gouts of blood into the air.

A drumbeat. The gunfire was just a drumbeat, adding to the great song’s crescendo. Bolts thudded into him, blasting viscera free in sloppy arcs. They did nothing at all. Angron had transcended corporeal pain, in the grip of heavenly torment.

Lightning struck him. Even Lorgar hadn’t expected that.

Thunder pealed, forming another part of the great song, and more bolts of lightning snapped down from the bleeding sky, igniting the World Eaters primarch, the corpses at his boots and the very earth around him. The fire burned red, formed of flickering, writhing ghosts. The lives of those lost, in exchange for his.

The blood rain fell harder, hotter now – hot enough to fog and bleach the paint from the cracked ceramite of countless warring warriors. Lorgar never ceased his chanting, naming the Names, calling upon them to obey as they’d promised. He’d given them oceans of blood and worlds aflame. Now they owed him. He’d sold trillions of lives in exchange for one. Let it never be said that Lorgar Aurelian wasn’t a loyal brother.

The inferno that had been Angron of the World Eaters raged unchecked. Doubt’s first kiss touched Lorgar in that moment; he couldn’t make out anything through the sanguine blaze. Was Angron even within that conflagration? Had the gods annihilated him, in reparation for some flaw in the great song? He reached out with his psychic sense, questing towards the bale-flame. All he could hear was the wailing of the unfairly slain – their rage, their agony. This was the song he’d composed from fire and genocide, playing now for his brother’s salvation.

He felt another presence in that moment: something inhuman and vastly more powerful than any mere psychic soul or ghost of Ultramar. This was a voice he couldn’t tune out, and for a moment of absolute ecstasy, he believed one of the Four had come to bless his efforts.

I am no god. The voice was softened by amazement, but nothing could conceal the power in its sepulchral tones. I am the Communion.

The name meant nothing to Lorgar. Aid me! he demanded of the presence.

Sadness preceded the reply. I see now. I see everything. You are killing our father.

I am saving him! Ascension! That is how worthy he is in the eyes of the Four!

Lorgar Aurelian, said the voice, we will not allow this.

And just as they’d let themselves drift from their bodies, they pulled Lorgar from his.

He was falling.

He was falling into the tides behind the veil, into the song itself. The melody was a much harsher, acidic tune on this side of reality. It washed over his flesh, burning and boiling, running into his mouth and filling his lungs. He rejected this invasion, channelling his concentration into a repelling force. It did nothing. If anything, it made the fire-water sear hotter against his body.

Lorgar raked his hands against the un-colours of the warp, forcing sense to the senselessness. Vision resolved into something a flesh and blood mind could process in a realm of the unreal.

He wasn’t falling. He was being pulled down, deep under the blackest tides. He was drowning, with his crozius in his hands.

And then, light. Something that blazed with its own inner light dived after him, chasing him down.

A World Eater.

No. A War Hound. The armour was a serene pale blue marked with white. On its shoulders reared the red dog of war: that old, abandoned symbol, consigned to the vaults of memory.

The War Hound matched the primarch in size, even without its corona of cauterising light. The two figures met as they fell together, axe against maul, the sound of psychic iron on psychic iron sending ripples through the tides of unreality.

‘You are an echo,’ Lorgar told the ghostly warrior. ‘A revenant. A nothing.’

The warrior turned in the swirling black. ‘I am the Communion.’

Their weapons met again and again, sending the same ripples out into the Sea of Souls. Each time they crashed together, the warp itself screamed in answer: faces melted out of the fire-water to deliver their shrieks, then sank back into the primal matter from whence they came.

The War Hound’s helmet was an older design, calling back to more innocent, easier days when the Imperium’s ignorance allowed its people to feel safe. The sight of it made Lorgar laugh.

‘You are a relic,’ he told the warrior.

‘Our Legion has suffered more than any other, Lorgar Aurelian.’ The low voice was a knight’s cold and righteous threat. ‘Enough. Enough. You will not corrupt our lord.’

‘I am saving him!’ Lorgar spoke through clenched teeth. He was weakening in the tides, still falling, knowing his body lay motionless back on Nuceria. He could imagine its armour and skin being inked dark by blood from the storm.

This battle was a contest of wills, perceived as the mortal mind allowed it. Their weapons clashed again. The War Hound pushed against him, but the dissipation of strength was an affliction they both had to bear. Clawed hands reached out from the turbulent water. Lorgar repelled them with a snarl and psychic shove of concentration. The War Hound suffered their assault, his whole being focused solely on Lorgar. Trails of smoking white blood streamed away from the wounds clawed in the Communion’s antique armour.

‘You tried to drown me in the warp.’ Lorgar was smiling now. ‘But I am just as strong here. I am the archpriest of these powers, little ghost.’

The War Hound sagged, its shoulders straining against the locked weapons. Weaker, weaker. A growl left its throat.

Then it struck faster than even a primarch could follow. It came apart, discorporating into the black water. Lorgar’s maul sliced the tides, all resistance gone. The War Hound reformed in Illuminarum’s wake, its hands at the Word Bearer’s throat.

The psychic manifestation of his crozius slipped from his hands, vanishing the moment it left his fingers. Lorgar wrapped his own hands around the War Hound’s neck, struggling to breathe despite neither of them needing to do so in this place. Instincts died hard.

As they fell in that killing embrace, tumbling through the tides, Lorgar looked into the War Hound’s eye lenses and saw just what he was fighting. It wasn’t one spirit beneath that helm. It was a gestalt of souls.

Another smile creased his lips, more an amused grimace than a grin.

‘Boldly done, though,’ Lorgar hissed. ‘Very clever.’

He released his grip, ramming his hand into the War Hound’s breastplate, right through and into the psychic meat beneath. The warrior tensed, stunned, its grip slackening but not falling free.

Lorgar closed his hand into a fist. Something burst within the warrior’s body.

‘Who was that?’ Lorgar shouted over the roaring sea. The War Hound’s corona of light faded, no longer throwing back the gloom with such intensity. ‘Was that you, Esca? Ralakas? No, I still sense you both in there…’

Lorgar punched his other fist home in the warrior’s chest. The corona dimmed further as he burst another sphere of searing liquid in his grip.

‘Lhorke…’ The War Hound struggled feebly, almost shaken loose by the current. More hands were clawing for him now. ‘Lhorke…’

Lorgar opened his eyes to the slick rainfall, hauling himself to his feet. The inferno still blazed – had any time passed at all? – and he still saw nothing of his brother within its blazing core. Weakness seemed to follow him back through from the warp, sinking into his flesh and binding there. He was wearier than he’d ever been in his life.

The Communion died in his mind. The primarch felt it quite literally crumble apart in some untouchable psychic diminishment, and in its place, the bolter fire began.

There was a grinding snarl of powerful iron joints, and the jagged stabs of shells bursting against his armour. Something eclipsed the shaft of spectral sunlight. Something taller than a primarch and twice as broad.

‘My Legion has suffered enough,’ boomed a mechanical vox-voice. A huge claw crashed against Lorgar’s breastplate, throwing him from his feet. ‘Now we must endure corruption as well? Was madness not enough of a curse?’

TWENTY-THREE

Destiny’s Hand
From the Fire
Blood for the Blood God

Khârn fought in the blood rain, butchering skitarii along the battlements. The fortress on Corinthian’s back was already drenched in the downpour, with blood sluicing from the gargoyles and rain gutters to fall to the city below. Looking over the edge revealed blood waterfalls streaming in cascades, as well as the packs of Audax Warhounds now moving free from their ambush. With the Imperator Titan’s bridge crew dead – Kargos swore he’d be keeping the princeps’s skull as a trophy for his tally – nothing remained bar purging the skitarii castle on the god-machine’s shoulders. After the leg-towers and the savagely outnumbered defenders on the command deck, the fighting was thickest here in the fortress. The defenders mustered from their barracks for a last stand, despite the fact they’d already lost the battle for their Titan.

Skitarii cybernetics ran the gamut of contextual usefulness and lethality. The Legio Oberon’s fleshsmiths and mechnicians had a penchant for augmenting their war-slaves’ arms with heavy rotary cannons, which gave off the powdery reek of fyceline as they chattered with the bloom of muzzle flares.

Khârn cleaved his way through them, his retinal display lighting up with damage warnings and runes marking his left knee-joint as compromised to the point of instability. Smoke trailed up from the egregious gunfire pockmarks covering most of his armour. These rotary cannons lacked penetration, but they made up for it by sheer volume of fire.

The battlements were wide, more like gantries and iron bridges than anything like a fortress from a feudal world. The bloody downpour left the metal platforms slick and treacherous.

With the last of the skitarii slain, the World Eaters went through the cowering slaves and brain-dead servitors lingering in the habitation quarters. While the Legio’s indentured servants begged and cried out as they were butchered, the cyborged slaves simply stared in slack-jawed apathy.

Lacking any more enemies, the World Eaters took to the battlements, raising their axes and yelling their triumph to the blood-red sky.

The colour of that sky was all Argel Tal could focus on. Red. Not grey. Lorgar was working his will across the city, and Erebus had been proven wrong.

Khârn dies at sunrise on a world of grey skies. In every future I’ve seen, he dies as dawn lightens the sky. And he dies with a blade in his back.

But Khârn lived. He’d not died during Nuceria’s infinitely protracted dawn, and the skies were no longer grey. There’d been no blade in the back.

Argel Tal’s armour had been left as beaten and worthless as that of the World Eaters he was with – but where theirs required maintenance and repair, his was already healing in slow, scabby regeneration. Raum had fallen quiet the very moment the last slave had wheezed his final breath. With no one to slay, the daemon coiled up in irritated respite.

He made his slow, bleeding way to the battlements, where Khârn was looking over the city. The blood-storm was filling the flooded streets, turning the invading waters red. The entire city seemed to be drowning in blood.

‘Gunships inbound,’ said the centurion. His helmet was a cracked ruin, and Khârn pulled it free, blinking in the blood rain. His pale face was a mess of bruises, in every colour it was possible for a bruise to be. ‘What’s happening?’ he asked. ‘What is this storm?’

‘Lorgar,’ Argel Tal replied. ‘This is the Ruinstorm, finally released.’

‘It’s horrific. It isn’t what I expected.’

The Word Bearer lifted his shoulder guard in a shrug. ‘It’s exactly what I expected.’

Khârn wiped his face and replaced his helm, masking his features in the grille-maw and slanted eye lenses that the Imperium was already coming to dread.

‘Erebus was wrong,’ the World Eater pointed out. ‘And I saved you seven times on the way up this beautiful war machine.’

‘Only seven? You’re still alive because I saved you at least a dozen times.’

The brothers shared a smile neither of them could see and thudded their bracers together. Once-white gunships, now stained red by the storm, came in low over the fortress and burned their engines hot to hover above the battlements. Crew ropes dropped from open hatches, and the World Eaters abandoned their towering prize to redeploy elsewhere.

Argel Tal turned to move with Khârn, but Raum stirred in a weary slither.

The Deceiver comes.

He didn’t deceive us, the Word Bearer replied. He was merely wrong.

I want to kill him. I want his blood.

He brought back Cyrene. He warned me about Khârn. I owe him.

All we owe him is pain. Cyrene is dead, her Second Breath taken for nothing. Now the Deceiver comes to speak more falsehood and ape emotions he cannot truly feel. Kill him, brother.

I cannot kill everyone in the galaxy purely for the sin of being despised. There would be no one left.

Khârn was tilting his head, staring through his helm’s eye lenses.

‘You’re speaking to the daemon, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘I can almost hear it. It makes my gums ache.’ Khârn shook his head as if dislodging an unwanted thought. ‘The Nails are biting. I can’t stay.’

Argel Tal spread his raked and bleeding wings. They rose high from his shoulder blades, chiropteran and thick-veined, rattling in the rain.

‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘I’ll rejoin my Legion and see you at the muster.’

‘So be it. Good hunting, brother.’

The centurion jumped from the battlements, catching a hanging crew rope and hauling himself up into the last gunship. As its engines flared and carried it away, Argel Tal closed his wings back against his shoulders again. He heard the bootsteps he’d known were coming.

‘You look weak, my son,’ said Erebus from behind him. Argel Tal leaned on the battlements, the blood rain washing his armour.

‘I feel weak. I spent several hours on the front lines, being stabbed and cut and shot, trying to defy your prophecy.’

Kill him, or yield control of our body, so I may kill him.

No, I have to hear this.

Erebus walked out from a tower onto the battlements to join his former pupil. His crozius was pristine, unmarked by gore, as was his armour. Argel Tal noted it with a disgusted shake of his head and looked back over the warring city, beginning to drown in blood.

‘Khârn lives,’ Erebus said. ‘That’s good, my boy. He has to live. The Powers have so much hope for the Eighth Captain, you know.’

Kill him, Argel Tal. Kill him now.

Be silent, Raum.

‘What do you mean?’ Argel Tal asked aloud. Erebus’s scholarly face, so solemn and stern, softened for a moment as he met the other Word Bearer’s gaze.

‘Khârn has been chosen.’

‘By the gods?’

‘Of course,’ Erebus replied. ‘Who else?’ He took a breath, pushing away from the battlements and pacing the wall. Argel Tal’s wings twitched and itched as Erebus walked away. He watched the Legions fighting in the city below, driving back the Ultramarines, pushing them through the streets back to their landing sites.

‘Argel Tal,’ Erebus said quietly. The inflection was strange; despite saying the name, it didn’t sound as if he was speaking to the other warrior.

‘Wh–’

KILL HIM. HE FORCED US TO FIGHT FOR THE SLAYER’S LIFE SO WE WOULD BE WEAK N–

The ritual dagger slid into Argel Tal’s spine, gentle as a lover’s touch. Raum’s furious cry trailed away, faded, and not even an echo remained.

For the first few seconds, there was nothing. When pain blossomed from the wound, it did so like something unfolding cold inside him, wrapping around his bones. He staggered, claws scraping over the metal battlements, all strength sucked from him. Claws? Hands. His hands scratched at the battlements. A legionary’s hands. A legionary’s weakness.

Raum. Raum!

There was no Raum. The daemon’s absence was a shock many times more painful than the knife.

Argel Tal’s helmet slipped clear, baring his too-human face to the downpour. He tasted the blood of countless innocents slaughtered in the Shadow Crusade. It stung his eyes, and he couldn’t summon the strength to wipe his face clean.

The knife came free with a jerk and the crunch of violated meat. It took the pain with it, flooding his muscles with a hatefully pleasant numbness.

Erebus stood patiently, watching Argel Tal collapse. In his hands he held a knife the length of his forearm, bone-handled and engraved in Colchisian runic script.

‘It was always you,’ the Chaplain said. ‘In every one of the Ten Thousand Paths, your erratic, emotional foolishness leads us to lose the war. You had one last chance to turn away from this fate, if you could just overcome the death of that worthless whore-priestess. But no. You begged me to bring her back, and in doing so proved you were as worthless as she was. You cannot be relied upon. You cannot be trusted. You cannot, for want of a better word, be controlled. And we need control if we are to win this war, my boy.’

Argel Tal coughed blood, reaching a trembling hand out to drag himself closer to his killer.

‘Don’t fight it.’ Erebus shook his head. ‘I confess I’m amazed you can move at all. No one else has been able to move after the killing stroke. What a saddening moment to discover you’re stronger than I thought.’

Argel Tal crawled another metre closer. Erebus smiled, resting a boot on the Vakrah Jal’s hand. Ceramite started to split and crack, but there was still no pain.

‘Khârn has been chosen,’ the Chaplain stated. ‘And in every future I saw, the one thing that altered his fate… was you. You, my boy, would have saved him. I am Destiny’s Hand, Argel Tal. Can you even conceive of my role and responsibility? You would break my path and change Khârn’s fate. I cannot allow it. Let him carve his destiny free of your fraternity. Immortality awaits him this way.’

Argel Tal lifted his head, speaking through clenched teeth. ‘I die,’ he breathed, ‘in the shadow of great wings. Not here. Not here.’

Erebus stepped aside. Behind him, the fortress tower was marked by the Imperial aquila, streaked with blood from the hellish storm. The two-headed eagle stared into the rain, its wings wide and proud.

‘So you do,’ Erebus agreed, and the Chaplain turned away. ‘Goodbye, my son.’

The Contemptor was relentless, reaching for him, clawing at him, driving him back. Lorgar parried every blow with Illuminarum, each cathedral-bell clang meshing with the great song. His muscles ached from the Communion’s cunning assault. Even his bones hurt from their insipid little ambush. Concentration was a poor jest.

Behind Lhorke came the coven of Librarians – their survivors at least – bolters high and force weapons raised. He could feel their weakness, their hesitation after being so cruelly torn apart as the Communion. But they still came. The fire and lightning bathing their blades flew forth in a hybrid of elemental rage. Lorgar willed a protective barrier into being, but his focus was shattered. The barrier shattered with it, leaving him open to the fire.

But it was weak. As weak as he felt, they were even weaker. The flames gusting towards him paled and dispersed, sucked into the red inferno where Angron had been. The lightning veered with it, whip-cracking away to join the conflagration. What blasted against Lorgar’s armour was a thin remnant of their rage, scorching his flesh, igniting his cloak, and met with a telekinetic wave in reply. Lorgar poured his sapped strength into it, literally shouting them from their feet with a sonic bellow.

Iluminarum came up, warding back another of Lhorke’s sweeping blows. Vorias’s wretched coven refused to face their defeat, clambering back to their feet and opening fire again. Several of their bolts struck Lhorke himself – the Contemptor didn’t even notice.

One of them took the Word Bearers primarch in the thigh, blasting his armour open to the bone. He staggered, lifting the crozius only to have it knocked from his hand by the Dreadnought’s claws. He didn’t see where it flew, only that it spun away over the surrounding bodies, hopelessly lost.

Lorgar raised his hand to hurl secret fire of his own, but his hand burst in a bolt shell detonation, exploding in fragments of meat and bone. Before the pain even took hold, he powered the other fist through Lhorke’s carapace, digging for the corpse-pilot within. The Dreadnought howled, falling back, leaving Lorgar with one remaining hand clutching a fistful of iron and wire.

He saw Esca, Vorias and the others. Haskal died the moment Lorgar turned his eyes on the warrior, and as the primarch clawed the Librarian’s soul from his skin, he sensed that Haskal had been the one to land the bolt shell that blew off his hand.

The others kept coming. They threw fire, lightning, wind… Lorgar battered it all aside, staggered but still standing.

The Ruinstorm. Angron. The great song. The Communion. The Dreadnought and the coven. He was tired enough to lie down and die. No living being had channelled so much psychic power in the history of life itself.

Another Librarian died – this one speared through the throat by a fallen sword. Lorgar lifted it telekinetically with his violated arm and hurled it home, straight and true.

He staggered again, and this time he went to his knees. The whine of gunships fighting the storm’s wind howled above him, but they were too late, too late. He couldn’t beat back Lhorke and the coven while defending against their unleashed energies.

Salvation came from the unlikeliest place.

‘My brother!’

The primarch butchered another of the advancing Librarians, repelling the warrior’s fire and forcing it to wash back over the War Hound. Despite everything, Lorgar laughed as Angron roared and came to his aid.

Khârn hit the ground running. With nowhere to land in the inferno raging across the hilltop, their gunship hovered at the bottom, letting the World Eaters leap down into the blood-flooded street.

He had no idea what was happening up there. Even so, it pulled at him, making the Nails bite deep, turning the chemicals in his brain to acid. Every step closer made the pain fade a little more. Each metre brought him closer to serenity. He would have killed anyone, even his own primarch, to banish that pain and chase that peace.

Kargos was with him, keeping pace as they half-ran, half-hauled themselves up the desecrated hill. Legionaries from across the city were streaming closer, scrambling up the hill, chasing the same promise of peace. Their primarch was calling, though they knew not how. All that mattered was flocking to his side, among the red fire and the blood rain.

They saw Lorgar, driven back and bleeding. They saw the last living members of their forgotten Librarius standing with Lhorke, ringing the wounded primarch. They saw the fire alive with the shadows of the dead.

And they saw Angron.

Every World Eater stood frozen before the fire. The reflection of a god’s son played across their eye lenses as it rose from the flames of a Hell the Emperor had sworn didn’t exist.

Even Lhorke turned to face his gene-sire.

‘My brother!’ Angron roared again. ‘Hnngh. Traitors, traitors, seeking my brother’s blood.’

‘Sire,’ the war machine rumbled, but all sense of what to say died when he saw what Angron was becoming. The Change wasn’t finished – red flame still blazed in the primarch’s flesh, and where the flames receded, they roared higher elsewhere on his abused form. Blood shook from him with every movement. Beneath the fire, Lhorke saw a sliver of what was coming to be.

The primarch’s scarred flesh was the inhuman red of bare meat, armoured in bone fused with blackened bronze. He saw impressions only: a colossal molten thing, an avatar of volcanic anger, its flesh steaming in the foul rain and its clawed boots boiling the puddles of blood littering the earth. He was still growing, still rising, his entire form rippling to the warp’s music. The great song was more than a harmony to rewrite the void; it was the tune destined to rewrite a primarch’s genetic coding while immolating his very soul. Through the fire, something purer would emerge into the material realm. Something immortal, composed wholly of rage, not subject to pain or the mortal prickings given by the Butcher’s Nails. Lorgar had composed the warp to perfection.

Lhorke never saw the metamorphosis end.

The claw that crashed against his ironform tore the Contemptor-shell apart, sending wreckage tumbling across the ground. The biological revenant that was Lhorke himself – a crippled and withered corpse – broke against the rough earth, still trailing its life support cables and milky with amniotic fluid. It gave one breath, a sudden, sharp inhalation, and moved no more. Blood filled its open mouth and washed over its wide eyes.

The primarch-beast turned to the Librarians. The creatures that had pained him for decades. The warriors that had made the Nails sing and his brain bleed just for the sin of standing near them. Now they moved against his brother, hurling their foulness at Lorgar, who crouched one-handed and wounded, down on his knees.

‘Traitors,’ the thing breathed. Its maw cracked and stretched, iron teeth lengthening into rusted sword-fangs. The Butcher’s Nails were a thrashing, dreadlocked crest, hissing and buzzing in the rain.

Each of them tasted a different doom. Vorias, eldest of all, was struck blind by his eyes bursting in their sockets. He died in a strange peace, not hearing his gene-sire at all, hearing nothing in fact except for Lorgar’s exultant chanting. He thought the Word Bearers lord was laughing – and indeed, he was right.

Several of the others died from embolisms, brain haemorrhages, and in one case, Ralakas’s skull detonated as though struck by a bolt shell, showering bone fragments and bloody-grey ooze across his last living brothers.

Those who sought to escape met the implacable forms of their armoured kindred standing vigil on the other side of the flames. Kheyan crashed headlong into a centurion, lifting his bleeding gaze to the officer’s visage.

‘Khârn…’

Hands gripped the fleeing Librarian – his throat, his wrists, his shoulder guards. Kargos and the others hurled him back through the shrieking fire. He crashed onto the corpse-mound, to lie before his primarch’s mercy. Angron’s stormcloud-shadow fell over him, but the last thing Kheyan saw was Khârn watching in silence through the flames.

Esca was the last to die. He didn’t know which of his brothers threw him back across the fire, but he picked himself up and held his broken axe at the ready. Angron towered above him – Angron, who was eating Kheyan’s corpse. An armoured torso and one arm rattled down the primarch’s monstrous gullet. He even heard the muted hiss of digestive acid doing its corrosive work, deep inside the great beast’s body.

It was the roar that hurled him from his feet. Angron’s eyes ignited in the sockets of that malforming skull, triggering a roar that shook the sky. It sent Esca crashing back to the ground, weaponless and aching from too many torn muscles for his retinal display to track in one scan.

Esca rose again, scrambling to his knees, looking up at the face of Lorgar Aurelian, Lord of the XVII Legion. Viscous lifeblood bathed the Word Bearer’s serene features.

‘You should thank me,’ Lorgar said. ‘Your whole Legion should thank me.’

Esca snarled up at the primarch, all words failing him. A shadow draped over him from behind: Angron – or whatever Angron was becoming – was drawing close.

‘Blood,’ said Lorgar, lifting his crozius, ‘for the Blood God.’

‘They’re running.’

Feyd Hallerthan had been accused of arrogance in the past, and was accordingly proud of his appearance. As he looked into a sliver of glass in his hands, he had to confess he’d never be handsome again. Not without extensive facial reconstruction.

He dropped the knife of glass, letting it smash on the deck, and stared into the hololith with his remaining eye.

‘They’re running,’ he said again, then realised there were no higher-ranking officers to speak to. The only souls still alive on the Conqueror’s ravaged bridge were thralls, menials and servitors. Lehralla was a corpse hanging by the Medusa-cables of her augmetic links. Tobin was in similar health, impaled by a fallen ceiling girder-beam pinning him to the deck, right through his chest.

Dead Ultramarines lined the deck. Dead World Eaters populated the floor alongside them, along with a number of crew Feyd almost feared to count.

A few World Eaters walked here and there, their chain-axes idling. They seemed disorientated, but with their helmets on, Feyd had no way to be sure.

He recognised one of them, crested as a captain and anointed with enemy gore. ‘Delvarus,’ he called. ‘Where’s the captain’s body?’

Delvarus crouched, lifting wreckage aside and offering his hand down. Feyd saw Lotara take the gauntlet, and she was heaved to her feet by the massive legionary. Soot marked her face, and blood had crusted darkly down one side of her face.

‘Thank you, Del,’ she said. ‘I take back everything I’ve ever said about you.’

The Triarii smiled. She never saw it beneath his helmet. Hesitantly, the captain reached a hand to the split in her skull, where her hair was matted and grimy around the gash. ‘I have a headache,’ she said. ‘Feyd, you look terrible.’

Feyd’s smile was a guilty and childish thing. ‘They’re running, captain.’

She limped her way to the hololithic table. ‘The Ultramarines never run. They engage in fighting withdrawals and tactical retreats. And in this case, they’re right to do both.’ She gestured at the Trisagion’s rune, still pulsing with healthy vigour. ‘It galls me to thank the Word Bearers for anything, but that ship is a killer.’

She turned her gaze back to the retreating runes of the Ultramarines survivors. ‘They almost had us, though. Engines?’

‘Dead, ma’am.’

‘Weapons?’

‘Dead.’

‘Navigation?’

‘Dead.’

Lotara snorted. ‘Lucky for us they’re running, then.’

‘Agreed, ma’am.’

She turned to the oculus, which was marred by several vicious, smoking bolt shell holes, like craters in the reinforced glass. Nuceria’s image wavered, flawed by visual corruption, but the red tempest above Meahor was visible from orbit.

‘What am I looking at?’ she asked anyone near enough to hear.

‘No idea, ma’am,’ Feyd replied.

Lotara kept staring, and finally cleared her throat. She spoke in a calm, clear voice, as if nothing untoward had happened recently, or indeed ever before.

‘Someone get me a link to the surface,’ she said. ‘I need to speak with Angron.’

EPILOGUE

I

‘What have you done?’

It didn’t matter how softly Khârn asked the question, anger was still the emotion that drove it. A cold anger though, rather than the heat of rage. This wasn’t born of the Nails. It was much more personal.

Lorgar’s newly-claimed reflection chamber aboard the Trisagion was a humble space of bare iron and naked steel, untouched as yet by the personal touches of a soul at home. Khârn knew that in time it would become another library-temple, housing whatever scrolls and tomes the primarch chose to devote himself to. For now, its emptiness made it much less inviting, yet strangely more tolerable. The chamber had no windows, no portals looking out into the warp. Khârn couldn’t tell if that change was significant or not. The primarch was mercurial; guessing his moods and methods was a trial at the best of times.

Lorgar was robed as he usually was when away from battle. He worked at a writing desk, the scratching of his quill a continuous whisper.

‘I did what needed to be done, Khârn.’

The former equerry stepped forwards. ‘There’s a… a daemon shackled in the Conqueror’s hold.’

Lorgar still didn’t look up. ‘It is Angron. Nothing more, nothing less.’

‘Nothing more?’ Disbelief made him bold. ‘It butchered hundreds of my men before you bound it. It does nothing more than roar down there in the dark, breeding shipquakes. Lotara wants to jettison it into space – several decks around it have turned to human flesh, Lord Aurelian. The walls have started shrieking at us with moving mouths. Our water supplies are turning to blood as soon as they’re reprocessed. Whatever is down there is not “Angron and nothing more”. What did you do?’

‘Go down there.’ Lorgar still wrote; scratch-scratch went the quill. ‘See for yourself.’

‘What did you do? Answer me.’

Lorgar raised his head with threatening slowness. His eyes blazed with warp light. Looking into them was like staring into the Sea of Souls itself.

‘I saved him, Khârn. It was the only way. I alone sought to save him from the Nails that were killing him by degrees. I alone looked into the ways to free him from an existence of unrivalled agony. And I alone acted to save him.’

‘But…’

Lorgar’s glare silenced him. ‘Go down there and see for yourself. Angron is the future, our future. Humanity’s future. Immortal strength, and an eternity to learn the universe’s secret metaphysics. He didn’t die, Khârn. He ascended.’

‘But he’s trapped.’

‘For all our safety,’ Lorgar agreed. ‘Ultramar is blighted by the Ruinstorm, cut off from the Imperium. But I know the way back through the fire. We will gather our fleets spread across the Five Hundred Worlds, then we shall rejoin Horus. Has Vel-Kheredar finished forging the blade?’

‘He has.’

‘Is it all I asked?’ Lorgar asked calmly.

‘Its blade is black. It burns with god-runes.’

‘Bring it to me, Khârn. I will deliver it to Angron, just as I will release him when the time is right.’

‘When will that be?’

‘Can’t you guess? When we next reach a world that must bleed like never before.’ He smiled, though it was a sad thing to see. ‘Is that so different from how Angron has lived his life these last decades? Summoned only for slaughter?’

Khârn had no answer to that. No sense arguing with the truth.

‘Is he in pain?’

‘Yes.’ The primarch went back to his writing. ‘But nothing compared to what has wracked him since his gestation pod first crashed on Nuceria, and the Desh’eans hammered the Nails into his skull.’

Another silence stretched out between them. Khârn broke it by bowing; his armour joints snarled at the movement.

‘I’ll see with my own eyes, then.’ He turned to take his leave, but stopped when Lorgar said his name once more.

‘Khârn.’

The captain glanced back, expecting Lorgar to be occupied with his parchment. Instead, the primarch’s gaze was raw and pained; a dignified, restrained fury.

‘Lord?’

‘Would you like to know,’ Lorgar asked softly, ‘who killed Argel Tal?’

II

Erebus bowed to the crowd, facing the applause of fists thudding against bare chests. The deactivated crozius in his hand was flecked with blood – first blood – and ever the dignified victor, Erebus offered a hand to help Skane up from the deck. The sergeant took the proferred hand, gripping it with his new augmetic limb.

‘A fine bout,’ the First Chaplain said.

The World Eater still hadn’t had his throat mechanics repaired, leaving him speechless, but he grinned and nodded in place of words, and moved back into the crowd.

Delvarus stepped forwards. So did Khârn. The crowd, on the edge of cheering at the first warrior, fell silent at the sight of the second. The captain said two words to the Triarii centurion.

‘Let me.’

Delvarus saluted and backed away.

‘First blood?’ Erebus asked.

The axe in Khârn’s hand was Gorechild, toothed by mica-dragons and once thrown from the hands of a primarch. He’d chained it to his bare wrist in imitation of the Nucerian gladiators, whose bones he’d seen and honoured mere days before at Desh’elika Ridge.

The captain was stripped to the waist, as were all the warriors present.

‘Sanguis extremis,’ Khârn said. Some of the crowd breathed in, showing their shock as the humans they once were. Others laughed or cheered. More fists beat against chests.

Erebus regarded Khârn with cold, composed eyes. Several seconds beat in silence, before the Word Bearer’s lips curled in a soft, indulgent smile.

‘Bold, Khârn. Are you s–’

Gorechild revved for the first time since its rebirth, eating air with the throaty snarl of an apex predator. That interruption was the only answer Khârn would give, and Erebus raised his crozius in reply.

‘Come then.’

Three blows. The first: Khârn smashed the maul aside with the flat of his new axe. The second: he cannoned a headbutt into Erebus’s nose, breaking cartilage with a wet crunch. The third: Gorechild tasted first blood, ripping across the Chaplain’s chest, carving a canyon of flesh over the dense subdermal armour of the warrior’s black carapace torso implant.

All of this happened in the time it took Erebus to blink. No one could move as fast as Khârn moved. No one human, and nothing mortal. The Chaplain threw himself backwards, crozius up high to guard.

Khârn walked forwards, gunning Gorechild’s trigger. The crowd was silent now. This was a Khârn they’d never seen – not even on the field of battle.

Another three blows, delivered with the same blinding speed. Erebus’s maul clang-skidded across the deck; he took a fist to the throat and a boot to the stomach, knocking him back with enough force to send him crashing onto the bloodstained iron grillework.

He looked up at Khârn from the ground and saw his death in the World Eater’s eyes. He’d never seen this before, not in any of the paths of possibility. It couldn’t be happening. It couldn’t end like this. He was Destiny’s Hand.

Khârn looked down at him, clearly allowing time for the Chaplain to recover his crozius.

‘Get up.’

Erebus rose, his mace in his hands again. He attacked this time, showing the speed and skill that had allowed him to hold his own against Lucius of the Emperor’s Children, and Loken of the old Luna Wolves. His crozius trailed killing lightning, buzzing furiously as it thrummed through empty air again and again. Khârn weaved aside from every blow, quicker than a blink, surely quicker than muscles could ever allow.

Their weapons crashed together. Khârn had parried the last blow. Erebus expected accusation in the World Eater’s eyes, or surely anger. He saw neither. Worse, he saw a bored indulgence. The captain even sighed.

Three more blows. Erebus was on the deck before he knew how. Pain flared across his chest, hot and urgent, matching the thick throb of his smashed face. He reached to touch the wound with a hand that was no longer there.

His hand. His hand was on the deck, several metres away. Blood leaked from the chewed veins nestled in the meat of his severed limb. Turning unbelieving eyes downwards, he saw where his arm now ended at the wrist.

‘Going to need an augmetic for that,’ Kargos said from the crowd. Several warriors laughed, but few with any real relish. They were too fascinated by what was unfolding.

Erebus looked up at Khârn again. He was just waiting.

‘Get up.’

The Chaplain rose. Khârn didn’t wait this time – the blows were bloody blurs of whining motors and tearing chain-teeth. Pain bloomed across Erebus’s body, and he was face-down on the deck again before he’d managed to fully rise from the last time. Even without his armour’s pain nullifiers and chemical stimulants, Erebus suppressed the pain by whisper-chanting a sacred mandala. Khârn interrupted it.

‘Get up.’

Erebus actually tried, but he froze when he felt Gorechild’s teeth against his spine. The idling chain-blade was purring and breathing out its promethium fuel-stink, the axe’s stilled teeth kissing Erebus’s vertebrae.

Never, not even in fragmentary glimpses, had he foreseen this duel.

It couldn’t end like this. He couldn’t die here. There was so much to do. Signus Prime. Terra herself. In all the Ten Thousand Futures, Erebus had seen himself fighting the Long War to the very last.

The very same second Erebus reached for the ritual knife at his belt with his remaining hand, Khârn pulled the chain-axe’s trigger.

There should have been a scream. Everyone expected it. Every warrior present waited to hear the First Chaplain of the Word Bearers shriek as Gorechild bit into his flesh. But there was nothing beyond the rotating whine of an axe blade chewing empty air.

No one seemed surprised at the display of Word Bearers sorcery. Even fewer were surprised at the cowardice. Khârn turned from the blood marking the deck, leaving the circle without a word.

III

An hour later, armed and armoured, Khârn stood ready once more.

‘You don’t have to do this.’

Khârn looked at Kargos by the console. ‘Yes, I do. I’ve done it before. Open up.’

The Apothecary worked the key controls and the doors swung silently outwards. Beyond them, sticky with drying blood, a set of bone steps went down into the shadows. Another roar, wordless and deep-throated, came echoing up from the gloom.

Khârn walked forwards and let the darkness fold over him as Kargos swung the doors closed behind him. The first thing he heard was the dead whispering in the dark. The second thing was the beast’s breathing. Even his genhanced eyes couldn’t pierce the absolute lack of light. He walked slowly, drawing no weapon despite the temptation, listening to a daemon breathing in the black.

‘Khârn,’ said something unseen, from everywhere and nowhere. Whatever it was, it smelled of fresh graves and funeral pyres, and its teeth were wet.

‘Lord?’

Slow thunder answered. No, a laugh. A chuckle. ‘I am no one’s lord. I never was. Even less so now.’

Khârn swallowed, still edging through the dark. He heard the thing that had once been his gene-sire licking its maw.

‘I want something from you, Khârn.’

‘Name it.’

‘Hnnh. Take your axe. Take your brothers. Kill three hundred souls on the thrall decks.’

Khârn stared in the direction where he was sure the monster was at rest. ‘Why, sire? To what purpose?’

‘Three hundred of them. Take their skulls.’

Khârn heard the thing smile, heard the wet peeling of its fanged maw curling into a grin. Something huge, winged and wreathed in the smoke of dead souls tried to move closer to him, and strained against the rune-etched chains that bound it. He saw its eyes burning in the dark, orbs of ember-fire, the colour of boiling blood.

‘Take their skulls, Khârn. Build me a throne.’

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.

It is the doom of empires that they forget, and those that consign their victories and failures alike to oblivion are destined to repeat them forevermore. An empire should honour its history.

With the treachery of our brothers revealed and the Mark of Calth measured in the beating of loyal, legionary hearts, we gather and collate. Witnesses to the end of a world give us their accounts. Enemies are interrogated. Communiqués, datastreams, status reports – we will read them all. We will scrutinise. We will analyse. We will reach judgement, both upon others and upon ourselves. We will conclude the whole truth of those dark times, even if it takes us a thousand years.

The XIII Legion has not forgotten – nor will it ever forget – what happened at noble Calth. We fight with the weight of Ultramar’s history upon our shoulders. It is our burden. It is our honour.

– Roboute Guilliman, In Plenitudine Temporis
(In the Fullness of Time), from the General Introduction, ref:71.1

The chanting of Erebus’s lesser, human priests reached its height as he unwrapped the anathame blade from its blessed shrouding. Reverently, the Dark Apostle lifted the weapon – one hand upon the hilt, the other beneath the blade with an open palm so that his flesh would not touch its deadly edge.

Crafted from neither metal nor stone, it had characteristics of both, and was warm to the touch as though alive. This was the weapon that he had stolen from the interex, the blade that had wounded the Warmaster and turned him to the true way. It was a holy artefact, and key to a plot that spanned tens of thousands of years.

And now he must violate it.

He presented the sword to the statues of the four powers that dominated the sacellum space of the Destiny’s Hand. He called out prayers and incantations, saluting the dread lords of the warp, each in turn. A row of eight cult priests bearing censers and icons followed his every move, adding a chorus of their own voices to his supplications. They fell behind Erebus in procession as he walked solemnly to the high altar of the Octed that dominated the nave. The Dark Apostle had little time for common mortals, but these priests were among his most trusted servants.

What he was doing here was to remain secret until the allotted time. The doors were barred. His bodyguards stood watch outside.

Before the great brass and iron star had been set an anvil, specially cast and sanctified for the sole purpose of this ritual. Cowled artisans stood in readiness at either side – Guldire, chief among the Dark Apostle’s Warpsmiths, shadowed by his foremost apprentice. They would aid him in this task, directing his blows and channelling away the fell energies that might yet be unleashed.

The Warpsmiths did not flinch as Erebus pointed the terrible blade at them. He took the hilt in both hands and raised the anathame, point upwards, to his forehead. With his eyes closed and hushed prayers upon his quick lips, he placed the weapon upon the anvil – the holy weapon that had brought Horus Lupercal into the light.

The priests downed their icons and doused their torches. They brought out their athames from their sleeves. Their chanting grew deeper.

Erebus took up a rune-inscribed hammer from the apprentice Warpsmith. The head came to a brutal point, like that of a pick, and it crackled with the subdued energy of a disruption field.

The Dark Apostle gazed down at the blade for the longest moment. What he must do seemed a sacrilege, but the weapon had served its purpose.

In this form, at least.

He pinned the blade down firmly. Muttering outlawed spells torn from the minds of dead kinebrach metallurgists, he raised the hammer above his head, and brought it down hard. The hammer’s tip flared with light as it connected with the anathame’s arcane alloys. There was a mighty bang, and a terrific scream as though the weapon itself cried out in pain, and the priests sank their ritual athames into their own hearts.

They did this willingly. What Erebus had asked of them was a great honour, the first anointing of a new weapon against the False Emperor. Their blood flowed onto the stone flags as they fell, their souls running joyously into the warp as their hymnal ceased in choking death rattles. He prayed that their weak spirits would prove sufficient offering.

The sword writhed in his hand; although his eyes did not see it move, he felt it shiver and squirm, as muscular and deadly as a snake.

He called out in the black speech of the kinebrach and felt the air shift under the fell burden of the sounds. He brought the hammer down again, and again.

A crack like thunder. A flash of greenish light.

Erebus reeled back, the hammer spinning from his hand to land in the pooling blood upon the deck. He nearly went down himself, pushed away by the portion of the weapon’s holy might that he had released. His muscled arm was numb to the shoulder, his hand sparkling with electric agony.

He approached the anvil again cautiously. The sword rang with a fading note. Next to it lay a finger-length sliver of the blade’s weird alloys. The anathame shimmered with heat haze; it was diminished, yet whole. Erebus felt awe at this god-slayer, this tool of the end times.

He smiled with satisfaction and looked to his Warpsmiths.

‘Take the shard. Place it in the medium.’

Guldire bowed his hooded head and deftly plucked the sliver from the anvil with a pair of black iron tongs. It hissed and spat in the chill air. He produced a small jar of blood-grown ruby, filled with a liquid of an even darker red, in which the shard of metal went. The Warpsmith screwed down the vessel’s lid, sealing it with black wax and pressed symbols.

Erebus rubbed at his shoulder. He ignored his pain. Pain was the least of what would test him in the months and years to come. He picked up the hammer, grasped the hilt of the anathame, and spoke once more the spells of making and unmaking.

The hammer fell.

Seven more times did Erebus break the dark blade; seven more slivers he commended to his Warpsmiths, until finally he was done. The sword’s anguish faded.

The sacellum was silent at last. His ears rang. He lifted his head with effort. Sweat dripped from his face; he was febrile, his arms leaden.

‘It is done,’ he said weakly, though there was much yet to do. The air was tainted – the sacellum practically thrummed with outrage, its animus offended by Erebus’s sacrilege. The universe itself knew that what he had done was an affront to the natural order, and that he had done it for his own gain.

He revelled in reality’s discomfiture. He was a Dark Apostle, First Chaplain and bearer of the true faith. His was a higher purpose – the will of the gods themselves guided his hand.

Give me strength now, he thought, to embrace my destiny. Already events were in motion, and the days of the XIII Legion were numbered. He had seen the need to embroider his own goals into Lorgar’s plans. The fracturing of the anathame was but the first step down a longer path.

His gaze came to rest upon the diminished blade. He would dispose of it, conveying it onwards as he had originally been instructed.

‘Take the shards to the forge,’ he ordered the Warpsmiths. ‘Send for me when they are ready.’

Within his sanctuary, Quor Vondar, Chief Librarian- sorcerer of the Word Bearers, let his psychic senses unfurl. The crude matter of realspace dropped away, and he gloried in the revealed majesty of the warp.

Had there been anyone else with him in the small chamber, they would have seen a slow smile spread across his face.

Here was power, the very realm of the gods. Its tides caressed him, the warmth of its living energies invigorating his body and mind. Fearsome entities stalked the depths, but he paid them no heed; he was the anointed of the Legion, and his faith in the revealed powers of the universe was his shield. These fleshless daemons that swam the sea of souls were lesser servants – they had no souls of their own. They were not so mighty as he.

Chosen of the gods.

The weakest among the warp’s denizens bowed to him and sought his favour. They whispered their fealty, they promised great power and insight if only he would set them free. Open your mind! they sang. Let us in! Let us in!

Quor Vondar did not open his mind. His was not the way of possession, for he was above such crude displays of devotion. Let the Gal Vorbak court the bottom-feeders – he could wield the energies of the warp directly. He could lay waste to his enemies with but a thought. He could channel the might of the gods into a glorious blast of ruin. No, he had no need of what the daemons promised, and he dismissed them with contempt. Their minds slunk back, whimpering, into the undifferentiated roil of the empyrean.

Oh, how wrong the Emperor was to deny this to his servants. How very, very wrong. The so-called Master of Mankind was a liar, a false prophet, keeping the true nature of power hidden. A paper god, not worthy of the Word Bearers’ worship. He had denied their veneration, Quor Vondar suspected, simply to make them crave his blessing more, forcing the faithful to kneel in the dust of Monarchia. Now the XVII Legion understood, and the power the Emperor sought to keep for himself was theirs instead.

Fool. He would die. So sure of his sons’ mewling obedience, he was likely still ignorant of the war, gathering momentum after Horus’s masterful victories in the Isstvan system. He was blissfully ignorant, but soon he would pay for his selfishness.

Something disturbed Quor Vondar’s meditation. He sensed no unusual movement in the empyrean, and no warnings were cried by his bound sentinels, but there was… something.

Muttering cantrips of warding to guard his exit from the warp, he slipped his mind from its unholy communion and opened his eyes.

He was alone in the sanctuary. The uncanny beings that stood watch over his meditating form remained quiet.

An unexpected draft caused the candles upon his prayer shrine to flicker. He stood, his brocaded robes whispering, and… there, again. He turned in a circle as he followed the movement, a wave of yellow flames guttering atop those black waxen pillars. Twice it went about his chamber, light glittering insolently off the statuary as if daring him to guess its cause. Still his guardians raised no alarm.

Now Quor Vondar’s courage shrivelled. He suppressed the urge to cry out, turning the unborn words to a snarl of anger. He crept through the shadowy space, pausing to genuflect before the great Octed. That seemed to calm the disturbance. The movement ceased.

What could this betoken? Perhaps it was a message, a test from the gods. He liked to think himself so important. Still perplexed, he turned back to the centre of the room.

He gasped, his hand catching on his robes as it sought the handle of his dagger.

In the middle of the room was a knife, plunged into the centre of his warding circle – the very spot where he had been seated until moments ago.

Quor Vondar hesitated as he approached it. An aura of malice spilled from its black blade. The knife appeared to be of a dark metal, knapped like flint, and yet it had been plunged into the plasteel plates of the deck without breaking. Dark red ribbons inscribed with holy texts trailed from its leather-bound handle.

Pinned to the floor by its point was a message, handwritten upon rich parchment.

Quor Vondar recognised the penmanship. It was that of the Dark Apostle Erebus, adviser of Horus, absent from the Word Bearers fleet these past months. Where he had gone, none knew.

Quor Vondar mastered his unease, grasped the hilt of the knife and drew it easily from the deck. The weapon seemed to tingle in his hand. He plucked the message from the blade and began to read.

He frowned and crushed the parchment into a ball.

‘Let him summon me,’ the Librarian-sorcerer muttered. ‘We shall see who is the master.’

Phael Rabor started from his slumber, coming to full wakefulness in less than a heartbeat. Something was amiss. He leapt up from his pallet. He stood unclothed, senses straining, muscles tense and ready for combat.

His cell was dark. The ship’s engines vibrated almost imperceptibly through the metal beneath his bare feet as it pushed its way through the warp. The drone of machinery within the hull troubled the edges of his augmented hearing, and the scent of unwashed bodies – both legionary and mortal serf – lingered in the corridor outside.

There was no one there now, yet his feeling of disquiet persisted, a sense of reality off-kilter. Rabor made for the switch by his pallet to activate the single ceiling mounted lumen-strip, but something gave him pause and he went to the one by the doorway instead.

Light filled the chamber, and he found his eye drawn to the other switch.

Where his hand would have passed, a knife was embedded in the wall. Pushed up the blade, near to the hilt, was a message.

He snarled.

‘Erebus…’

Davin was as the First Chaplain remembered it, with wide plains running into the red deserts beyond. The Thunderhawk startled great herds of ungulates into stampede as it swept over the savannah.

‘Keep low,’ he ordered the pilots. ‘I do not wish to announce my presence.’

‘As you wish, Lord Erebus.’

They were far from the civilisation sheltering in the mountain valleys. Out here on the plains were only the herds and the nomads that hunted them.

He chose a hollow in the grasslands for their landing site and had them put the gunship down, before gathering his belongings and making for the lower deck. The five warriors of his bodyguard bowed before him as he descended.

The ship settled on to its landing gear and the forward ramp cranked open, letting in rays of dazzling sunlight. Erebus wore no battle-plate, only the rough robes of a mendicant priest. He was an apostle of the truth, and the truth demanded humility, as much as that might chafe at his usual sense of grandeur. Upon his back was a small pack of supplies, enough for a few days – this too was of simple manufacture, rough hessian stitched into the gaps where use and time had frayed it. An athame gleamed at his waist, utilitarian and unadorned. The only item of ostentation about him was the roll of rich velvet he had slung over his shoulder, but this was hidden, covered in grubby sackcloth tied with a cord.

‘You are to return to the Destiny’s Hand,’ he informed his men. ‘Shipmaster Voregar has orders to rejoin the fleet. Wait for me there.’

‘How will you return, lord?’ asked Undil. ‘Will you contact the garrison? We are far from–’

‘Do not concern yourself with that, brother-sergeant. I will return before we reach Ultramar.’

The sergeant paused, uncertain. He bowed again. ‘As you say, my lord.’

Erebus stepped out onto the dry grass of the savannah. He trudged to a safe distance as the engines of the gunship whined up to full power. The wash of exhaust set fires in the grass.

He watched as the Thunderhawk banked, aimed its blunt prow at the heavens and rapidly ascended. The echoes of its passage rolled off across the plains, and he was alone. The sough of the wind, the crackle of burning grass and the lowing of panicked animals in the distance enveloped him.

He closed his eyes and breathed deeply. The air was hot, redolent of parched soil and animals under the smell of smoke. Here, in the Davin system, his greatest plan had been set in motion by the turning of Horus. His return was a homecoming of sorts.

The flames were spreading in the dry grass, fanned by the wind. Erebus shifted his burden upon his back, and began to walk.

The chamber was large enough to accommodate more than a hundred legionaries, and yet it struggled to contain the collected egos of the five Word Bearers who now occupied it. They were the greatest amongst the Legion’s ranks, clad in all their regalia as if for war. Their stares spoke of open distrust; some were once as close as blood-kin, but in recent times they had vied hard with one another as the face of the XVII Legion changed, and brotherhood crumbled quickly before ambition’s onslaught.

Kor Phaeron, with all his grand titles, certainly considered himself to be the head of such a gathering. His arrogance was palpable to the rest: Morpal Cxir, Phael Rabor, Foedral Fell and Hol Beloth all chafed beneath his conceit. He bestowed a smile upon them that was perilously close to a sneer as they gathered around the innermost of the room’s eight concentric tables, each taking their place at a point of the Chaos star set into the granite surface.

Kor Phaeron’s expression lost all pretence of benevolence as Quor Vondar strode into the room. His dark eyes glittered.

Vondar approached the table. ‘My brothers,’ he said, though the acknowledgment was brusque to the point of insolence. He stood by one of the three empty chairs, but did not sit. His entrance had ended what little conversation there had been.

Kor Phaeron stared at him hard. ‘Sorcerer, your power extends deep into the warp, but we expect a little more civility. You will address us correctly.’

‘I give such civility as is warranted.’

Vondar cast a black-bladed knife onto the table. The weapon skittered across the surface inscriptions, and came to a spinning halt in front of the Black Cardinal himself. ‘What is the meaning of this?’ Vondar demanded.

Kor Phaeron looked slowly from the blade to Vondar as though he were a teacher who would coax the realisation of an obvious fact from a slow pupil.

‘This is none of my doing, Master Vondar. This is the work of the Dark Apostle.’

‘Erebus does nothing without your knowledge and your collusion!’ the sorcerer snapped. ‘I am not some lowly menial to be–’

‘We are not savages!’ Kor Phaeron snarled, and smashed an armour-clad fist into the table, cracking the surface. ‘Address me correctly, sorcerer. Do me the proper courtesy, or I will do far worse to you.’

Vondar’s mouth opened. Whatever he was going to say went unsaid. ‘My lord. First Captain. Black Cardinal. Master of the Faith, I apologise,’ he said, though the words carried little sincerity.

Kor Phaeron nodded. ‘Now, brother,’ he breathed, ‘I advise you to sit. Sit!’

‘My lord.’ Vondar took his place. His comrades muttered, and eyed him as warily as they did one another.

Reclining in his chair, Kor Phaeron waved a hand dismissively. ‘Besides, you speak of older times, Chief Librarian,’ he said. ‘Now Erebus is a law unto himself. I am not his keeper. I am ignorant of the purpose of these blades, as you are. He would not tell me what he intends.’

‘My lord – you have seen him, then?’ said Hol Beloth. ‘Where has he been these last months?’

Before Kor Phaeron could answer, Vondar spoke again.

‘Blades? You speak of many blades?’

‘We all carry them, lord,’ said Phael Rabor. ‘Observe.’ He pulled out his own knife and set it upon the table with a click. One after another, the others did the same.

Foedral Fell regarded each in turn. ‘I thank my lords for allaying my fears,’ he said. ‘I too had believed that I had somehow been singled out.’ Fell gave a wry grin and rested his gauntleted hands upon the table. ‘To feel noticed by Lord Erebus is to feel as a fly noticed by the spider.’

They shared a grim laugh.

‘Well then, esteemed brothers,’ said Morpal Cxir. ‘It is all of us – all of us who were chosen to lead the assault on the XIII Legion.’ He toyed with his own blade, fascinated by it.

Rabor frowned. ‘All of us?’

Cxir nodded. ‘Such a gift. I expect it is meant as a great honour.’ His voice was level, though his gaze did not leave the edge of the knife. ‘Have you not felt the power of them? These are no mere ritual athames, but true tools of the gods.’

‘How came each of you by yours, then?’ Vondar demanded. He stared at the other blades suspiciously.

Kor Phaeron scoffed. ‘You still fear some unknown conspiracy?’ His aged, gene-forged face moved unnaturally, the skin too tight – a result of his imperfect elevation to the ranks of the Legiones Astartes. ‘My brother’s distrust does not befit one of his rank.’

Vondar glared. ‘You ask me to honour you among this company, and then offer me nothing but disrespect in return. What of courtesy now, eh? Do not speak to me so, my lord.’

‘I will speak to you howsoever I choose, Master Vondar.’

The Librarian gritted his teeth, and rose sharply from his seat. ‘What gives you the right? You, who are not truly one of us, and can never be. You are no son of Lorgar! Not as we are, nor any other brother legionary, down to even the most lowly novitiate.’

Kor Phaeron stood, and the shadows around him seemed to deepen. ‘No, you are correct in that. I cannot claim to be your brother as this… rabble can.’ His voice echoed with the thunder of eternity, and his eyes flashed with spectral warp-light. ‘I am not Lorgar’s son. I am his father. You would do well not to forget it.’

Quor Vondar sank back into his seat, though the Black Cardinal’s gaze did not waver. The scent of brimstone hung in the air.

Slowly, the tension faded.

Cxir cleared his throat. ‘My lords, please. I will answer Master Vondar’s question, for it is one that we have all no doubt considered.’

He looked to the others before continuing.

‘Mine came from nowhere. I was at table, preparing to feast with my chosen veterans. We bowed our heads to give thanks to the lifegiver Nurgle. When we raised them, there it was.’

‘Aye,’ said Fell, raising his own blade. ‘As if from the very air.’

‘But how can this be?’ asked Rabor. ‘I am not so gifted in the dark arts as many of you, but I confess that I did not believe Erebus either to be capable of such magick.’

Morpal Cxir shook his head. ‘All that which stems from the Dark Apostle must be approached with caution. He sees things which many do not, and his ways are not always those of the Seventeenth.’

‘The writing was his. The summons are his,’ said Vondar. ‘I will not be a pawn in some unrevealed scheme.’

‘You saw him enter your chambers then?’ said Kor Phaeron slyly.

Vondar shook his head.

‘Sensed him, at the least, oh great Chief of Librarians? You regale us so often with tales of your arcane might.’

Cxir raised a calming hand. He did not mock as Kor Phaeron did. ‘And your might is not to be denied, Master Vondar. But how did he gain entrance to your sanctuary without attracting your attention?’

Vondar’s face wrinkled. He was shamed, but could not say so immediately.

‘Come now, sorcerer – it is a vital part of the puzzle,’ said Kor Phaeron.

‘My lords, I am forced to admit that I saw and felt nothing. Only a draft of air at the blade’s passing. My senses and my guardians failed me.’

Kor Phaeron slapped the table and laughed. It was an unpleasant sound.

Vondar’s face flushed with anger. ‘How then, if I may ask, did the great Lord Kor Phaeron come by his gift, then?’

‘Why, Lord Erebus himself walked in through the door and presented it to me, and together we planned this merry little gathering. I am, after all, the primarch’s chosen commander of our next campaign.’

The First Captain’s implication that the rest of them were beneath Erebus’s respect was plain, and intended to be so. Quor Vondar’s fury was writ equally plainly upon his face.

‘Then what are they for?’ muttered Hol Beloth. ‘Surely you, my lord – as first among us – must know.’

‘He would not tell me for what purpose these athames are intended,’ admitted Kor Phaeron, waving away his obvious annoyance at the fact. ‘Only which worthy brethren were intended to receive them. Who am I to deny the Dark Apostle his theatrics?’

Cxir again raised his hand. ‘Let us not bicker, then, but compare them. Perhaps there is some relevance to their differences?’

‘Aye,’ said Beloth, his voice resonating with equal parts enthusiasm and wariness.

They placed the daggers’ points facing inwards. Although they were all similar – hilts bound in black leather or wire, marked with golden runes and tied with devotional ribbons – the blades were all markedly different. Crooked, or straighter. One forked. Another with waved edges. All were, however, of the same flinty black metal that pained the eyes.

‘Six daggers,’ said Fell. ‘If these are truly tools of Chaos, then there might at least be eight.’

‘Lord Erebus will surely carry the seventh,’ said Hol Beloth.

‘That still leaves one, captain,’ pointed out Rabor.

Quor Vondar frowned. ‘All of the Legion who have been chosen to command the coming assault are present, barring the Dark Apostle himself.’

‘Indeed!’ said Erebus as he strode into the chamber. The sudden sound of his voice caused Fell and Cxir to rise from their seats. ‘And it is this noble legionary who will carry the eighth.’

Another warrior walked behind him: Sergeant Kolos Undil, leader of Erebus’s cadre of bodyguards.

‘A mere sergeant?’ said Rabor angrily. ‘You disrespect us, Lord Erebus.’

Hol Beloth frowned. ‘I – unlike my brothers, it seems – do wholly appreciate the honour of these fine athame blades, Lord Erebus. But it seems to lessen the gift, to put a mere sergeant on a footing with a captain…’

Erebus took a seat at the table. ‘Gifting the faithful with such a weapon, even though he be a mere sergeant, does nothing to diminish the potency of the rest, nor the honour in carrying one.’ He gestured to the last empty space, bidding Undil sit. The sergeant took his chair with unhurried grace and looked into the eyes of his superiors without fear. ‘Undil is as faithful as any of you,’ Erebus added, taking care to nod respectfully to Kor Phaeron as he did so.

The others were guarded. Undil was a renowned warrior, as devout as his master and almost as devious.

‘I do not like this, Dark Apostle,’ said Fell, finally.

‘Nor I,’ said Cxir. ‘There is ambition enough in this room as it is. Do you seek to set us all upon one another in open combat or honour duels?’

Undil inclined his head.

Erebus laughed.

‘You are all already worthy of this honour, my lords, as is Undil.’ Erebus smiled enigmatically, the scar across his throat a pale pink mirror of it. ‘And now, my lord Kor Phaeron, shall we begin? I believe now is the time to review our strategies for the assault on Calth.’

Beloth raised his hands, exasperated. ‘Come now – we all know the plan, Dark Apostle, and our parts in it.’

‘There is more I have yet to add,’ said Erebus archly.

‘Then add it.’

‘He will, he will,’ said Kor Phaeron. ‘It is not in the nature of our First Chaplain to employ such drama with no final revelation.’

Then he turned to Erebus, and his manner became more firm.

‘He assured me that he would explain himself, and so he will.’

Akshub’s face betrayed only a flicker of apprehension when Erebus walked into the nomad camp. To her credit, she alone stood her ground as the tribesmen backed away from him, the giant who came out of the night.

The locals were wiry, repulsive creatures – devolved dregs of humanity that appeared more beast than man. Erebus despised them, even though they had proven their worth in the past.

The priestess eyed him as he approached.

‘You have found me quickly,’ she muttered. Her widely spaced, dark eyes were unreadable, the reflected flames of the campfires dancing in them.

Erebus halted. ‘You knew I had survived?’

The scar on his throat itched as he spoke. He had been waiting for this moment for a long time. He would relish it.

However, her reply robbed him of any satisfaction.

‘I foresaw your return. I have been waiting for you.’

He reined in his rising anger. Now was not the time for revenge, but he could not resist the urge to dominate her. He loomed over her in the fiery twilight. ‘You tried to kill me.’

She tilted her head and pursed her lips. Bone beads clicked in her hair. Her appearance was more barbaric than when Erebus had last seen her – in the depths of the Delphos, where she had slit his throat.

‘And yet I did not, noble warrior,’ she said. ‘I had to spill your blood for the spell to succeed. This should have been clear to you – the last act of faith.’ She took a step towards him. ‘The war has begun, as you and your masters desired.’

‘It has.’

She shrugged. ‘Then all is well. It is as I told you. Your death was necessary.’

‘It was… an unwelcome surprise. You meant to slay me.’

She was wary, but her pride masked her fear. ‘And now you seek vengeance? All I did was what was asked of me. You should take care when asking favours of the greater powers, warrior.’

‘Then I shall be more precise with my words in future, seeress,’ Erebus said. He slipped his pack from his back and set it down in the dust at his feet. ‘I am weary, for I have walked a long way to find you. Can you not offer me some refreshment? Some water, perhaps?’

‘You are not here to kill me, then?’

Erebus folded his arms. ‘If you can see the future, then you know the answer to that.’

She smiled enigmatically, an ugly expression on so debased a face. ‘What do you know of what I see, my lord? I will tell you what I see. I see that you have grown powerful. You have done well. But know this, hand-of-destiny – there will always be matters of which you will remain ignorant, no matter how great you become.’

Erebus nodded contritely.

‘You are correct, Akshub, and though it pains me to say so, it does not make it less true. That is why I have come – to learn from you. Your power humbled me in that moment, and so, in you, I recognise a greater knowledge than my own.’

He sank to his knees and bowed his head.

‘Allow me to become your acolyte.’

He reached for the roll of sackcloth and untied the cord about it. Reverently, he spread out the black velvet within, and adjusted the contents as it lay on the ground.

Glinting in the firelight were eight knives: athames of exquisite, brutal craftsmanship.

Now that surprised her. His satisfaction returned.

‘This is – was – the anathame?’ she whispered.

‘Shards knapped from the blade by my own hand, in accordance with the old rituals.’ He spread his arms wide, his palms upwards. ‘I grew them in the blood of the Neverborn and fashioned them into these fine implements – each alike, but no two the same.’

She looked up, her expression guarded. ‘How did you learn this?’

‘The forging was simple, because the gods demanded it should be so. You of all people, mighty Akshub, should know that their will cannot be defied.’

She wrinkled her nose.

‘Their will? Your will, I think. And now you want me to reward you for this sacrilege?’ The bones in her hair rattled as she shook her head. ‘No. Never.’

‘The gods willed it, seeress.’

She stared at him, and let out a long sigh. She scratched at her scalp with a ragged fingernail, and sat down with much grumbling. Her limbs had stiffened since their last meeting. ‘Maybe, maybe,’ she muttered. ‘What would you have from me?’

He prostrated himself before her once more. ‘Help me. Help me to win the war and bring the light of Chaos to every corner of the galaxy. Mighty Akshub, I beseech you, teach me the way to the paths between worlds.’

Even as the words left his lips, he smiled into the dirt beneath his face.

Akshub spent the night in communion with her patron spirits. Her tent she heated to almost unbearable levels, piling the fire high with dung cake. She sealed the space tightly – door and window flaps, and the opening at the peak that would normally let out the smoke. The place was filled with a choking reek long before she began casting her herbs and powders into the flames and inhaling the thick vapours.

Erebus watched the old witch perform her magic, his eyes streaming. He strove to stay vigilant, to learn what he could, but her chanting invaded every corner of his mind and led him to places he could not later recall.

He did not sleep. Of that he was sure.

Suddenly, it was light and the fire was out. Erebus blinked. The door flap had been opened behind him. Outside, the dirt was scuffed, with various belongings strewn about. The tribesmen had fled, although how long ago was impossible to tell.

Akshub jabbed him hard in the shoulder with her finger.

‘Very well, noble warrior. We go. I will teach you what you desire. The gods will it.’ She glanced at the velvet roll containing the eight athames, before ducking out of the tent.

She burned down the remains of the camp, then led Erebus across the savannah for eight days and nights. During the hours of darkness, when the great, sickly moon of Davin hung heavy in the sky, she told him more of the gods’ own realms. She took him into trances, guiding his mind into the fringes of the empyrean, showing him the secret ways by which a mind might pass beyond.

‘We are servants of the gods, and so we go more easily,’ she said. ‘But they are capricious, and there are many dark things of lower consequence that dwell within that ocean and hunger for our soul-fire. You must be wary at all times. Trust nothing, think nothing. Feel nothing. All you can imagine can destroy you.’

‘Then what protects us?’ he asked. ‘Why was I not devoured when you sent me that way before?’

She looked away, into the mauve darkness of Davin’s night sky.

‘You think perhaps your pretty inks? Your special words? Or do you think yourself favoured, “hand-of-destiny”?’ She turned back to him, almost angry. ‘No, none of these things, Lord Erebus. Not one will protect you. We are protected because we do the work of the gods, and because of our devotion. Our ambition, our will, our determination. These things are pleasing to them. That is why you passed freely before.’

‘Will I be able to do so again?’

She did not speak, but prodded idly at the dirt with a stiff stalk of grass. She glanced again at the roll containing the knives.

‘I know what you and the golden one intend to do. I have foreseen that you will attempt to call down the Ruinstorm upon the galaxy and stir the oceans of time into a tempest. This is why you are here – not only to pass the veil that divides. You will gather your ships about you and sail unhindered whilst others founder. That is what you seek to learn.’ She sniffed, and muttered to herself. ‘Mighty sorcery indeed.’

He did not deny it. ‘Will I succeed?’

Her grass stalk scratched the dust, writing things only she could see.

‘We shall see,’ she said abruptly. ‘We shall see.’

By day they walked, heading for a range of black mountains in the distance. They saw no other living soul as they went. Erebus thought back to the last time he had set foot upon the planet’s surface.

‘The plains and settlements are almost empty,’ he observed. ‘But of course – the exodus has already begun, has it not?’ With a smug grin, he directed his words at the priestess’s back as she walked. ‘Tell me, why did you not join them? Why did you not take your tribe into the stars, like so many of the other priests?’

Akshub did not respond.

The eight legionaries talked at length of the plans for the coming battle: the ambush of Guilliman’s hated Ultramarines that would open wide the way to Terra. Their defeat would be a blow to the morale of the so-called loyalists – the realm of Ultramar that Guilliman ruled was a model of what the Emperor said he had always intended for the Imperium.

Lies, all of it, thought Erebus. The Emperor sought only his own aggrandisement, and would abandon mankind to rot. Had he not hidden himself away for millennia? Mankind would fall as the eldar had fallen, its potential unrealised, all because of the Emperor’s desire for apotheosis. This had been revealed to him long, long ago.

Talk of ambush, of scrapcode, of deceit and murder washed over him. They all knew the strategy back to front. It had been almost a year since Lorgar had first tasked him and the others with the destruction of the XIII Legion, and Kor Phaeron’s plans had been long in the making. He let the Black Cardinal talk, as he so liked to do. So sure of himself, this half-man – so sure of his adopted son’s affection for him. He was prideful at his command of the attack.

But Erebus knew that a thorn of irritation dug at Kor Phaeron too: his own refusal, until now, to reveal the purpose of these particular athames. This pleased the Dark Apostle. He and Kor Phaeron, once close conspirators, were more often at loggerheads of late.

He watched the others. Quor Vondar, swollen with confidence. The embittered Foedral Fell, angered by duties he deemed unbefitting of his station. Hol Beloth, thirsting for power. Murderous Rabor, cautious Cxir. All were wrapped up in their own concerns in some way, but only Morpal Cxir looked genuinely troubled. The attack was essential to the winning of the greatest war, but it would be costly, no matter that surprise and fear would be on their side.

As Erebus looked around the circle of Space Marines, arguing and manoeuvring for whatever small glories were to be had, he wondered – and not for the first time – if Lorgar had meant leadership in this battle to be an honour. This campaign was crucial, but it would also prove bloody. Not all of them would survive. Perhaps Cxir, always glancing at his blade, was also beginning to see the truth of it.

No matter. Erebus would complete his part in the ritual. The great spell had been prepared, and the rest of the Legion was already making its way across Ultramar. He had the place for the summoning marked. His acolytes were gathered, and the myriad names of the daemons he would call forth were committed to his memory.

All was ready.

Cxir looked up at him, wordlessly. Erebus nodded.

In the ruins of an old temple in the foothills tended by grim-faced sentinels, Akshub began to teach him the way to open the skin of reality.

Erebus’s first attempts were clumsy and humiliating. He would pass Akshub’s knife through the air as instructed, only rarely causing the tear he required, and then it would be too small or too short-lived. Many temple slaves were violated and sacrificed before he had mastered even this first part of the ritual.

‘To move one’s mind into the empyrean is one thing, warrior, but to go bodily into that place is another.’ She rapped the back of his head for effect. ‘You must concentrate. Learn! Watch!’

She took back her knife. She muttered her words and slid it along an angle that earthly dimensions could not describe. A crack of light split the air.

With a feral smile, Akshub disappeared.

Erebus noted again that she needed no sacrifice to open the way and, for a moment, his resolve wavered.

Patience, he told himself.

She returned as she always did, bringing with her yet another entranced victim for Erebus to bleed for the glory of the gods – then he would try again.

At night Akshub kept him awake, forcing him to meditate to clear his mind and safeguard his soul. She armoured his spirit with incantations, but the lack of sleep began to take its toll, the genetic gifts of the Legiones Astartes notwithstanding.

The pile of glassy-eyed slave heads that she was making on the far side of the temple – the mark for his re-entry into the material realm – grew steadily.

Then, on the sixty-fourth day, he succeeded.

He made the pass with the knife, weary beyond telling. He was drained by the endless repetition of the spell, annoyed to breaking point by Akshub’s imprecations and insults. He felt dull inside, the words tumbling from his lips without conscious thought.

‘Yes! Yes!’ the priestess screeched. ‘The way, it is open! Now go. Go. Shield your mind. Remember all I have told you.’

He lifted his eyes and stepped through without hesitation.

What did he feel? Tumbling. Things plucking at him. Great, unwavering power. To see into the warp with one’s mind was one thing, but to be physically in it…

He could never have put it into words. Few could, for to enter that realm was death to any soul. And yet…

He felt where he should exit with senses that he did not know he possessed. He tumbled to the ground only a couple of metres short of the pile of mouldering heads.

Akshub sat down beside him as he lay, heaving. She looked him up and down, then stretched out her hand and closed her eyes. She spoke a spell of divination under her breath. Her mind probed at his, before her inhuman eyes snapped open again.

‘It is you. Nothing rides your body.’

Erebus pulled himself from the floor, exhausted.

‘Now rest,’ Akshub said, with the slightest hint of pride in her voice. ‘Tomorrow you shall do it again.’

His trips grew longer. First outside the ruins, then onto the plains, then later into the settlements further away. Erebus stalked the dusty streets by night. He was not out of place in the largest settlements, for the Word Bearers had a presence here, although when he caught sight of his legionary brothers he would duck quickly out of view. He struggled to maintain his composure; such was his sense of triumph that he would gladly shout it to the heavens.

He started to bring his own victims back to their lair. The place became foetid, buzzing with blowflies and rank with the stench of old blood. For the shorter trips, however, he no longer needed to kill.

He plotted longer and longer journeys – at first only in short steps, until he could circle the whole planet in a single night.

Akshub’s short-lived pride in her teaching grew into wariness as his competency increased. She kept her distance, and became almost entirely passive. She barely spoke to him, spending long periods seemingly in a trance, but did nothing to disrupt his learning.

Then he dared the moon. He stood in its daylit swamps, gazing up in amazement at Davin’s night side where he had been only seconds before.

No matter how far he went, the time he felt within the warp varied little. The same sensations of power and fear. The struggle to keep his mind blank of all but his destination. The tumble from one realm to the other. He lacked Akshub’s elegance, but he knew that he could go farther than she. He had grown more powerful than her, and they both knew it.

She ceased to guide him at all. She stopped eating. Erebus guessed that she was preparing herself for the end. He was angered by that, but still she did not leave the temple.

He set himself one final test.

He emerged into his quarters aboard the Destiny’s Hand with a clatter, spat from the warp with force. He slammed into his iron lectern, scattering books, manuscripts and data-slates onto the floor.

Laughing, he fell back into them. Surrounded by a jumble of arcane knowledge, he laughed long and loud.

He had pinpointed a ship, moving through the warp at speed, without any beacon or homing signal. He had arrived within his locked and barred sanctum, and no one had detected him in any way.

‘I truly am the Hand of Destiny,’ he murmured to himself.

He left again before he was discovered, back to the ruined temple on the other side of Ultima Segmentum.

Now it was time for that old witch to die.

‘So sure have you become, Lord Kor Phaeron, that you think yourself worthy of the very secrets of the gods themselves?’ said Erebus.

‘I am foremost among the servants of the gods!’ insisted Kor Phaeron. ‘I followed them of old. I demand to know their purpose. They do not deny me, Apostle, and yet you do. You promised to reveal the purpose of these athames. Do so. I command it.’

Erebus scowled. The old man disappointed him.

‘So be it, my lord. Like the warp-flasks, they are gifts of the gods. They possess the power to shield the wielder from harm, or to aid him in the working of great sorceries. Know, however, that these things are dependent on the ability of he who carries them.’

‘That is worse than cryptic, my lord,’ offered Undil with a knowing grin.

Foedral Fell laughed.

Erebus shrugged. ‘I speak words of truth to the deaf, then. These athames are not merely ritual tokens, but tools of enlightenment. A wound from them can turn the mightiest hero to our cause, opening his eyes to the majesty of Chaos, and the perfidy of the Emperor.’

‘I sense no such power beyond the gift of death,’ muttered Quor Vondar, holding his blade close to his closed eyes. ‘Though there is an echo of something…’ A frown creased his brow, as though he were straining to listen.

‘As I said, Master Vondar,’ said Erebus coldly, ‘it would depend upon the abilities of those that carry them. One might use it for whatever purpose they set their mind to.’

Kor Phaeron seemed to regard his blade in a new light. ‘You say that they are tools of enlightenment?’ he said, his eyes gleaming. ‘Enlightenment, or corruption?’

‘Of conversion, my lord. Amongst other things.’

‘And doubtless you will not tell us what those things are?’ said Cxir.

‘The gods will not spoon-feed you power, my lords, and nor will I. It must be learned and seized. Learn as I have, or fall by the wayside in the months and years to come. The choice is yours – I have simply given you a focus for your future endeavours, in the hope that you might…’ His words trailed away, and he cast his eyes downwards. ‘Well, there you have it. I see a touch of greatness in each of you.’

‘Of course,’ said Fell. ‘But why? Tell us, or we will not take your blades, no matter what wonders you promise. You surely do not expect us to follow your whispers so blindly?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘Then for what reason do you hand us these athames?’

Erebus smiled widely. He restrained himself for a moment, savouring the pent-up irritation of the others.

Rabor slammed his blade down flatly upon the table, and stood.

‘Destiny,’ Erebus said eventually, and a delicious shiver passed up his spine at the sound of it.

Akshub was waiting for him when he returned. She watched him as he approached.

‘I have learned all I can from you, priestess,’ Erebus said, casting off his rough robe.

‘That is so.’

‘Only one more task remains to me, here.’

‘I have foreseen it,’ she agreed.

She did not resist as he knelt and pinned her to the floor in the centre of the temple with seven of the athames, their unnatural blades sinking into the stone as hot knives might sink into ice. She cried out as he repeated the ritual that he had seen her perform upon the Davinite priest the day she had sent Erebus to meet the Warmaster.

She did not plead with him, not even as he peeled back her withered skin, though she gasped as he sank the last of the blades into the exposed muscles of her chest.

She was still conscious as he cut out her heart and bit into it. Her eyes fluttered as her blood ran down his chin. ‘It is…’ she hissed, ‘the will… of the gods…’

Curiously, she died with a smile upon her face.

As Erebus chewed and swallowed, his transhuman physiology took over. The memories and thoughts of the priestess came to him in fits and flashes. Her wisdom was his, and he revelled in–

His chewing slowed. There was a recent recollection there that he had not expected.

A shadowed face. A furtive meeting.

He swallowed again, and took another bite, his teeth worrying at the tough muscle.

No matter how hard he focused, he could not bring that face into the light. Whoever the stranger was, though, they had told Akshub something that had gladdened her greatly.

Erebus knew then that he had been cheated of his revenge. She had waited for him to slay her. As much as she had wanted to live, Akshub had died in service of the gods, perhaps party to something greater that he would now never know.

He cast the remains of the heart aside with a cry of frustration. He rocked back on his heels next to the ruin of the priestess’s body.

Patience.

He had learned what he needed to learn, but he was not content. Akshub had won.

The knife in his hand began to hum a harsh, troubling note at the edge of his perception. One by one, the others picked up their own discordant tone. It was a terrible, raucous sound, until the eighth knife sang out, and the cacophony became a thing of riotous beauty. Just as the primarch had written, Erebus heard for the first time the eightfold song of Chaos, and the future opened up to him.

Then the notes slowly died.

Erebus plucked the blades from the priestess’s body. The final act of consecration was complete, and his shards were ready.

They tingled in his grasp as he gathered them. With an easy flourish he drew one – the one he had selected as his own – across the skin of reality, and stepped back to the Destiny’s Hand.

Erebus left the chamber first, followed closely by Sergeant Undil. Kor Phaeron had an evil look about him, and the Dark Apostle did not have the patience for any more of his posturing.

Many of the others were angry at his obtuseness. What did he care? They were also more than a little afraid of him now, and that gave him a hold over all. His goals were close to fulfilment. The shards would be present as he needed them to be, and the blood they would shed could only hasten the future that he had foreseen, even if nothing else.

If Lorgar did intend to rid himself of Erebus, then he would be disappointed. That the eight Shards of Erebus now also offered his fellow commanders the opportunity of escape from Calth was unimportant to him. Whether or not they would learn how to effect flight through the immaterium should they need it, well…

That was something he would leave to the will of the gods.

+++data-inload suspended. purge routine initiated+++

+++FATAL ERROR: CANNOT FIND VARIABLE “ushkul thu”+++

+++ERROR+++

+++ERROR+++

+++ERROR+++

+++ERROR+++

+++ERROR+++

+++ERROR+++

+++ERROR+++

+++ERROR+++

+++ERR–we are the dawn of sanctity. what lives in the eighth shall not die. those that cast down shall sit upon thrones. what changes is eternal. that which writhes in the grave’s womb will be reborn. they who live without shackles shall be freed. we are the footsteps of the new sun. we are the pyre’s children–OR+++

+++ERROR+++

+++ERROR+++

+++ERROR+++

++WE RISE++

+IT BEGINS+

~ DRAMATIS PERSONAE ~

The XIII Legion ‘Ultramarines’

Remus Ventanus, Captain, Fourth Company
Kiuz Selaton, Sergeant, Fourth Company
Lyros Sydance, Captain, Fourth Company
Ankrion, Sergeant, Fourth Company
Barkha, Sergeant, Fourth Company

Eikos Lamiad, ‘Eikos of the Arm’, Tetrarch of Ultramar (Konor)
Telemechrus, ‘The Sky Warrior’, Contemptor Dreadnought

Aethon, Captain, 19th Company

Octavian Bruscius Captain, 24th Company
Colbya, Techmarine

Urath, Sergeant, 39th Company

The XVII Legion ‘Word Bearers’

Foedral Fell, Anointed Commander

Hol Beloth, Anointed Commander

Maloq Kartho, Dark Apostle

Eriesh Kigal, Terminator Sergeant

Zu Gunara, Dreadnought

Imperial Personae

Meer Edv Tawren, Server of Instrumentation, Mechanicum

Subiaco, Ingenium, Calth Pioneer Auxilia

Riuk Hamadri, Colonel, Defence Auxilia
Volper Ullyet, Captain, 77th Ingenium Support Division

Kadene, Major, Cardace Storm Troopers
Bartebes, Corporal, Cardace Storm Troopers

I

Who will be the last to die?

Honorius Luciel’s name is entered in the Operational Records as the first, but who will be the last? The treachery orchestrated by the Warmaster began with the death of an Ultramarine, but Captain Remus Ventanus of the Fourth Company has sworn that it will end with the death of a Word Bearer. Not one of their rag-cloaked rabble of cultist-brotherhoods, not one of the skinless abominations dragged from the empyrean, but with a warrior of the XVII Legion.

Ventanus has marked a strip of oath paper with his angular handwriting to that effect. Sydance and Barkha bore witness to this, and Selaton affixed the wax-sealed strip to the hilt of his gladius. Ventanus will be the one to drag the last of Lorgar’s sons to the surface of Calth and tear his armour from him before throwing the bastard to the irradiated ground.

He will wait and watch as the caustic rays from the poisoned sun burn the flesh from the Word Bearer’s bones. As layer after layer of skin blackens and drifts away like cinders, the toxic air will scald the traitor’s throat, silencing his screams and causing him to retch up the frothing, disintegrating remains of his lungs.

And just at the instant before the sun’s deadly rays finally kill him, Ventanus will put a bolt through the Word Bearer’s skull.

The last to die will be a Word Bearer, slain by the hand of an Ultramarine.

This is not theoretical.

Purely practical.

II

Lanshear.

Once counted among the great starports of Calth, the city-sized facility burned in the fires of a Legion’s wrath. Hol Beloth and Foedral Fell were two names they knew, but there were others – warriors whose deeds might once have echoed with honour in an earlier age, but which were now bywords for betrayal, mentioned in the same breath as Horus.

Lanshear is a necropolis, a cemetery city whose streets are choked with scorched hulks of wrecked fighting machines, the planet-wide detritus of battle and tens of thousands of radiation-blackened bodies. The lethal rays of Calth’s sun are burning their bones to ash and irradiated winds blow flakes from the dead in swirling dust devils. Most are the mortal soldiery of the traitors, killed by the retribution of the orbital platforms or poisoned by the sun when the last of the planet’s atmosphere was stripped away. Only a scattered few corpses have the post-human scale of legionaries.

Only enemy dead remain on the surface.

The fallen of Calth have been taken below and accorded the proper honour.

Great siege excavators and Mechanicum construction engines intended for wars of crusade are digging mortuary caverns throughout Calth’s bedrock; vast galleries and deep shafts where the honoured dead will forever be part of the world they died defending.

Ingenium Subiaco’s Pioneers have much yet to accomplish, but honouring the dead was the first task Ventanus set them.

III

Tawren’s purging of enemy scrapcode from the orbital defence grid saved Lanshear from complete destruction, but the thoroughness of her retribution left little standing after the beam weapons, missile stations and barrage platforms pounded the Word Bearers’ assault to dust. The shells of foundries and roofless manufactories spread over the blasted industrial hinterland like the ruins of some long-dead civilisation. Forests of sagging tower cranes and the buckled remains of bulk lifter-rigs list like drunks, and the railhead terminal of the Bedrus Oblique is like a child’s toy-set of rolling stock scattered across the transit lines and engine hangars.

Munitions depots and cargo containers stockpiled in anticipation of being raised to orbit burn throughout the starport, and hundreds of ink-black columns of smoke striate the rippling aurora of the sky. The crackle of flames and the screech-metal sound of collapsing structures echo mournfully through gutted transport hulks and the wreckage of a world-conquering army.

Ventanus remembers this place.

He remembers the sheer violence, the never-ending blitz of enemy fire, the overwhelming force of it all. Mass-reactives in solid hurricanes, las-fire sheeting like neon rain and the thunder of traitor battle engines howling in bloody triumph. Explosions and screams merging to shape the death-cry of an entire world.

Compared to that, this nightmarish, flame-lit vision of perdition is almost quiet.

Lanshear is dead, but there is yet activity. The distant foundries and cargo depots far to the north of the main fields are wreathed in a mist that is wholly unnatural, and fires burn there that are not the fires of devastation, but of construction and rebuilding. In the midst of this planetary cataclysm, something survives. Fragmentary vox-intercepts suggest Foedral Fell holds the northern foundries, but beyond that supposition, nothing more is known for certain.

The aftermath of the battle for Calth has left a great deal of theoretical, but precious little practical.

Below the ridge where Ventanus and two hundred legionaries of the Fourth are concealed, the rusted tracks leading from the burning railhead terminal run in arrow-straight lines from the Oblique to the foundry depots.

‘Can you see anything, sir?’ asks Selaton, crawling up to join him at the edge of the ridge.

Ventanus shakes his head. Whatever is happening in the north remains a mystery.

‘I need Vattian’s scouts,’ he says. ‘But...’

He waves a hand, leaving the sentence hanging, and Selaton nods in understanding.

During their desperate thrust towards the guildhall, Vattian’s pathfinders safely brought them into Lanshear under the watchful gaze of the Word Bearers, but their armour is too light to survive the hostile environment of the surface. Even Mark IV plate can only remain above ground for a limited time before its protective qualities are eroded. Terminators can move with impunity, but Ventanus has precious few of them at his disposal.

‘You really think the Word Bearers will come this way?’ asks Selaton, and Ventanus knows that the sergeant shares Sydance’s belief that this is a theoretical without merit.

‘I do,’ says Ventanus, nodding towards the railhead terminal. Hundreds of locomotive convoys lie scattered like dead snakes throughout, their fuel tenders split and belching thick, tarry smoke.

‘Why?’ asks Selaton. ‘There are plenty more direct routes to the northern foundries.’

‘All of which involve crossing large tracts of open ground.’

‘Hit it at speed and they could be across before the orbitals got a solution.’

‘Without vehicles? Would you risk it?’

Selaton considers the question for a moment before answering. ‘Theoretical – if I was trapped on an enemy world with no immediate prospect of reinforcements, I’d want to link up with friendly forces as quickly as possible.’

‘Practical – the railhead terminal offers shelter,’ says Ventanus, gesturing to the building’s shell-cratered roof. The covering is still largely intact, though shafts of wounded blue light spear through its smoke-fogged interior. ‘Server Tawren’s auspex feeds suggest that whoever’s leading this force is cautious. He’s moving from cover to cover, taking his time.’

‘But she lost them,’ points out Selaton. ‘We don’t know where they are now.’

‘If he wants to reach Foedral Fell alive, he’ll come this way,’ asserts Ventanus.

‘Did the Server happen to mention anything about their numbers?’

‘At least five hundred, maybe more,’ replies Ventanus.

‘Then I hope you’re right,’ says Selaton with relish.

IV

They come in ragged squads at first. Tentatively, like thieves in the darkness.

Emerging from the gutted shell of a Titan repair facility, two groups of Word Bearers emerge like wary grazing beasts approaching a watering hole frequented by an apex predator. They move swiftly between the burning hulks of derailed shipping containers. Ventanus lets a finger slip beneath the trigger guard of his bolter.

He lets out a breath.

These are just scouting forces – probing thrusts into the flaming ruins at the edge of the terminus. They hope to provoke any potential ambushers into carelessness, but Ventanus has been specific in his orders. None of his warriors open fire, though each of them dearly wishes to. If this trap is to be sprung completely, then the Word Bearers must fully stick their heads into the noose.

Watching the enemy warriors, Ventanus sees the plate of their legionary armour has changed again. First it changed from granite grey to crimson. Now it is a mixture of scorched black, bare-metal iron and a few remaining patches of bruised blood. The first was a choice, but this latest change is not. The light of Calth’s wounded star has robbed the XVII Legion of uniformity, and Ventanus realises he can no longer think of them as legionaries.

They are too ragged, too individual to be worthy of such a unifying term.

They do not even deserve any force designation such as company or battalion.

This is a warband, a haphazard arrangement of survivors.

Within the protective environment of his helmet, his lip curls in contempt.

You won’t be survivors for much longer.

These forward elements of the Word Bearers advance into the railhead terminal, still moving cautiously, still keeping one eye on the sky and the unseen orbital weapons. They pass out of sight, obscured by the banks of smoke, and Ventanus counts the long seconds in time with his heartbeat.

He wonders if he has made a mistake. Perhaps the Word Bearers have split into smaller groups, each one making its own way to Foedral Fell. He senses Selaton’s scrutiny, but keeps his gaze fastened on the buckled tracks leading to the terminus. He wills the enemy to show itself.

Then the real prize comes into view.

A marching column of Word Bearers emerges from the shelter of the repair facility, moving with as much speed as caution allows. Ventanus calculates their numbers to be close to six hundred. All infantry – no vehicle support and no Dreadnoughts. A few light artillery pieces, but nothing that gives him pause or second thoughts.

But it is more than their lack of heavy firepower that convinces him that this attack will work. Watching the exaggerated caution in their movements, Ventanus realises that the Word Bearers are in a state of shock. They came to Calth arrogant, confident of total victory. They forgot who they were fighting. That slip allowed the Ultramarines to deliver a stinging reprimand, the gut-punch from a downed fighter that turns the bout on its head.

Ventanus waits until he is sure that there are no more Word Bearers yet to emerge from hiding.

He rises to his feet and reaches behind him, hand outstretched.

Another sergeant, Barkha, hands Ventanus the standard, its haft dented and the fabric of the company colours torn and ragged. He plants it at the edge of the ridge and pulls his bolter tight to his shoulder.

‘For Calth!’ he shouts, and two hundred warriors of the Fourth rise up.

Bolter fire blitzes down into the wreckage in front of the railhead terminus. The barking volley punches scores of Word Bearers from their feet before they are even aware that they are under attack. A second volley kills dozens more. Now the enemy are moving into cover, returning fire and keeping their heads down. The Ultramarines do not advance, but hold their position, pouring fire into the enemy ranks. Ventanus is a keen-eyed shot and takes his time, picking his targets with care. He scans for officers and sergeants among the Word Bearers. His task is made more difficult by the fact that the scorching of their war-plate has obliterated most symbols of rank.

In lieu of conventional markings, he targets those with the greatest disfigurements wrought upon their shoulder guards or helmets, the most heavily scarred or those to whom others appear to defer. He puts a mass-reactive through the helm of a warrior whose breastplate is hung with dagger-like fetishes and whose mail cloak glitters with an oily sheen. He kills another with a jagged star symbol cut into the faceplate of his helm. A warrior with a long chain-glaive and a crackling power claw dies with his chest blown out as he runs between two broken tenders. Any one of these kills would earn him a commendation for marksmanship, had anyone but him seen the shots.

Ventanus feels the same rightness to these kills he felt as they first fought their way into Lanshear. At this moment, his bolter is more than just a weapon – it is an instrument of just retribution, the nemesis of all that is faithless and treacherous. He ejects his emptied magazine and slots a fresh one home with smooth ease.

A series of explosions bloom along the ridge-line, and the impacts hurl perhaps twenty Ultramarines to the ground. Ventanus recognises the detonations of lightweight field artillery shells. Scavenged Army weapons, not Legion ordnance. All the downed Ultramarines are quickly back on their feet and firing downhill with only a fractional pause in their killing.

The Word Bearers are shooting back, but their response is desultory at best. Some enemy warriors are not even bothering to return fire, and it takes Ventanus a moment to realise why. Selaton reaches the same conclusion a moment later.

‘They don’t have enough ammunition to fight back,’ he says.

That same realisation is spreading amongst his warriors, and Ventanus feels their desire to take the fight to the Word Bearers. They want to look the traitors in the eye as they kill them. They want to spill enemy blood with their own two hands. Like them, Ventanus wants to mag-lock his bolter and advance with his sword drawn, to teach Lorgar’s faithless sons the cost of not finishing the job they started.

He checks the thought.

The theoretical is glorious, but this practical does not allow for emotion.

‘Hold position,’ he says. ‘Maintain fire.’

The tone of his voice is unequivocal and locks the Ultramarines in place.

The Word Bearers are no longer shooting back. Instead, they are risking the relentless fire of the Ultramarines as they run for the rail terminus. They have abandoned the field guns, knowing they are useless against warriors protected by power armour.

Dozens of Word Bearers are cut down as they cross the open ground, but hundreds more survive to reach the smoke-choked cover of the terminal. Thick smoke swallows them and not even Ventanus’s auto-senses can penetrate the chem-rich blackness.

Selaton looks at him, waiting for him to give the order.

Word Bearers bodies litter the ground.

Some will still be alive, and Ventanus is glad. They will see what is coming.

He opens a vox-link on a pre-arranged frequency.

‘Server Tawren, this is Ventanus. The enemy is in the kill-box,’ he says. ‘You have a solution?’

‘Affirmative,’ comes Tawren’s vox-distorted reply. ‘Engaging now.’

Her voice is without accent and apparently devoid of emotion – though Ventanus knows her well enough to know that is not true. He has come to like her, as much as any post-human can be said to like a chimeric, fully modified adept of the Martian priesthood.

Selaton hears this exchange and turns his gaze upon the railhead terminus as the clouds light up with the approaching storm. A dazzling tower of light flashes from space, briefly linking an orbital lance battery with the surface of Calth. The shell-punctured roof of the terminal lifts off in a rush of explosive kinetic force before vanishing in a cloud of fire.

Ventanus does not flinch as the electromagnetic pulse and colossal overpressure wash over him. With one hand on the company standard, he stands immobile as another lance strike pounds the railhead terminus, then another. Twice more, the orbital battery unleashes its power, and when the roiling banks of volcanic smoke are blown clear, nothing remains.

The ground has been vitrified. Not so much as a single brick or nub of steelwork remains standing within a five-hundred-metre radius of the first impact point.

Ventanus nods in satisfaction and returns the standard to Sergeant Barkha.

He pre-empts Selaton’s question of the lance strike’s timing before it is asked.

‘Because I want the last sight of every Word Bearer to be an Ultramarine,’ says Ventanus.

V

The caves sit beneath a conurb-ring on the southern transit hub of the Uranik Radial, a once populous region of vast habitation blocks a hundred kilometres west of Lanshear. Its hyperstructures and sprawling mega-towers were toppled by the guns of warring Titans in a firestorm like the coming of an apocalypse. Heedless of the terrified inhabitants, traitor engines and loyalist forces duelled in a battle that left hundreds of thousands of combatants dead, but saw no real victor as each side’s forces were drawn away to higher-value objectives.

The caves are a marvel, a series of naturally occurring subterranean voids that local legends attribute to the mythical serpent said to have honeycombed the bedrock of Calth in the planet’s prehistory. No one believes such things, not even children, but a new serpent has made its lair in the coiling tunnels beneath the Uranik Radial.

His name is Hol Beloth, and once he commanded an army of annihilation, a genocidal host that sought not to conquer and enslave but to destroy in the name of Horus. Half a million warriors rallied to his banner.

The barest fraction of that force remains.

His army has been reduced to less than ten thousand, and even this number is largely made up of the mangy rabble of the brotherhoods: among them the Kaul Mandori, the Tzenvar Kaul, the Jeharwanate, and the Ushmetar Kaul. Bloodied and humbled, the predatory hosts of Hol Beloth take refuge in the Uranik arcology, invisible to the murderous fire of the orbital batteries and sheltered from the deadly radiation scouring the surface, but tarred with failure.

As falls from grace go, Hol Beloth’s is all but complete.

Hol Beloth is one of the anointed ones, a warlord of vaunted ambition and proven battle-worth. He has led conquests on a thousand worlds, seen the fall of empires and brought ruin to uncounted enemies. He is all this and more, but he fears that his dream of ascending to stand at the side of Lord Aurelian is slipping from his grasp.

He still does not understand how they failed.

The Ultramarines were broken, scattered and leaderless. Within minutes of destruction.

And then the heavens rained fire and killing light, gutting Titans with every hammerblow from orbit and reducing entire warhosts to ash. Somehow, the enemy had regained control of the orbital batteries and turned what should have been Hol Beloth’s greatest triumph into his blackest defeat. Lanshear was to burn in the thunder of his guns, but the storm turned and tore the beating heart from his chest.

He broods in a cave that echoes with the heartbeat of the dying world, with nothing but ashes for companionship. At his full height, Hol Beloth is a towering giant in crimson armour, his flesh cut with the words of Lorgar and inked in consecrated blood, but defeat has bowed him. He was chosen for great things, but failed to live up to his end of that bargain, and the forces that empowered him have forsaken his ambitions.

For all Hol Beloth knows, his army may be the last alive on Calth.

His fellow commanders. Do any of them yet live?

Is Kor Phaeron dead or does he still fight to bring the Word to Calth?

Hol Beloth has no answers, and the sense of loss is paralysing him.

The warp-flask sits beside him, the oil-dark liquid stagnant and lifeless, where once it wriggled and slithered with the motion of something foetal and immeasurably ancient. He speaks to it, hoping to hear from his fellow commanders, but receives no reply. The thing that deigned to squeeze a fragment of its consciousness into that many-angled space is gone, and Hol Beloth has never felt more isolated. The Ultramarines control the few remaining satellites, and rad-storms on the surface make a mockery of any attempt at encrypted vox.

He looks up as he hears approaching footsteps, legionary footsteps. His mouth curls in a sneer as he sees Maloq Kartho. The Dark Apostle filled his head with visions of power and majesty throughout the approach to Calth and their campaign of extermination. Like all true zealots, he refuses to let their utter defeat diminish his passion. Hol Beloth wants to kill him, but when the nights come to Calth the muttering shadows still attend the Apostle like unseen flunkies.

And in the caverns beneath Calth, it is always night.

‘What do you want?’ demands Hol Beloth.

‘To take the Word to the Ultramarines,’ says Kartho. ‘As you should.’

‘You want to fight?’ snaps Hol Beloth. ‘Go ahead. Make your way to the surface and see how long it takes the orbital guns to end you.’

Kartho is a bleak presence – similarly marked, but thrice favoured. He has the blessing of the primarch, the empyrean and the beasts from beyond the veil. His armour glistens, as though freshly daubed with blood, and the runic inscriptions carved into every plate writhe in the azure bioluminescence of the cave. His helm bears a single horn at his right temple that curls around his head to an iron-sheathed point at his left cheek. At his back is a long staff, black-hafted and trailing smoky shadows that etch themselves upon the air.

Hol Beloth suspects this to be deliberate artifice on Kartho’s part.

‘You think your work on Calth is done, Beloth?’ says the Dark Apostle. ‘Do you really believe your task was simply to fight a mortal war? The Warmaster and Lorgar Aurelian require you to do more than spill blood with bolt and blade. They require you to transform the canvas of the galaxy, to bring great truths to those who have been blinded by the Emperor’s empty promises. You are an avatar of the new age.’

Anger touches Hol Beloth and he rises from his torpor with one hand hovering near the hilt of his war-blade, the other curled in a fist.

‘You spoke those words before,’ he says. ‘When I marched at the head of an unstoppable army. They put fire into the hearts of all who heard them, but I understand their truth now. They are as hollow as a Colchisian promise and just as meaningless.’

Maloq Kartho unhooks the spiked staff from his back, and Hol Beloth thinks for a moment he means to attack him. Instead, Kartho plants it into the ground and the muttering shadows swell at his back. The staff’s length is scrimshawed with catechisms and blessings copied from Lorgar’s great book and topped with a circular finial, the eight spines of the Octed radiating from its centre.

‘You are weak, Hol Beloth,’ says the Dark Apostle. ‘Weak and stupid. A petulant child who weeps and wails and gnashes his teeth the first instant his desires are thwarted.’

Hol Beloth reaches for his sword, but before the blade is even half drawn, the dark smoke around Kartho’s staff whips out to slap his hand from the hilt. Kartho is in front of him an instant later, moving without seeming to move, as though the muttering shadows have borne him aloft.

Hol Beloth takes a backward step, surrounded by a veil of darkness that ripples with undulant motion, like a slick of oil in the air. Shapes move within its depths, infinitesimal fragments of immense presences from beyond space and time, pressing at the meniscus that separates this reality from theirs. They have no form, save that which he imprints upon them; a multitude of eyes, fanged mouths and curving horns that manifest and fade as soon as he looks.

They are hungry. They feel the beat of his heart and crave the taste of his lifeblood.

He is powerless to stop them if they attack.

Kartho steps in close, and the darkness parts before him. It wraps itself around him like a shroud, slithering over the curved surfaces of his war-plate, its lightless form lingering at his back like an acolyte.

The sight disgusts Hol Beloth.

‘To think I anointed you and set your feet upon the path to glory,’ says the Dark Apostle with a disappointed shake of his head. ‘Lorgar brought us truth from the place where gods and mortals meet, but you do not see it. You are too ignorant to see it. You have a chance to leave your mortal shell behind and rise to glory, but your moment is passing with every second you spend in wretched self-pity.’

Hol Beloth does not fully understand Kartho’s words, but he feels the terror of everything he was promised slipping beyond his reach, never to come again. He drops to one knee before the Dark Apostle, head bowed as a supplicant.

‘Tell me what I must do,’ he says.

The notion of submitting to the Dark Apostle’s designs is abhorrent to him, but now he knows he will say or do anything to hold on to his ambitions. So badly does he desire to stand at the side of Lorgar and Horus that he willingly begs for Kartho’s scraps.

‘The galaxy is changing, Hol Beloth,’ says the Dark Apostle. ‘The old ways are passing, and a new order is establishing itself. What was is no more, and what will be is just taking shape. Those who embrace that truth will prosper. Those who do not will perish.’

‘Tell me what I must do,’ he asks again. ‘What do the powers require of me?’

Kartho leans down and his hooded eyes are alight with a passion only bloodshed ignites.

‘Atrocity,’ says Kartho. ‘They require atrocity.’

VI

Geologists once came from far distant corners of the Imperium to study the cavern arcologies of Calth. Magi from the forges of Mars and the master masons of the Terran Guilds marvelled at their self-sufficiency and remarked often on how seamlessly the artifice of man blended with the vagaries of natural formation.

Horus himself once came to Calth as Guilliman’s honoured guest, though no one now remarks on that particular visit. Ingenium Subiaco pauses in his labours and wonders what those magi and masons would make of what has been done beneath Calth’s surface now.

A tall man with a permanent stoop that comes from spending endless days bending over highly detailed schemata, the ingenium’s craggy face is crowned with a thinning crop of corn-coloured hair. A set of brass-rimmed goggles, complete with noospheric MIU and a full sensorium suite, is clamped to Subiaco’s haunted face like some form of surgical device. In the fine tradition of the ingenium from Calth, he cultivates a long moustache with its ends waxed to points that curl over his florid cheeks.

Long days and restless nights have given him an unkempt look, one at odds with his station as a senior ingenium of the Calth Pioneer Auxilia. A wave of tiredness washes through him and his eyes flutter closed for an instant, but he quickly blinks them open. He has too many nightmares in his sleep to wish for more in his waking hours.

Subiaco stifles a yawn and watches as yet another opening in the bedrock is gradually sealed up. This one is a dead tunnel that delves a thousand metres from a lower branch cavern of Arcology X. The cartographae drones that returned tell him the tunnel is a dead end, but the violence of the war has made accurate readings of the deep caverns next to impossible.

A pulse of thought fades up a noospheric projection of the tunnel’s dimensions before his eyes. Subiaco dials down the magnification to view its entirety. The tunnel is five metres wide and curves downwards in a gentle arc for another three hundred metres, twisting through a series of sharp bends before arriving at a water-filled corrasional cave. The deeper reaches of the tunnel are hazed with error-signifiers. Subiaco wishes he had the time and manpower to map them with greater accuracy.

The cavern in which he stands is filled with the tools of the ingenium: blue and grey earth-moving machines, each with dozer blades tens of metres high, bulk crawlers with pneumatic arms capable of lifting a super-heavy battle engine with ease, drilling rigs with conical snouts, and a lone construction engine of the Mechanicum. The noise they make is cacophonous, and but for the aural baffles worked into the mechanism of his goggles, he would long since have been deafened.

Hundreds of men and women of the Pioneer Auxilia are manoeuvring the last of the blast shutters into metres-deep caissons at the mouth of the tunnel, while lumbering tankers of permacrete stand ready. The Pioneers wear heavy, tear-resistant coveralls and bulky respirators, but toil without complaint in the heat, dust and gloom.

They are bent to their labours with pride and determination.

Subiaco understands that pride, it is Ultramarian to the core.

To strive for excellence is the bare minimum expected of Lord Guilliman’s people, and to be born in the Five Hundred Worlds is an honour and privilege that must be repaid every day.

The world above is no more, but he and his Pioneers will be builders of the world below.

Subiaco watches the work with bloodshot eyes, but he needs offer no suggestions nor make any corrections. His subordinates know their craft and his instructions are precise, needing no further explanation. Instead, he calls up a fuller rendition of Arcology X, smiling as he realises that Captain Ventanus’s hurried marking of a map has effectively renamed this cave complex forever.

Thinking of Ventanus, Subiaco looks up as an Ultramarines sergeant in a battle-damaged suit of power armour approaches him. He does not know this warrior, but the deep blue of his armour is heavily abraded across the breastplate and pauldrons with bullet impacts and blade scars.

Only his helmet is unscathed, painted a fresh crimson that seems oddly fitting.

‘Sergeant Ankrion,’ says Subiaco, optical filters reading the warrior’s name beneath a patina of las-burns on his right shoulder guard. ‘Is there something I can do for you today?’

‘How long until the tunnel is sealed?’ asks the giant.

Ankrion’s tone is brusque, but Subiaco understands his urgency. The ingenium calls up a host of data-streams and sifts graphs of work completion sigils with haptic implants in his fingertips.

‘The shutters will be in place momentarily. Once the integrity checks are complete, we spray the permacrete and I will implant the locking seal. All things being equal, the tunnel will be secure within the hour.’

Ankrion nods, though he is clearly unhappy with the answer.

‘You can’t do it quicker?’ he asks.

‘Not if you want an Ingenium Mark on the work, no.’

‘Would more machines speed the process?’

‘Of course, but we don’t have any more machines,’ says Subiaco. ‘We’re lucky to have the ones we’ve got.’

‘Clarify.’

Subiaco waves a hand at the construction engines and earth-moving machinery, causing his holographic graphs to spin away.

‘None of these machines should be here, Sergeant Ankrion. They were all due for orbital transit when the traitors attacked.’

‘So why are they here?’

‘My understanding is that we have the Word Bearers to thank for that.’

‘I’m not in the habit of thanking those bastards for anything,’ says Ankrion, and Subiaco hurries to explain himself as the Space Marine exudes a looming threat.

‘You misunderstand. The corruption they used to infect the orbital defence systems,’ says Subiaco. ‘It appears it caused a cumulative arithmetical overflow in the scheduling subroutines of a Defence Auxilia calculus-logi, which saw these engines sit idle on the embarkation platforms while the rest of Calth was being shipped into orbit. Lucky for us, eh?’

Ankrion does not reply, and looks up as the last of the blast shutters is lowered into position with a heavy impact of metal on stone. A squad of riveters move into position, their whining guns securing the shutter in place. Sparks rain down from their work, and the permacrete hoses lift with a hiss of pneumatics.

‘This would go quicker if we didn’t have to seal off all these dead branches,’ observes Subiaco, projecting a holographic representation of the tunnel’s structure from the surface of his data-slate. ‘For example, this tunnel terminates hundreds of kilometres from the nearest arcology or shelter. There’s really no need to expend resources to seal it.’

Ankrion takes a moment to study the gently rotating image.

‘Did you find a source for the water in the chamber at the tunnel’s end?’ he asks.

‘No, implying that it is an opening of negligible proportions.’

‘In other words, you don’t know where the water is coming from?’

‘Not as such, but–’

‘Captain Ventanus’s orders are unambiguous,’ interrupts Ankrion. ‘Any tunnel the termination of which cannot be confirmed absolutely is to be sealed.’

‘Sergeant, you need to understand that only a very few of Calth’s cave systems are linked. The vast majority spread through the planet’s crust in splendid isolation.’

‘If Calth is to survive, that’s going to have to change,’ says Ankrion.

VII

Shelter CV427/Praxor sits fifteen hundred kilometres to the east of Lanshear, a series of hardened bunkers and armaments storage facilities. It is designed to hold up to a hundred thousand fighting soldiers and a further twenty thousand ancillary staff, together with three battalions of Defence Auxilia personnel.

Its maximum occupancy is listed as one hundred and fifty thousand souls.

In the wake of the XVII Legion’s attack it is currently home to over twice that number. Its enlarged caverns and deep constructions are nightmares of overcrowding, yet there is little anger amongst its inhabitants, save that directed at the warriors of the Word Bearers who have driven them here.

This is to be expected.

The gates of Praxor have been closed for nearly two weeks, and tens of thousands of refugees fleeing the war and the doomed sun’s radioactive spasms have sought sanctuary within. The shelter’s accommodation is beyond its capacity, and the security of a weapons storage facility requires that every individual be identified. Once a full inventory has been taken of human and weaponised resources, a detailed campaign of resistance and reconquest can be developed.

Every entrance to the shelter, and there are many, has been sealed – some with permacrete shuttering and some with warriors bearing guns. Elements from five different companies of the Ultramarines are now based here: five hundred and sixty-seven legionaries. They do not guard the entrances to the arcology. They train, they re-arm, they mount sorties onto the surface when word comes from Arcology X that enemy forces are nearby.

The security of the gates falls to the Imperial Army – of which there are sixteen separate regiments present locally – and skitarii elements swept into the arcology by the star’s radiation. Command protocols and communications are still in disarray as the Mechanicum adepts try to mesh Army vox-systems with their own and those of the Legiones Astartes. Different systems, hundreds of encrypted networks and trillions of code combinations have brought a special kind of hell to operational co-ordination.

It is this that is giving Major Kadene a headache that is only getting worse.

She and her squad of Cardace Storm Troopers occupy one of the smaller routes to the surface, more accurately described as a sinkhole filled with hardscrabble that has been pulled apart by millennia of tectonic movement. It is, nevertheless, a passageway that connects the caverns below with the surface and must be guarded.

Temporary shuttering sprayed with rad-proof sealant allows unprotected humans to occupy the prefab guard post and barricades that watch for infiltrators from the surface. Twenty soldiers occupy the position: battered, war-brutalised veterans who have seen their world torn apart and broken into pieces that can never be put back together. Major Kadene’s men have fought the good fight, and only these twenty of her seven hundred remain. They fought at the Pasuchne Bridge, and held it long enough for the 86th Company of the Ultramarines to cross. Along the Marusine Highway, a ten-thousand-strong rabble of cultist scum chased them for a hundred kilometres before they reached the regimental strongpoint set up at the Talanko Arterial.

Hol Beloth’s flanking forces, moving to encircle Lanshear, were on the verge of forcing them to abandon the strongpoint. But then came the fiery rain from orbit, burning the Word Bearers and their rabble to vapour ghosts.

Leaving her company colours flying proud at Talanko, Major Kadene followed Colonel Rurik as he brought the scraps of their regiment to Praxor.

Kadene knows she will never see the surface of Calth, but hopes that some remnants of the enemy forces will try to fight their way into the shelter. She dislikes being underground, having discovered a mild claustrophobia, but she is a Storm Trooper, and to acknowledge weakness is not in her nature. She sits in the guard post’s single structure, a reinforced tin shack, with a vox-caster and her unit’s stock of anti-radiation pills, ammo, food and water. This is what has become of her once elite unit

She flinches as a squawk of interference barks from the speaker horn of the vox-caster.

‘Bloody Mechanicum,’ says her adjutant, Corporal Bartebes. He smacks the grey-steel box with the heel of his palm. ‘Bloody bastards never get anything bloody right.’

‘I thought they were supposed to have this fixed by now.’

‘And you bloody believed that, major?’ says Bartebes, fishing a lho-stick from his pocket and lighting it with the ease of a professional. Oily smoke lifts from his mouth.

‘I thought you quit,’ says Kadene.

‘I survived the surface,’ replies Bartebes. ‘If that ain’t killed me, these bloody won’t. It’s boredom that’ll do for me first.’

Kadene can’t argue with his logic, and though she could order him to put it out, she won’t. They have suffered too much in the last few weeks to deprive Bartebes of his vice. Besides, he’s probably right.

She shrugs, turning on her heel as she hears the rumble of an engine. A big engine, something industrial. She wonders if there’s something wrong with the sealant or the shuttering that requires a Pioneer work team. She doesn’t feel any effects of surface radiation, but supposes that’s probably why it’s so dangerous.

‘Now what’s this bloody noise?’ wonders Bartebes as a heavy industrial carrier lumbers around the corner. Its cargo compartment is draped with a blue tarpaulin, roped down and covering several objects, bulky and oblong in shape. Work tools? Engineering equipment?

‘We expecting anyone?’ asks Kadene.

‘Not that they bloody told us,’ replies Bartebes, giving the vox another clout. ‘Not that we’d have heard on this piece of junk.’

The driver’s Army, but she can’t see his unit insignia. Thirty men accompany the carrier, some riding shotgun on the running boards, some marching alongside. They look bored, and Kadene can sympathise. There’s something... ragged about these soldiers, but that’s nothing unusual. Everyone looks a little ragged these days.

But her soldier’s instincts are telling her there’s more to it than that.

‘Find out what they want,’ says Kadene, lifting the vox-horn. ‘I’ll see if I can get some word from on high.’

Bartebes nods and reluctantly stubs out his lho-stick.

As he shoulders his hellgun, Kadene says, ‘Eyes on.’

Bartebes understands immediately and his demeanour instantly changes.

He leaves the guard post and waves four soldiers to accompany him, bulky in glossy plates of ablative carapace. Each Storm Trooper wears the regimental insignia of crossed lances over a skull on one shoulder plate, a hand-painted black X on the other. With Bartebes at their head, they march out in front of the new arrivals. Bartebes waves his arms in front of him like a crew chief on a landing platform.

‘Right, who the bloody hell are you?’ he demands with his customary wit and charm. ‘This is a Cardace post.’

A man in a uniform that hangs strangely on him detaches from the soldiers escorting the vehicle. He carries an old-style data-slate and holds it out to Bartebes. He says something she can’t hear. Kadene lifts the vox-horn and twists the dial to the assigned command frequency.

As she does so, her eyes alight on a man partially obscured by the tarpaulin-wrapped cupola of the cargo vehicle. He wears armour, but it takes her a fraction of a second to realise what’s wrong with it.

The man is dressed as a Cardace trooper, but she has never seen him before.

Her mouth opens to shout a warning.

A scream of dissonant noise erupts from the vox-horn, a blast of a million terrorised screams that comes from a place of horror and blood. It paralyses her. Literally paralyses her. Her every nerve is shrieking in pain, but she can’t move.

Something pours from the vox-horn, a rush of stinking black fluid. It spatters the wall like an oil-filled balloon has just been thrown at it. She sees the men talking to Bartebes pull out flasks of black liquid and throw them to the ground.

She can’t move. Fluid shapes leap from the black oil. She still can’t move.

More glass breaks. More viscous darkness erupts like tarry geysers.

Shifting, formless things of grasping arms, gaping mouths and tearing claws slam into her soldiers and bear them to the ground. The rest of the men in her command drag their rifles to their shoulders, but there are shadows for them all. They slither over the floors, stretch and swell over the walls and loom down from the cavern roof. Men are plucked from the ground and black filth pours into their screaming mouths. It stops up their ears and noses, presses its way into their skulls through their eyes, and invades the entirety of their bodies in the space of a heartbeat.

Kadene sees all of this, but she still can’t move. Her entire body is shocked rigid by the squalling blast of nerve-paralysing sonics. The vox is laughing at her. The spatter of oil on the wall is pushing itself into a semblance of form. Human, but larger than any man she has ever seen. Bulked out beyond mortal norms, she recognises the fluid-formed outline of Legion plate. The helmeted head has a horn that curls around it, and is formed from glistening matter that stinks like a mass grave.

It turns its gaze on her and she wishes she could close her eyes. She wants nothing more than to shut this abhorrent monster away.

The door to the guard post is thrown open. The man Bartebes was talking to enters.

‘They’re all dead,’ he tells the horned black torso extruded from the wall.

Behind him, Kadene sees her men being stripped of their armour and uniforms. The killers garb themselves in the colours of a regiment that, but for her, is now extinct. The dishonour is beyond insult. It is violation.

‘You know where to take the device?’ asks the monster, its voice a gurgling wet horror of liquid vowels and drowning consonants.

The man nods. ‘The statue of Konor in Leprium. Rendezvous at zero-dark-thirty.’

Kadene wants so badly to reach down for her holstered laspistol. Sweat beads on her forehead. Her hand trembles and, incredibly, she feels a tingling sensation in her fingertips.

‘Take three men and dump the corpses at least five kilometres out,’ says the black apparition. ‘The defenders must not learn what was taken until it is too late.’

‘It won’t be long before a relief force turns up.’

The black shape gurgles with what Kadene realises with sick horror is laughter. ‘You wear loyalist uniforms. Welcome them and share the camaraderie of brothers. Then kill them.’

The black shape on the wall turns to her. A slit of a mouth forms in its impossible helm, a leering grin of anticipation. She feels warm leather at her fingers. The holster is open; she never keeps the press-stud closed. Sweat pours down her face, veins stand out. Her hand shakes as she slides it around the weapon’s grip.

‘Such gross betrayal of trust has power beyond measure,’ says the horned monster.

Kadene draws and fires her pistol with a scream of pain and grief. All she has already suffered and all she has just lost is distilled into this last act of defiance.

She shoots the monster again and again. Her bolts burn it like solder through plastek and ignite it like promethium. It burns away into a stinking mist. A sulphurous reek fills the guard post, the stench of voided bowels. She tries to turn her pistol on the mortal traitor, but the weapon is slapped from her hand. A rifle butt slams into the side of her face. Bone breaks and she falls to the ground. Pain shoots around her body and a gut-cramping nausea stabs through her paralysis.

The traitor drops on top of her, one knee in the chest, another over her throat. He has a black-bladed knife in one hand, the tip scratching the surface of her eyeball. Fluid oozes out over her cornea. His palm rests on the dagger’s pommel, ready to drive it home.

‘Just for that, I think you’re gonna come with us,’ he says. ‘Be interesting to see what your new sun does to one of its own.’

VIII

The heavy adamantium gates of Arcology X rumble closed on rollers the size of Land Raiders, blotting out the venomous blue light of the system star. Booming locks hammer home, shutting the subterranean complex off from the upper world. Thundering recyc-units purge the contaminated dust from the vast airlock chamber.

Remus Ventanus and the warriors of the Fourth Company stand immobile in the roaring winds as a Mechanicum adept and a host of servitors with hostile environment augmetics come forward with high pressure hoses, to scour them with electrolysed water that runs into specially dug sluices.

Ventanus has little patience for such processes, but with so many mortals packed into Arcology X, decontamination is a necessary evil of any mission to the surface.

Selaton and Barkha stand behind him, Barka still clutching the battered pole of the company standard that Ventanus retrieved from the slaughtered honour guard at the Numinus starport. Water drips from the eagle and the Ultima, making both shine brightly in the gloom of the gateway. The symbolism pleases Ventanus and makes the time taken to cleanse their armour feel worthwhile.

He could have the indentations of the dead warrior’s grip worked out of the metal, but he will not. The dying grip of the Ultramarine whose name he never knew will be a constant reminder of the Word Bearers’ betrayal.

Wherever this standard ends its days, it will forever display the mark of its former bearer.

With the closing of the gate and the completion of decontamination procedures, the defence protocols ease a fraction and servitor-crewed turrets switch their macro-weapons from armed to safe. An internal bulkhead the size of a jungle escarpment rumbles down into the floor with the sound of tectonic plates grinding together. The Mechanicum adept waves the Ultramarines in and leads his servitors away.

Ventanus marches from the decontamination barbican into Arcology X.

IX

Captain Octavian Bruscius makes his way through the neatly arranged lines of beds and temporary shelters housing the groups of civilian survivors packed into CV427/Praxor. Bruscius is a gene-forged post-human, and they are but mortals, yet they are all warriors of Ultramar.

He feels proud to number himself among them.

He has fought in the Legion’s battle lines for a century and a half, but fighting within the bounds of the Five Hundred Worlds is something he never expected.

There has never officially been a theoretical for a war between the Legions, and though Bruscius understands he is simply a line officer, even he recognises that the Ultramarines will never be the same again.

The Warmaster’s treachery has upset the order of the galaxy, and nothing will ever be the same. He and his battle-brothers of the 24th Company are based in Praxor. Warriors from the 56th, 33rd, 111th and 29th Companies are here too. His group is the largest, boasting two hundred and nine warriors, whereas the 111th has been reduced to a single squad.

Cut off from the fighting, they are isolated beneath the tumbled ruins that are all that remains of the Persphys and Caela Praefecture conurbs.

Techmarine Colbya has established contact with sixteen other nearby shelters, as well as Captain Ventanus in what is now known as Arcology X. Bruscius does not know why its name has been changed, and is just glad that Lord Guilliman saw fit to place Ventanus in control of the fight-back.

The Word Bearers have taken the surface, but the war beneath belongs to the Ultramarines.

Bruscius forces himself to keep such thoughts tamped down.

He has more immediate concerns.

Registration areas have been set up in each of the largest caverns, manned by the few Administratum personnel who escaped below ground. It is a thankless duty, but the citizens of Calth form snaking lines as they await their turn to be processed without complaint. Well over ten thousand people are crammed into this cavern alone, with more pressing in behind. Motorised gurneys drive along cleared lanes between the queues, bearing reams of accumulating paperwork and identity confirmations from the registration booths. The drivers are all Army-helmeted and with rifles slung across their backs.

Bruscius and twenty of his warriors are here to oversee the registration process and watch for any security breaches, but his company will be rotated onto surface patrol soon. He recognises the importance of this work, but Bruscius wants to kill Word Bearers.

His eyes roam over the thousands of people in the cavern, pleased to note the stoic determination on every face. These people have seen their world virtually destroyed, but there is no trace of panic or psychosis. They came with nothing but that which they could carry on their backs when the evacuation order came through, yet still stand proud and ready to serve.

What other citizenry of the Imperium could rally so magnificently?

Almost all are young. All are ragged and grimy. But no amount of dirt can hide the mottled purple radiation burns with which almost every man, woman and child’s skin is afflicted. The medicae call it the ‘Mark of Calth’, and it is as much a badge of honour as it is an injury.

Bruscius moves on, traversing the echoing cavern and counting the hours until he can turn his weapons on the enemy. Everywhere he goes, people turn to stare at him, and he finds the attention faintly discomfiting. He is a warrior, pure and simple, yet these people invest him with all their hopes of a better tomorrow.

It is a heavy burden to bear, one he had not known he shouldered until this moment.

A woman with a babe in arms clutched tight to her breast approaches him and she reaches out to touch his vambrace. Under normal circumstances, Bruscius would never allow such contact, but these are far from normal circumstances. Another two children hold tight to the hem of her skirt, both so young and fragile looking that Bruscius finds it hard to believe they survived the horrors above.

‘Emperor protect you,’ she says.

Bruscius does not know how to respond and gives the woman a nod. She smiles, and he knows she will treasure the memory for the rest of her days.

The Ultramarines have become touchstones of hope, living proof that Calth will rise again, that its people will one day reclaim what was taken from them. This hope is a humbling experience, and a salient reminder of why the Great Crusade was fought in the first place.

The woman holds out her hand, and Bruscius sees a small aquila pendant on a silver chain lying flat against her palm.

‘Take it,’ she says. ‘Please. You have to.’

The Ultramarines have standing orders not to accept gifts from civilians. Despite that, their muster spaces and arming points are surrounded by offerings, tokens of gratitude and handwritten messages declaring a readiness to fight for Calth.

‘My thanks, but it is not permitted,’ he says, turning away to move on.

‘Please,’ says the woman, more insistently. ‘She needs you to have it.’

Something in the woman’s tone makes him stop and turn back to her.

‘Who needs me to have it?’ he asks.

The woman tilts her head to the side, as though confused at his question.

‘The saint,’ she says, almost in tears. ‘You need to see. Before it is too late.’

Bruscius finds himself reaching for the aquila, though he knows he should not. The woman sighs as though a pent-up breath has just been expelled from her lungs. She looks up at him, and though Bruscius does not easily recognise conventional human expressions, he sees she is surprised to find herself face to face with a Space Marine.

As his hand closes on the silver pendant, combat reactions surge within his post-human body as chem-shunts within his battle armour flood his system with combat stimms in expectation of battle. His bolter snaps up and his visor is suddenly overlaid with tactical schemata, spatial signifiers and topographical data.

A vox-link instantly activates between him and his battle-brothers.

Bruscius has no idea what has triggered this reaction and the woman backs away from him in fear as he goes from heroic saviour to lethal, bio-engineered killer in the blink of an eye. He scans for any sign of threat and immediately sees the motorised gurney bearing boxes of administrative documents and the like.

Two things are immediately obvious.

First, the gurney is laden with heavy boxes, but is heading towards the registration booths.

Second, its driver wears Army fatigues, but they are ill-fitting and clearly not his own.

Bruscius sets off at a run towards the gurney, bellowing for people to get out of his way as a terrible foreboding fills him. The driver sees him coming and grins with zealous fury as he halts the gurney in the centre of the cavern.

Bruscius pulls his boltgun tight to his shoulder. A targeting reticule fastens on the man’s centre mass. It flashes red in full expectation of a lethal shot. The man stands and shouts at the top of his voice, with his rifle and a black-bladed dagger held aloft.

‘Hear the Word of Lorgar!’

It is all he manages before Bruscius’s mass-reactive round blows out his chest and entire upper body in a wet meat explosion. People duck for cover, clearing a path for Bruscius as his warriors close on his position.

‘Get back!’ shouts Bruscius, kicking the dead man’s remains from the driver’s seat and hauling boxes from the back of the gurney. As he feared, they were concealment for something hidden behind them – a long, crudely-machined tube of thick metal, sealed at both ends by seamed welds and pierced by a multitude of sheathed connection jacks, electrical buffers and decoy wires. Behind a crystalflex panel, Bruscius sees a pair of brushed steel casings marked with the symbols of his Legion.

His armour registers a blazing spike of radiation, but it is the only warning Bruscius gets.

The stolen atomics detonate a second later, filling the cavern with nuclear fire that spreads through the entirety of Shelter CV427/Praxor and kills every living soul within.

It is the first of three such atrocities that murder two million civilians in one night.

X

It still amuses Ventanus that a mark he made in haste upon a wax-paper map has become so synonymous with the defenders of Calth. With Lanshear laid waste by the orbital batteries, the defenders had needed a place to rally. With virtually every data-engine on the planet dead, a pict scan was made of Ventanus’s map with a rally point marked with black ash.

That scan was broadcast through every civilian pict-caster and Legion slate within reach of Lanshear, and thus was named this bastion of resistance.

Arcology X.

Two quick, crosswise slashes on a map and an element of geography became a piece of history.

A symbol of resistance and a talisman to brandish in the face of the enemy.

XI

The caverns are dim. Power consumption is carefully controlled. The few Mechanicum adepts have yet to stabilise a link to the geothermal grid at the heart of Calth. Flickering lumen globes in protective caging are strung from brickwork supports on looping cables like jungle creepers. This close to the surface, the architecture has a martial character, but with every sub-level they traverse, the more civic and functional it becomes.

The walls are etched with metres-high Xs, and hundreds more adorned every archway and lintel. Among them, Ventanus sees pictures drawn on the walls, serpentine creatures with dark wings and fanged mouths. Draconis. He sees a childishness to the scratched lines and wonders if these nightmares have been drawn on the walls as a means of expelling them. Are they memories of the monsters brought forth by the heinous pacts made by the Word Bearers or visions drawn from the nightmares common in the wake of the attack?

News of Ventanus’s mission has already reached Arcology X, and the return of the Fourth is greeted with cheers and loud huzzahs from the thousands of civilians packed into its sprawling sub-levels. Someone shouts the word saviour, and the cry is taken up by the multitudes packed into the caves. It follows them down the levels as they plunge deeper and deeper into the bedrock of Calth.

Sydance is waiting for them at the gateway to the administration levels.

His cobalt-blue armour is clean and polished. Some of the Legion have made oaths not to remove the dust and blood of war until Calth is reclaimed, but like Ventanus, Lyros Sydance wants the Word Bearers to see the Ultramarines are still the regal Battle Kings of Macragge.

No amount of treachery and no grief will ever change that.

But even Sydance has adopted the black X on his shoulder guard, carefully etched between the curved arms of the marbled Ultima. It looks like a Chapter number or a company designation, but it is something far more important.

‘You’re making a name for yourself down here, Remus,’ says Sydance as the chants continue behind them.

‘Nothing to do with me, Lyros,’ replies Ventanus. ‘This has your fingerprints all over it.’

Sydance shrugs and grips Ventanus’s wrist. ‘A bit of hope and glory never hurt anyone.’

Ventanus does not release Sydance’s arm. ‘I want it to stop.’

‘Why? What you’re doing, it’s giving people hope.’

‘I’m not a saviour,’ says Ventanus, ‘and I don’t like the connotations of the word.’

‘You don’t have to like it, you just have to endure it.’ says Sydance, turning and making his way down the ramp into the cavern. ‘Come on, the Server’s waiting for you at the Ultimus.’

The war for Calth is being co-ordinated from the lowest level of Arcology X, a cavern seared from the lithosphere by melta drills and seismic charges. Beneath the levels of habitation, engineering and hydroponics, it is a rock-clad dome, some three kilometres in diameter, with numerous branching passageways, sub-galleries, and twisting dead ends radiating from its central void. At its heart stands a structure of polished marble and glass, utilitarian in elevation, but designed in the shape of the XIII Legion’s sigil. Armoured panels encase its lower levels, and Techmarines aboard Tekton-pattern Rhinos work side by side with Mechanicum servitors to transform it into something resembling a strongpoint.

Before the invasion, the building was owned by a trading cartel founded in the time of Guilliman’s adoptive father. It is named Konor’s Arch, but is now known as the Ultimus. Its robust infrastructure and powerful data-engines – designed to link subsidiary operations across the Five Hundred Worlds – make it the perfect base from which to conduct offensive operations against the remaining Word Bearers.

Such concerns are vital, but once again, the symbolism of the structure is paramount.

Hundreds of temporary structures surround the Ultimus, overspill from the levels above. So great were the numbers of refugees fleeing Lanshear that the upper levels quickly filled, and Ventanus had no option but to allow billets to be set up around his command post. He doesn’t like it, but has little choice in the matter. There is simply nowhere else for them to go.

Word of their coming has reached the refugees, and people cluster at the edge of the clearway that leads to the gates of the Ultimus. People cheer and wave and clap. They shout his name, and once again call him saviour. He keeps his expression neutral, but catches sight of Sydance’s amusement.

‘You might not like the connotation, but the Saviour of Calth has a nice ring to it,’ says Sydance. ‘It’s a title that’ll stick, mark my words.’

‘So what do they call you?’

‘I haven’t decided yet,’ says Sydance with a grin. ‘But we’ll all have titles by the end of this.’

Ventanus walks on. He knows Sydance is right, but it still irks him to have the mantle of saviour thrust upon him. He dislikes the self-aggrandisement and its faintly theological undertones, but is canny enough to know that nothing he can do now will stop its spread.

‘So, are you going to say it?’ asks Sydance.

‘Say what?’

‘That you were right after all, and that I was wrong.’

‘I don’t need to,’ says Ventanus. ‘The truth is self-evident. Six hundred Word Bearers dead without the loss of a single warrior.’

‘Yes, very impressive,’ agrees Sydance, placing two fingers to his forehead and narrowing his eyes as though in a trance. ‘I see many laurels in your future, great statues built in your likeness and a name that echoes through eternity.’

Ventanus allows a thin smile to surface. ‘I will shoot you if you use those psychic powers again.’

Sydance laughs and turns from Ventanus and addresses the two sergeants behind him.

‘Barkha, Selaton, good job.’

The sergeants acknowledge his words, but do not reply.

Ventanus looks up and sees Server Tawren and her newly-acquired retinue of lexmechanics, calculus-logi and data-savants approaching. He is still learning the nuances of human interactions – something forced upon him by increased contact with the populace of Calth in recent weeks – but has become familiar with the hybrid machine/flesh expressions of the Mechanicum.

Tawren has the chimeric qualities common to the members of the Martian priesthood – detachment, aloofness and a disconnect that some see as cold – but right now Ventanus sees nothing of detachment, nothing of disconnect.

What he sees in Tawren’s face is an abyss of all too human despair.

‘Something has happened,’ he says. ‘What is it?’

‘CV427/Praxor is gone,’ says Tawren. ‘Two others as well.’

‘Gone?’ he says. ‘What does that mean?’

‘It means that they are radioactive craters hundreds of kilometres wide,’ says Tawren.

XII

Theoretical: deny the Word Bearers the chance to regroup.

Practical: achieve the same for the defenders of Calth.

Result: bring the Ultramarines back into the fight against the Warmaster.

These are the prime directives by which the XIII are operating, but knowing them and achieving them are two very different things.

Gathered around the central plotting table in a gleaming conference chamber that now serves as Calth’s command centre are the men and women Ventanus needs to turn that theoretical into a workable practical.

Sydance and Urath stand shoulder to shoulder, his fellow Fourth Company captain half a head taller than the sergeant of the 39th. Though his rank is inferior to that of Sydance, the hard-faced Urath has given fresh purpose to the scattered survivors of Sullus’s company.

Ventanus will see to it that he receives a captaincy for that.

Server Tawren consults with her Martian acolytes. He cannot see it, but knows there will be a haze of noospheric information buzzing around their heads in veils of data-light. She sifts invisible information with her hands. Behind her, a brutish skitarii clan chief stands, hulking and primitive looking. He has nothing of the calm poise of Cyramica, and is clearly a much lower ranking battle leader. His limbs are sheathed in metal and the lower half of his skull is a tusked, metallic trap like a greenskin’s jaw.

Colonel Hamadri consults a data-slate, her face set in an expression of cold determination. She has a son in the Numinus 61st, but has no knowledge of whether he is alive or dead. Statistical probability favours the latter, but until such time as his death can be confirmed, Hamadri will believe him alive.

This is good. Ventanus needs people around him who can hope against the odds.

Across from Hamadri is Captain Volper Ullyet of the 77th Ingenium Support Division, a heavily-built career officer who in fifty years of service had never left Calth or seen combat before the last few weeks. At first glance, he is an unlikely choice for the command table, but Ventanus sees beyond his service record to his actions during the initial phase of the attack.

Where the shock of the Word Bearers attack left others stupefied, Ullyet reacted in moments. Within four minutes of the attack’s commencement, his battalions of construction engines and earth moving machines were raising redoubts and defensive bulwarks around the main gates of Lanshear’s central arcology.

This, too, is good. Ventanus needs people who can react with speed.

Ingenium Subiaco stands close to Tawren, and his pleasure at being in the presence of a Mechanicum adept is obvious. Subiaco has only the most superficial augmetics, none that cannot be easily removed, and he hero-worships those who commune so directly with the Machine-God. Ankrion tells Ventanus that Subiaco is doing good work in the tunnels, securing the multitude of potential entry points to Arcology X.

The man is exhausted, but refuses to take his rest.

All the mortals are tertiary forces, reservists or commands designated to be rear-echelon units. Most are filled with raw recruits, soldiers raised specifically for the campaign against the Ghaslakh xenohold, a campaign Ventanus now understands to be entirely fictive. The forces still at Lanshear port when the sun died were the last to be embarked, fresh regiments, engineering units or logistical support elements.

Almost none are front-line certified.

Sydance tells Ventanus repeatedly that they are not ready for what he asks of them, and the stark light of the chamber only seems to confirm this. Every face is pinched and knurled with loss and shock. Sydance is right, they are not ready, but Ventanus believes that treachery has honed their previously unfinished edge. Complacency has been purged from their bones by the devastation above.

None beyond the Legion warriors were known to Ventanus before he made Arcology X his base of operations, but he knows them all now. He has made it his business to learn their strengths, their weaknesses and all the human foibles he must factor into his plans. Some think he wastes his time in attempting to understand mortals, but Ventanus knows better.

The only way Space Marines can now function alongside mortals is to understand them.

‘Server?’ says Ventanus. ‘Apprise me.’

Tawren nods and subcutaneous light shimmers through her fingers as she manipulates the plotting table with quick haptic gestures. A static-washed holographic of a giant, smoke-filled crater appears on the table, a hundred kilometres across. It blights the landscape and always will. Pixelated vapour clouds the size of cities are tugged by rogue thermals and atomic vortices.

‘You have all heard the news from CV427/Praxor,’ she says.

‘And the others,’ says Colonel Hamadri, her thin face blotchy with untreated rad-burn. ‘We lost more than two million people last night.’

Heads nod; the scale of death too terrible to contemplate. Such a vast number is difficult to visualise, too enormous for proper comprehension. Hamadri is a Defence Auxilia colonel, young to hold such rank. Ventanus sees she has heart and that will count for a great deal in the coming years. Hamadri kept her units on the surface as long as possible to allow the greatest number of refugees access to the arcology.

‘Do we know what happened?’ asks Sydance.

‘CV427/Praxor was an armaments stockpile for the orbital platforms and Legion warships,’ says Tawren. ‘Given the electro-magnetic signatures and recorded yields from the three blast sites, it seems likely that enemy infiltrators were able to modify and detonate a number of warheads from the cyclonic torpedoes stored there.’

‘How is that possible?’ demands Hamadri. ‘Those weapons are under Mechanicum protection. Don’t you people have security systems in place to stop that kind of thing? It’s your fault they’re dead!’

Tawren is visibly distressed by Hamadri’s accusation and her knuckles whiten as she grips the edge of the plotter table. Holographic clouds bend towards her in response.

‘That’s enough, colonel,’ says Ventanus. His tone leaves no room to argue, but Tawren raises a hand. She does not need him to defend her and answers Hamadri with remarkable calm.

‘Yes, we have ritual protocols to prevent such breaches, but the systemic corruption introduced to the planetary noosphere compromised a great many of our liturgical security systems.’

‘I thought your killcode got rid of it,’ says Hamadri.

Tawren nods. ‘The killcode of Magos Hesst burned the enemy scrapcode in a firestorm of numerical carnage, yes, but one that was indiscriminate in its purging. Many of our own systems were left crippled in the wake of the restoration of command authority. Those systems are even now being restored.’

‘So could this happen again?’ asks Ullyet.

‘I have personally inspected the security protocols at all other such weapon caches,’ says Tawren.

‘That’s not what I asked,’ says Ullyet.

‘Yes, it is,’ replies Tawren and her certainty is palpable.

Ullyet nods, the matter settled.

‘So how do we answer this atrocity?’ Sydance asks. ‘We’ll hit the bastards hard for this.’

They respond to Sydance’s words, and Ventanus sees the desire for vengeance in every face. He remembers his fellow captain espousing the same retributive mantra upon his arrival at Leptius Numinus. It is a primal and eminently understandable urge to strike back at those who have wronged them, but it is as ill-advised now as it was then.

Ventanus leans forward and places both hands on the edge of the table.

‘We answer by staying alive to finish the fight,’ he says. ‘We continue co-ordinating what forces remain combat-effective and devise a practical from that. The dead of Praxor are gone, and nothing will bring them back. Grieve when Calth is free, but while you are in this room, you all belong to me. Understand and accept that or get out.’

Stony silence greets his words. They hate his cold objectivity, his apparent lack of concern for the dead. Ventanus cares nothing for their approval. But he has to give them something, some spark to light the fire in their hearts. He is not good with such words, and these are the best he can do.

‘The Word Bearers will pay for this, but this war will not be won with impulse, it will be won with cool heads and solid practical. We fight for the living and we kill for the dead. Say it with me.’

The silence stretches.

‘Say it with me,’ he says again.

Heads nod, fists are made over hearts.

‘We fight for the living and we kill for the dead!’

XIII

Radioactive winds howl across Leprium, sounding hot and crackling in his helmet. The counter reads high, but his war-plate can withstand this intensity for days before its systems will need time to recharge. Maloq Kartho looks up into a sky laced with a poisoned borealis and heartsick rainbows of stellar fallout. The cascade of exotic particles and heavy metals will leave Calth a polluted wasteland from now until its star finally burns out and engulfs the entire Veridian system.

For all Kartho knows, that could be in millions of years or it could be tomorrow.

He cares not either way. He will never return to Calth.

It is reckless to stand so brazenly on the surface, but the powers to whom he owes fealty demand no less. Devastation surrounds him, the sprawling ruin of a dead city: twisted steel, shattered permacrete and broken glass. Upturned tanks and supply containers that fell from the ruptured bellies of bulk tenders straining for orbit are scattered everywhere.

Amidst the destruction, a statue fashioned from bronze, but now heavy with grey ash, stands at the end of a grand processional. It is a heroic representation of the mortal who raised Guilliman as his own.

Konor, the first Battle King of Macragge.

Bodies lie in drifts around the statue, as though the doomed populace of Leprium believed his legacy might somehow protect them from the slaughter. Kartho pities them their ignorance of the galaxy’s true divine masters.

A wrecked Imperator Titan stands sentinel over the ruins, hot, neutron-rich vortices gusting between its legs and sagging carapace. Its chest battlements are blown out and half its head section is missing. Grey dust falls in drifts from its listing carapace, but it is impossible to tell whether its loyalty was to Horus or the Emperor.

‘One of ours or one of theirs?’ asks Hol Beloth, emerging from the shelter of a tumbledown ruin of flooring plates and corrugated roof slabs. The commander has embraced his duty of atrocity with all the zeal one would expect of one of Lorgar’s sons. The murder of the civilian shelters has galvanised him, and the touch of the Bloody One fills his body with power.

That he thinks such banal deaths will be enough to save him makes Kartho’s lip curl in a mixture of amusement and contempt.

‘Who knows?’ says Kartho. ‘At this point it hardly matters.’

‘Could it be salvaged? Turned against the Thirteenth?’

Kartho shakes his head in disbelief. Hol Beloth mistakes this for his answer.

‘I suppose it is too badly damaged,’ says Hol Beloth.

That the fool believes there is still a war to be won on Calth is laughable. The Word Bearers’ victory has already been achieved and the fate of this rock is irrelevant.

Yes, the Ultramarines were not as humbled as Kor Phaeron desired, but they are broken as a fighting force. Spent. They will waste their efforts to reclaim a world that has no value. Lorgar has likely already forgotten Calth.

The powers beyond the Great Eye have their gaze turned upon the Golden One, and the burning of Ultramar is just the beginning of his grand schemes.

Maloq Kartho has ambitions of his own, and what he does here is simply the next step on his path to glory. He already feels his unnamed shadow moving through the darkness, an ink-black leviathan that swallows worlds and exterminates species for its fleeting amusement. He senses it hunting fresh prey even now, mortal beings who have somehow managed to escape Calth by means that should be impossible.

His hand slips over the glass surface of his warp-flask as he senses its squirming, reptilian hunger. Whoever it hunts must be special indeed to have elicited such pleasure in one so vast as to be beyond human understanding.

‘We shouldn’t be out here,’ says Hol Beloth, breaking into Kartho’s thoughts. The commander looks up into the wide sky. He feels too exposed to enjoy its technicolor death-throes. ‘You saw what happened to Lanshear.’

‘I did,’ agreed Kartho. ‘And it was wondrous. But still we wait.’

‘You will see us all killed,’ says Hol Beloth, lapsing into uneasy silence.

Hol Beloth feels acutely vulnerable here without his army, but to bring such numbers to the surface would bring the wrath of the Ultramarines orbital guns down upon them within moments. Besides, thinks Kartho, the brotherhoods will soon serve a much grander purpose where they are.

Kartho cast his augurs wide in choosing the legionaries who would accompany them. To achieve his goal, only the deadliest warriors could hope to survive. Only the most devoted and ruthless.

There are few as single-minded in their adoration as Eriesh Kigal.

Encased in a war-scarred suit of Terminator armour, Kigal stands head and shoulders above Kartho, his arched pauldrons and slab-like breastplate dancing with static and irradiated dust. Each fist is a lightning claw and his daemon-visaged helm now bears two curling horns. Six similarly clad warriors stand with Kigal, armed with a mix of combi-bolters, lightning claws, chainfists and energised warhammers. They bear the mark of the Octed upon their shoulders, and Kartho has inscribed each veteran’s scarred faceplate with his own personal sigil.

Towering over them all is a silent Dreadnought with a casket-plate bearing the etched name of Zu Gunara. Kartho knows nothing of that warrior; whatever flesh-scraps once sloshed in amniotic grease within have now been devoured by a void-hard darkness with teeth and eyes. The hulking war-machine is no longer simply a Dreadnought, but a thing of the night with iron fists.

‘So what are we waiting for?’ asks Hol Beloth, pacing back and forth in the shadow of a soot-blackened metal pressing plant.

‘For the bringers of a mighty gift,’ says Kartho, seeing a dust cloud threading its way through the ruins. The coughing splutter of a labouring engine echoes dully across the ashen remnants of the broken city. Hol Beloth hears it too and his hand goes to the crowned hilt of his sword.

‘Ultramarines?’ he asks.

‘No.’

‘How can you be sure?’

‘Because we are still alive,’ says Kartho as a wide-bodied industrial vehicle with a transport compartment at the rear comes into view. It ploughs through the knee-high dust between the gutted buildings, riding low on its suspension, heavy with potential. The remains of a spread-eagled skeleton are lashed to the roof of the vehicle. Only the pitted, corroded plates of carapace armour and shreds of uniform hold the body together. No flesh remains on the skeleton, the bones bleached the pallor of ash.

‘Major Kadene, I presume,’ says Kartho with a throaty chuckle.

Hol Beloth looks strangely at him, but he doesn’t satisfy his curiosity.

Though he has dismissed Hol Beloth’s concerns, Kartho looks up for any sign of their having been discovered. He has chosen his moment carefully. The clashing electromagnetic storm should render any geo-sats overhead blind to this portion of the city.

‘Come,’ says Kartho, and he and Hol Beloth step from the shelter of the covering structure.

Kigal’s Terminators and Zu Gunara follow them through the detritus of the flattened metropolis. Structures designed to withstand earthquake, fire and flood have been brought low by war, and the sight pleases Kartho greatly.

The vehicle wheezes towards them, finally stopping in the shadow of Konor’s statue. Its blue paintwork has flaked off, as though burned away from the inside. The bare metal of its frame and panels is already corroding. The Terminators lock the double barrels of their guns on the driver’s window. Kartho hears the buzz of target acquisition lasers and ranging motors over the city’s groaning lament of steel and the dusty susurration of the wind.

The vehicle’s crew doors open and Kartho smells the rich aroma of decaying meat. A man bearing the mark of the brotherhood lurches from the cab’s interior and Kartho sees death upon him. He wears it proudly, a mass of rotten tissue that weeps milky fluid from the rampant sores covering every visible centimetre of his skin. His eyes are yellow, veined with ruptured capillaries and virtually blind with cataracts.

Hol Beloth draws his sword as he sees the man wears the uniform of the enemy.

He has not yet realised that this man is one of their own. Another brotherhood acolyte emerges from the opposite door, and his afflictions are even worse. Blood leaks from every pore and wind-borne dust abrades the flesh from his bones with every gust.

Kartho sees a third man through the warped glass of the canopy. His skin has peeled from his skull and he stares sightlessly at the Dark Apostle through fluid-filled sockets. His hands are fused with the steering column in some strange biological symbiosis. Blind, and enduring unspeakable torment, he has been guided here by the dark monarchs of the warp.

Hol Beloth reaches into the vehicle and rips the driver’s insignia from his uniform. A flap of wet meat comes with it and flops to the dust. He looks at the insignia, and it takes him a second to make the connection. Kartho steps around the vehicle, to where the dying men are pulling back a heavy tarpaulin. Hol Beloth appears at his side as the weapon they have come for is revealed.

It is spherical in shape, and smaller than Kartho had expected. A metre long, including the protective metal case. Its surfaces are smooth, the blue paint gone, leaving its body a dull grey that matches the former colour of the Word Bearers.

An unambiguous warning symbol is acid-etched onto its side.

A circular ring, with three splayed arms radiating from its centre to form three circles in a pyramid form. Since the earliest days, this has been the sigil of an elemental power, an unknowing rendition of the fear of pestilence carried in the hearts and minds of mortals since the dawn of time.

Hol Beloth holds up the driver’s insignia. ‘These men came from the Praxor shelter before it was destroyed.’

‘That they did,’ agrees Kartho.

The shadow of Zu Gunara falls over them as the Dreadnought lifts the warhead from the transport compartment. It is heavy and the vehicle visibly lifts from the dust. The men whose flesh is slipping from their frames like wet cloth sigh in pleasure.

‘Is this what I think it is?’ asks Hol Beloth.

Kartho nods.

He feels the warp-flask at his hip squirm with agitation. With the acquisition of this weapon of total destruction, his union with the immaterial creature grows ever closer. Kartho feels its resistance. It wants to finish its hunt, but the fates have decreed their joining and nothing will prevent it.

‘We cannot fight the Ultramarines conventionally,’ says Kartho. ‘We are newborn Catachan Devils in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.’

The Terminators level their guns at the brotherhood warriors.

‘That is not how we will fight,’ continues Kartho.

The dying men drop to their knees and spread their arms in gratitude. Bare bone gleams. Ribs shine wetly through sloughing flesh. A bark of gunfire tears their dissolving bodies apart in an explosion of rotten matter. Flaming lumps of meat spatter the buildings nearby.

Eriesh Kigal affixes melta-charges to the vehicle. There must be no trace of it left for the geo-sats to discover. The intense heat will vaporise the transport and kill off any traces of biological taint. The Ultramarines must have no warning of the new threat that has emerged from the weapon stores of CV427/Praxor.

‘How do you intend to use it?’ asks Hol Beloth.

‘How do you think?’ says Maloq Kartho. ‘I am going to use it to kill Calth.’

XIV

A haze of light lies over the plotting table’s surface like a low-lying fog. Drifting particulates are caught in the diffuse light of the holos, causing flickering refraction errors in the topography displayed. It is Calth’s surface, rendered in greens, browns and yellows. Icons representing Ultramarines positions and their allies are marked in gold and blue; known Word Bearers and cultist positions in hostile red.

Two consistent red icons are of greatest concern to Ventanus – one in the heart of the foundries north of Lanshear, the other within the Uranik Radial.

‘How often do the geo-sats initiate a surface augur?’ asks Sydance as Tawren zooms in on each icon, friendly and hostile. Time stamps appear above each one.

The most recent is six hours old.

‘Access to orbital auguries is still sporadic,’ she says, shifting the map around with thought impulses through the MIU cabling plugged into the table. ‘Most of the geo-sats were knocked out in the first moments of the attack. The few that remain are slaved to the orbital weapon platforms to alert us to any surface movements of Word Bearers forces.’

Ventanus repeats Sydance’s question. ‘How often?’

‘Every ten hours,’ says Tawren. ‘That’s as much inload as the Ultimus noosphere can accommodate until more powerful data-engines can augment its capacity.’

‘That’s a long time,’ says Hamadri.

‘A long time?’ snaps Sydance, shaking his head. ‘It’s a lifetime. This map is worthless. Remus, we can’t devise theoretical, let alone practical, from data that’s ten hours old.’

‘Six hours,’ says Ventanus.

‘It could be six or ten minutes and it would be just as bad,’ says Sydance.

‘The map is as accurate as circumstances allow,’ responds Tawren, as the map zooms out.

‘You’re overlooking one thing, Lyros,’ says Ventanus.

‘I am? What?’

‘There are more gold icons today than there were yesterday,’ he says. ‘Every day our forces grow. The Word Bearers can have no such expectation. Server, how many more loyalist forces have you established contact with since the last update?’

‘Thirteen more underground shelters and sealed cave systems are now confirmed,’ answers Tawren, and the new additions bob like eager children on the map.

‘Two weeks ago we were broken and scattered, on the verge of extermination,’ says Ventanus. ‘Now we have co-ordination with nearly forty thousand of our Legion brothers, a quarter of a million Army and Mechanicum assets and sixteen Legio Titanicus engines. Every day brings us closer to becoming a globally unified force. The Word Bearers are alone, cut off from every hope of aid. They are fighting just to stay alive, but we fight for Calth.’

Ventanus spreads his hands to encompass the gold icons on the table.

He sees renewed hope. His words promise them a victory, but they think the war will be won in a matter of months. They think the Word Bearers will be pushed from Calth without difficulty.

They are wrong, and Ventanus needs to bring some cold reality to the table.

Using the manual controls, he highlights the area of the map that shows the two red symbols that trouble him the most. Force disposition icons and unit identifiers flicker to life as he manipulates the controls. The data is old and incomplete, but together with what he has seen with his own eyes, it is enough.

‘A Word Bearers commander named Foedral Fell is building a fortress in the northern foundry districts,’ he says. ‘And Hol Beloth, the warlord who razed Lanshear, has regrouped beneath the Uranik Radial. Beloth seems to have adopted a holdfast position, so we can discount him for now, but we can’t allow Fell to establish a secure base in the north.’

‘You have a theoretical?’ asks Sydance, eager to be unleashed.

‘I do,’ grins Ventanus. ‘We march north and kill the bastard.’

XV

The tunnels around Ingenium Subiaco are gloomy, and lit by dancing flames that he cannot see. Each passage bears the hallmarks of being naturally formed, but their dimensions are too perfect, too geometric to be anything other than artificial. The underground structures of Calth are an ingenium’s idea of paradise, a realm where geology, engineering and art come together. There are few underground cavern systems he has not visited, mapped and devised great schemes for linking.

An entire underground planetary ecology: self-sustaining and self-perpetuating.

His plans are even now being put into action – designs, philosophies and practical means of achieving their completion have been transmitted to most of the largest subterranean shelters for implementation.

The cavern is a glistening silver colour, suggestive of the eastern arcologies, the walls wet and dripping. Ingenium Subiaco has never feared solitude. He has found peace in the quiet times spent at a drafting slate, buried in a technical librarium or immersed in the design theory of the great thinkers of previous ages. He enjoys time spent with friends and family, but he acknowledges that he quickly reaches a point where he wishes to be alone.

Those closest to him know this about him and recognise the signs of his wandering attention and nascent irritability. They make allowances for him and Subiaco is grateful for their understanding of what he knows is a flaw in his character.

Subiaco relishes solitude and the chance to immerse himself in his work.

But this is something else entirely; he is utterly alone.

This is not just the absence of people, but the absence of the existence of other people.

Ingenium Subiaco understands with total clarity that he is the only man alive on Calth.

He does not know where he is and has no memory of coming here.

Each cave mouth is a yawning abyss, a pathway to horror or a gateway to some dreadful terror, locked away in ages past and now free to climb to the surface.

Caves and their exploration hold no terror for Subiaco. He has squirmed through the tiniest of cracks and pushed his wiry frame into some of the most inaccessible cave systems this planet has to offer, but these yawning entrances scare him more than anything.

He cannot count how many there are; every time his gaze shifts, the cavern seems to rearrange its walls and the black-limned cave mouths constrict without appearing to move. Subiaco feels hot breath exhale from the nearest cave, and backs away.

Which route leads to the surface? Do any of them?

He can see none of the cave markings etched by the earliest explorers, designed to aid the lost in finding their way back to the outside. It is as though this cave has never been trod by Calth’s people. Laughter drifts from somewhere and he spins around as shadows chase one another over the walls.

Drifts of steam sigh from cracks in the floor, but there is no heat to them. In fact, the cavern is like a storage chiller. His breath mists the air and he sees crackling daggers of ice form on overhanging crags of rock.

‘This isn’t real,’ he says, finally making the intuitive leap to realise that he’s dreaming.

But Subiaco is wise enough to see that understanding this and ending it are two very different things.

Orange light seeps into the cavern, the glimmer of distant fires. Subiaco remembers a crumbling text borne to Calth from Terra itself and said to be tens of thousands of years old. Its stasis-sealed pages spoke of a place far below the ground where all the devils and evil-doers of the world would be sent upon their deaths. This was said to be a place of fire and torment. With the sky above him and the light of the sun on his face, Subiaco scoffed at such ancient superstition, but here in the darkness, his animal core quails in fear.

The deep flames are growing hotter and the walls of the cavern begin to drip, sloughing their substance as though shaped from wax and not solid rock. The entire cavern structure is disintegrating, coming undone with the speed of an unmasked lie. The walls flake and peel away like cinders in a fire, the ceiling falling in a rain of blood-soaked ash.

And behind that waxen veneer, a swaying mesh of iron lath and haphazardly constructed supports. It is a madman’s structure that cannot possibly support the burden being placed upon it.

And beyond that, a howling void of utter emptiness.

No... not empty. Not empty at all.

Unimaginably huge shapes move within the void, leviathans that have outgrown the paltry scale of the word.

It horrifies Subiaco that this fragile lattice is all that stands between him and these monsters. He backs away from the nearest chain-link wall as a vast eye blinks before him. Subiaco only knows it is an eye because a pupil the size of a small moon dilates as it notices him. The structure around him trembles, and the shockwaves spread to the farthest reaches of the caves. He hears the sound of groaning steelwork and the grinding squeal of metal on metal. Something breaks over to his left and Subiaco hears the tap, tap, tap of steel claws at the iron lath. Hears it buckling and pulled apart.

Cackling laughter bubbles from somewhere that could be a thousand kilometres away or could be right behind him. Subiaco does not wait to find out and runs in what he hopes is the opposite direction. He hears the scrape of metal-sheathed bodies pushing their way through tears that are too small for their impossible forms. He hears the shrieks of their pain and the howls of their hunger. He keeps running, knowing better than to look back and see what is chasing him.

All he knows is that he has to get away.

He runs, and the sound of hundreds of polished steel blades echoes around him. They shed sparks that light the unravelling reality in strobing flashes and throw out elongated shadows of malformed limbs, distended jaws and jutting fangs.

Subiaco screams as he hears thousands more of the amorphous, bladed things beyond the lattice pushing their way into the collapsing cave structure. They will kill him if they catch him, but he fears that what will come after will be far worse.

Then, ahead, a miracle.

A great door, a towering portal that more accurately deserves – and utterly owns – the title of gate. It alone has resisted the dissolution of the caverns. It alone retains its solidity in the face of the corruption from beyond that unmakes all it touches. The gate is black and glossy, built from cyclopean blocks of titanic stone hewn from the depths of a lightless ocean. It is sealed at its centre by a great golden circle upon which is wrought a complex alchemical and mathematical equation.

The Clockwork Angel.

It is an ancient problem, but one that is known to Subiaco. He understands with the clarity only terror can impart that its solution will open the gate. An ornate keyboard of brass and jet sits at the centre of the great seal and his fingers make quick stabs at the black keys.

Gears spin, pins unlock and interleaved discs of gleaming metal separate as the lock disengages and the seal splits down the middle. Golden light spills through the gap between the leaves of the gate as it opens. It is cleansing and purifying, so bright that it threatens to blind him.

Subiaco shields his eyes from the radiance, feeling its welcoming heat spread over him.

Behind him, he hears the screams of the bladed beasts pursuing him. The light is lethal to them, it burns and unweaves the dark power holding their bodies. The golden light spreads, undoing the damage done to the fragile walls of reality. Its healing energy is wondrous and the corruption beyond the veil is helpless before it, driven back beyond the barriers that keep it from invading the realms of sanity and order.

The light envelops Subiaco, and he lets it...

...and his eyes open to find his wife standing above him, her face lined with fear. He sits up, and winces as a spasm of pain shoots up his spine. The cot-bed is uncomfortable, but is a great deal softer than a bedroll on the ground. He sees his daughter curled in the corner of their assigned room, her blanket pulled up around her knees. She looks at him with wide, frightened eyes.

‘I was having a nightmare,’ he says, letting out a shuddering breath.

‘Everyone’s having nightmares,’ says his wife, slipping her arms around him and resting her head on his shoulder.

‘I’m not surprised,’ he says, looking at the walls of their quarters as though they might disintegrate at any moment and reveal the horror behind them. He listens and thinks he can hear the faint tap, tap, tap of polished steel claws.

‘What was it about?’ asks his wife. ‘Your nightmare.’

‘I don’t remember,’ he says.

XVI

The Ultramarines move out in force. Fifteen hundred warriors leave Arcology X in a kilometre-long column of heavy armour. The armoured gates open onto the blue-lit wastelands, and Legion strength – enough to subdue a world – rides out to war. Ventanus leads them, shuttered within the commander’s compartment of a Shadowsword. The super-heavy’s interior is not designed for post-humans, but he has found a way to press his bulk into a space designed for a mortal body.

The interior of the super-heavy smells of grease, engine oil, sweat and sickly-sweet gusts of pine-scented incense. He hears the crew chatter over the vox, but tunes it out. He does not need to hear their operational back and forth. Not yet.

Though he holds no belief in the Machine-God of Mars, Ventanus gives a curt nod to the skull-stamped cog symbol on the bulkhead beside him. Though it goes against his grain, he touches the image with his fingertips. Not for luck, but to honour the Mechanicum forces that helped bring Calth back from the brink.

Hesst, Cyramica, Uldort and the thousands of others whose names he will never know.

As if in acknowledgement of his gesture of respect, the slates around him chime with inloading data. Reels of waxy paper spit from chattering ticker-tapes, Tawren’s feed from the cogitators of Arcology X. Geo-sat imagery fills the slate before him, a haze of information four hours old that bathes his cut-glass features in a ghostly ochre light.

Their attack will reach the outer edges of Foedral Fell’s foundry strongpoint in around another five hours. Ventanus plans to launch his attack immediately after the geo-sats pass overhead and paint the most up-to-date picture of the tactical situation. Nearly a hundred Land Speeders with enclosed crew compartments skim the ruins before them, feeding back more immediate intelligence on the ground ahead, optimal attack vectors and revisions to the proposed route.

It is not the way Ventanus would want to launch such a vital assault, but he suspects that few engagements in the coming war will be fought in ideal circumstances.

The landscape around Ventanus is bleached of colour by the display, but even rendered in monochrome the horror of such planetary holocaust shocks him. He saw this devastation unleashed first hand. He knows how terrible it was, but to see the surface of Calth like this is a stark reminder that this is not a warzone that nature will eventually reclaim.

This is all that Calth will ever be.

Lanshear is a skeletal steel ruin, its acreage of efficient platforms and guildhalls now a blackened, shadow-haunted wasteland. Numinus fares little better, and the space between them is littered with the detritus of wounded strato-carriers: flattened supply crates, ruptured barrels and upended cargo containers. Most split apart on impact, spreading their contents over thousands of square kilometres of the surface. Rifles, uniforms, food packets, boots, medicae supplies and the millions of other items required by campaigning forces at war.

It is as if a dozen armies marched through and discarded everything they were carrying before vanishing. None of the scattered items can be salvaged. All are too irradiated now to be of use. The crumpled spine of the Antrodamicus groans on the plains beyond Numinus City. The starship’s plated hull is buckled and holed in a thousand places. Ventanus remembers watching it fall from the sky, a sight no sane mind could have imagined. Smoke still billows from its gutted interior, weeks after it crashed into the surface like an extinction-level meteorite.

It reminds Ventanus of a great plains-dwelling leviathan brought down by rapacious predator packs. A marvel of technology that once travelled between the stars in service to the greatest vision of mankind, reduced to rusting wreckage. A mighty king of the void brought low by treachery and left to rot on the world that most likely saw its keel first laid down.

Towers stand on the horizon like broken teeth in a rotten gum, backlit by flames from the raging fires of the refinery wells. Colossal drilling rigs sway, their surfaces corroding in the stellar radiation. Ventanus sees the death of a world in all directions, cities reduced to ashen deserts, proud hubs of industry shattered beyond reclamation and entire habitation rings pounded to glassy ruin.

Calth was never the most beauteous planet of Ultramar, but Ventanus has seen enough of the galaxy to know it was a handsome one. It had not the wonder of Prandium, its cities were not the architectural marvels of Konor, and its oceans were not as majestic as those of Macragge.

Yet few worlds can match the industry of its people. Every inhabitant of Ultramar is hard-working, but the people of Calth are fiercely proud of their reputation as the hardest workers in the Five Hundred Worlds. Its shipyards, on the surface and in orbit, constructed more warships than many dedicated forge worlds, and no vessel bearing the stamp of a Calth shipwright ever failed in combat.

All of that is gone.

Calth’s people endure, but the world they fight for no longer exists.

Ventanus remembers the Calth that was.

The dead world around him is the Calth that is.

XVII

Ventanus splits his Ultramarines into four spearheads, the faster vehicles moving on the flanks while the super-heavies and Dreadnoughts advance up the centre. Ventanus commands this element. Selaton commands the left, Sydance the right. Urath of the 39th will rendezvous with them at the Malonik Transit, and the strike force will swell as more of their scattered brothers bleed in from each of the Lanshear Arterials.

The Burning Cloud, the Titan that killed the traitor engine Mortis Maxor, marches over the buckled superhighway of the Tarxis Traverse, its warhorn echoing mournfully over the ruins. Captain Aethon’s warriors are sweeping down from the north, but his force will only join with Ventanus when they meet in the middle of Foedral Fell’s ruined fortress.

The last element of the assault force is Eikos Lamiad.

Tetrarch of Ultramar, Primarch’s Champion. Eikos of the Arm they call him now; his army is an eclectic muster of forces stitched together from the survivors of the parched deserts and burning muster fields around the Holophusikon. Army, skitarii and Defence Auxilia rally to his banner, together with the great Telemechrus – the Sky Warrior, the twice-birthed.

With his arm lost to Word Bearers bolts, Lamiad’s warriors have declared themselves his Shield Bearers. Already, the survivors of the attack are building a mythology.

Perhaps there is something to Sydance’s assertion that they will all have names of legend by the time this war is done. Something to inter in the museum of the future.

Ventanus drags his thoughts from potential futures to the present.

He has brought together a force greater than any assembled since the muster. This is an appropriate response. What little information Tawren was able to collate from the brief link with the Word Bearers cogitators before the betrayal indicates that Foedral Fell is a war-leader of great prowess and charisma.

If he is allowed to effectively rally the Word Bearers, the war for Calth will take decades.

That cannot be allowed to happen.

His fortress stronghold in the foundry districts must be razed to the ground.

The going is slower than Ventanus would like, but his timetable has allowed for this. A number of paths thought clear from orbital pict-capture are proving to be impassable on the ground. The Land Speeders are creating passage with their guns or feeding back updated routes.

In five hours, the co-ordinated arms of the Ultramarines assault will be at the outskirts of Foedral Fell’s stronghold, within minutes of the fresh telemetry from orbit.

And armed with the most up-to-date information at his disposal, Ventanus will wipe Foedral Fell from the face of Calth.

XVIII

Hol Beloth follows Maloq Kartho into the ruins of a Lanshear starscraper whose spine has been broken. The towering structure lost its upper three hundred storeys when the portside void array of the Antrodamicus sheared them away with the precision of a thousand-metre blade. The shock of that impact buckled the ventral pier and robbed the building of its structural integrity. The starscraper creaks and groans in the howling winds, and wide cracks have spread from the floor to the metres-thick support columns.

It is only a matter of time until the tower collapses.

Neither this nor their proximity to a known Ultramarines stronghold seems to bother Maloq Kartho, who leads their small warband into the corpse-choked atrium. Concussive force from an engine engagement three kilometres away on the Niansur Lateral blew out the building’s heliotropic windows, and the scorched bodies are shrouded in ash-stained glass with brittle reflections.

Eriesh Kigal and his Terminators have said little since they took possession of the weapon from the disintegrating cult-warriors. Zu Gunara is even more uncommunicative, and Hol Beloth is beginning to feel like less of a commander, and more of a passenger.

‘Why are we here?’ he asks, stopping in the midst of the corpses. A flaking skull, black and pitted, stares up at him, the jaw sagging open with the vibration of his footfall. He crushes it beneath his boot.

‘You ask a question that has vexed the greatest minds since man first learned to walk upright,’ replies Kartho. He puts a hand out to support himself, as though weary from their trek across the shattered hinterlands of Calth. Their armour is straining to keep the worst of the radiation at bay, and the power capacitors in their backpacks will need to be charged soon.

Yet what they have endured is nowhere near enough to tire the Dark Apostle.

Only now does Hol Beloth realise that Kartho no longer has his Octed staff.

‘You know what I mean,’ says Hol Beloth. ‘Here. This building. Why?’

Kartho cranes his neck upwards, looking through the great void at the building’s heart. Hol Beloth follows his gaze. Dust and particles of glass spin in light filtered through the broken windows. They form strange patterns, spirals, loops and hints of suggested forms just out of reach. For the briefest moment, Hol Beloth sees something in the dancing motes, but it slips from perception even as he thinks he sees it.

‘We are here to witness something,’ says Kartho, as though that explains everything.

‘Witness what?’ demands Hol Beloth, his hand curling around the leather-wrapped grip of his sword. He no longer cares if the muttering shadows attack him, he simply wants answers.

‘A moment in history,’ says Kartho, holding up his hand to forestall another angry outburst at his cryptic answer. ‘Contrary to what some believe, the universe is not a sterile place. It is a grand melodrama, a tapestry of consequences, both man-made and celestial. Most are minor things, easily missed, but some are of galactic significance, universal even. And these dramas must be witnessed if they are to register in the universal paean to the dark monarchs. A number of such dramas are close, and we are here to bear witness to one.’

‘What’s going to happen?’ asks Hol Beloth.

Kartho sighs and says, ‘Climb with me and we will witness it together.’

Hol Beloth looks back up the atrium. Even with its top sliced away, the starscraper still soars to a height of nearly a kilometre and a half.

‘I suppose it’s too much to hope that the transit lifts still have power?’ says Hol Beloth.

Kartho laughs, a mockery of the sound.

‘Good drama is earned,’ he says, setting off towards a dust and corpse-choked stairwell. ‘And, trust me, you won’t want to miss this.’

XIX

Like everything to do with the war on Calth, Foedral Fell’s stronghold is a thing of ugliness. Dismantled manufactoria have provided the raw materials for his fortifications: sharp-edged bastions, low-lying artillery deflectors and sunken blockhouses. It is a cancerous blight on the landscape, a fog-wreathed, orange-lit vision of damnation. Tar-black smoke streams up like claw marks on a canvas, and the air stinks of petrochemical fires.

Ventanus remembers a Word Bearer who called himself Morpal Cxir who claimed that Foedral Fell’s warhost numbered in the tens of thousands. Those numbers will have been decimated by Tawren’s orbital strikes, but by how much is the real question.

‘Come on...’ he mutters, watching the counter on the main slate diminish.

At last it reaches zero, and heart-stopping seconds pass before the combat logister flickers to life. Real-time data inloads from the geo-sats. Information pours in. Ventanus processes it instantaneously, parsing tactical feeds on avenues of approach, heat signatures, topographical layouts and enemy troop dispersals. He had feared that the Word Bearers might have their own scouts in place and be ready for them, but it now appears that he was wrong to credit the enemy with such foresight.

Readiness icons flash on the logister as the information passes down to his force commanders. They have seen what he has seen, they are hungry for this fight: dogs of war, straining to be let slip. Even Lamiad defers to his command. It is Ventanus’s right and honour to give the word.

His theoretical is solid. The practical is in place. They all know it.

‘All commands, unleash havoc,’ orders Ventanus.

XX

The plotter table within the Ultimus is not designed to handle military-grade inloads. Its Lexaur-Kale photon arrays were fashioned to distribute system-wide shipping timetables and manifest lists, not co-ordinate Legion war-planning. Server Tawren has been forced to make numerous alterations to its bio-organic cognitive centres.

Most are sanctioned modifications, but a few are those taught to her by Koriel Zeth during her apprenticeship at the Magma City. Not forbidden, per se, but frowned upon. Hesst would have approved, and the thought of her binary life-partner observing her work makes her smile.

Colonel Hamadri and Captain Ullyet are present, but they are ghosts to her. Unaugmented and without noospheric enablement, little more than blurs in her peripheral vision. All she sees is data. They are speaking softly, but she does not hear them.

Calth’s atmospherics are lousy with rad-squalls, but Tawren has learned to compensate for this. She adjusts her filters and the optics of the geo-sats respond to her commands. Static blurs. Holographics waver. Resolution refreshes and she sees what she needs to see.

She reads the energy signatures of buried power sources, thermal blooms from what are most likely barrack structures. Everything the Word Bearers have tried to hide is laid bare before her and she relishes the godlike aspect to her current position.

Everything she is seeing is consistent with the deployment characteristics known of the Word Bearers. Heat patterns are consistent with Legiones Astartes power plants, and this reassures her that nothing significant has changed since the last exload from the geo-sats.

Half a dozen savants and logi are plugged into the table, each assigned to a command element of the assault force. The geo-sats send their findings back to Arcology X in compressed data blurts, which are then passed to the attacking Ultramarines. Each Space Marine commander has his own dedicated battle-savant to break the data inloads into packets of information more easily digested by those without cognitive process augmetics.

The bio-architecture of Space Marine brains is greatly enhanced compared to mortals, but they are not Mechanicum.

‘Geo-sats will remain overhead for another fifty-three seconds,’ says a savant with dark skin and warm eyes that are still his own. ‘Five three seconds.’

His accent is equator-thick, and Tawren likes the flexing epenthesis of his words.

She watches the inloading data spread through the plotting table, the gold icons moving in a carefully orchestrated ballet. Everything moves with precision. Every sweep and thrust made by the warriors of the XIII is perfectly co-ordinated.

It does not feel like watching a battle, it feels like watching a replay of a battle.

Her eyes flick to a noospheric countdown hovering over the rune indicating the force element containing Captain Ventanus.

XXI

The Shadowsword fills with crackling electrical feedback as its main gun fires. Static charge lifts energised dust fragments from armour plates and makes the hairs on the back of his neck stand to attention. Ventanus could have ridden into battle within a Land Raider, but the awesome destructive potential of the Shadowsword was too great to resist.

On the grainy pict-slate before him, a wall disintegrates as the super-heavy’s main gun obliterates it. This is a tank capable of killing battle engines. An ad-hoc fortification has no chance. Bodies tumble from the wreckage, cultist bodies. Those that are still recognisable as human are on fire.

Ventanus cannot hear their screams, but wishes he could.

His capacity to enjoy the suffering of his enemies has become something feral.

Ventanus activates the pressure seals that isolate his forward station from the rest of the super-heavy. He wants to see Foedral Fell’s stronghold laid waste with his own eyes.

A green bulb lights up beside him. Pressure seals secure.

He enters his command code onto an oversized keypad. The hatch above unlocks with a snap of vulcanised seals and durasteel locking bars. It slides back and Ventanus pushes himself upright.

Flames surround the tank as it bludgeons its way through the outer reaches of Foedral Fell’s defences. Bands of brotherhood warriors in scavenged exo-suits run from the Shadowsword. None of their weapons are capable of denting its thick armour, and they know it.

Banks of heavy bolters mow them down as they flee. Streams of las and solid rounds saw through their disordered ranks. Plumes of hot blood puff from their exploding bodies like geothermal geysers.

Ventanus slews the pintle-mounted combi-bolter around and hauls back on the arming lever. The magazine engages with a satisfying clatter and he mashes the trigger. The recoil of a combi-bolter is ferocious, more suited to the man-capable tanks that are Terminators, but the Shadowsword’s assembly and his genhanced strength keep his rounds on target.

Bodies detonate, reduced to meat and gristle.

Here and there a warrior band holds its ground. Ventanus has brief glimpses of iron masks, ragged robes and wholly inadequate rad-shielding. They fire weapons that are sub-Army in quality and effectiveness. He wonders how such rabble ever gained a foothold on Calth. He kills them as soon as he sees them.

There are no Word Bearers amongst the cultists, but everything he saw of the fighting before the retreat below ground displayed total disregard for their mortal allies. The humans are here only to slow the Ultramarines’ advance, to soak up their fury. If that is Fell’s plan, then he has sorely underestimated the well of fury from which the XIII Legion can draw.

Ventanus savours the sight of hundreds of Ultramarines tanks thundering over the hellish wasteland of Fell’s outer fortifications. To either side of him, Land Raiders rear up over hastily-raised berms of scorched earth, slamming back down with thunderous force. The enemy warriors who have held their ground are crushed beneath their tracks or buried in the dust. Squadrons of Predators fire syncopated volleys of heavy las-fire and the fiery contrails of Whirlwind missiles arc overhead in dizzying numbers.

Squadron upon squadron of Land Speeders flit like murderous raptors over the battlefield, strafing exposed enemy formations. Their multi-meltas breach bunkers, and Assault squads drop in their wake to end pockets of resistance with shrieking chain-blades and pistols.

The Burning Cloud strides in from the east, its guns wreathed in smoke and light as it sears the sky with magma blasts. Mushrooming explosions erupt in the centre of the fortifications. Adamantium walls are turned to slag with each impact. Air-bursting rockets flare from the Titan’s void shields, and its warhorn sounds like booming laughter.

Ventanus brings a tactical overlay onto his visor. Gold icons close like a fist on Fell’s fortification, but these are just the outer layers. Easily overcome. The real defences are a kilometre ahead, towering walls that can withstand a Titan’s guns, hellish bastions of dark steel and sunken bunker complexes that even a Shadowsword will struggle to breach.

But he has bigger guns than even a Reaver or a Shadowsword can mount.

Ventanus opens a vox-channel to Arcology X.

‘Meer Edv Tawren,’ he says. ‘Just like before.’

XXII

Tawren links with the orbital guns and disengages their safety protocols with an outward sweep of both hands, like an actor parting a curtain and taking the stage. It takes a moment for the multiple layers of security put in place since the invasion to disengage, but each platform comes under her command without issue.

Every orbital gun is now slaved to Arcology X.

She has control.

‘Brace for full bombardment,’ says Tawren.

XXIII

For a single, beautiful moment, Calth’s night ends.

The poisoned air lights up. Daylight returns.

But it is a false dawn, heralding not the promise of fresh beginnings, only endings.

The undersides of clouds heavy with acid rain glow for an instant as high powered lasers burn through them. Meson trails flash-burn the volatile, chemically-rich bands of vapour that have gathered above the strongpoint. The landscape is lit up for hundreds of kilometres as the sky catches fire.

All of this happens in an instant. Fractions of seconds later, searing beams of energy slice down from space like arrow-straight lightning. The beams make no sound in themselves, but the atmosphere ignites with their passage. Each impact is swiftly followed by a hard bang of displaced air.

Ventanus watches it through the filtering insulation of his armour’s auto-senses. Aural dampers resist deafening cracks of thunder that would otherwise rupture his eardrums. Visual protection keeps him from being blinded. Ceramite plates protect him from heat that would sear the flesh from his bones.

The exposed cultists have no such protection and their formations are reduced to swirling banks of meat-smoke. Skeletons have the flesh burned from them, blood boils and impregnable walls are left as little more than heaped rubble.

The first wave of overpressure hits and the ground quakes. The Shadowsword rocks back on its suspension as the percussive blast slams into it like an army of Contemptors slamming its hull with graviton hammers. Ventanus leans into the blast wave, riding out the pummelling force. His link with the super-heavy tells him that numerous onboard systems have failed. Feed lines rupture, hydraulics burst and delicate systems overload.

A kilometre from the nearest impact point, and still they are too close.

Laser lances and kinetic rounds all slam down on Foedral Fell’s stronghold, blowing out its pathetic blast shielding and rudimentary void fields. There is nothing left of the fortifications. Its soft underbelly has been exposed and Ventanus has the harpoon ready to thrust.

Excited chatter bursts over the vox. A hundred voices all saying the same thing.

‘Did you see that?’

‘Throne!’

‘There can’t be anything left alive in there!’

Ventanus knows there will be survivors. The Word Bearers will not be dug out so easily.

He cuts across the vox-network.

‘We still have a practical to achieve,’ he says. ‘Carry out your orders.’

The Ultramarines obey.

XXIV

Hol Beloth watches in horror as the horizon lights up from end to end. He knows what he is seeing, a holocaust of orbital fire concentrated in one place. He has memorised the geography of Calth and knows exactly who the wrath of the Ultramarines guns is striking.

‘Fell,’ he says.

Maloq Kartho nods.

Hot winds whip around the headless tower, billowing Hol Beloth’s cloak and filling his mouth with grey grit. The swaying motion of the tower forces him to keep his stance wide as the ground tilts alarmingly below him. He feels as though he stands upon the deck of a primitive longship. The sensation is not a welcome one.

The devastation of Calth is even more apparent from up here. It is a radiation-lashed death world that will always bear the mark of the Word Bearers. Despite what he is seeing, he takes a moment of pride in that fact, even as his own skin blisters.

More impacts slam into the ground, more fire lights the horizon. The first seismic shocks shake the tower. Glass fragments rain from gaping frames. Structural supports buckle and tumble earthwards. The tower slumps into its splitting foundations.

Collimated lance battery fire strikes the horizon. The hellish radiance it provides illuminates one stark fact.

‘You knew this was coming,’ says Hol Beloth.

Kartho shrugs and Hol Beloth hates the gesture. It is a gesture of giving up, of not feeling enough to care that something precious is dying. That shrug tells him that Maloq Kartho is no longer truly one of Lorgar’s sons, but is becoming something else entirely.

‘Fell had the biggest army,’ says Kartho, ‘and the grandest ambition.’

Hol Beloth tries not to feel slighted, knowing it is absurd in the face of such destruction. He tries to follow Kartho’s words to a logical conclusion, but those he reaches make no sense. Only one factor remains constant in his thoughts.

‘You engineered this, didn’t you?’ he says.

‘Of course,’ replies Kartho.

‘Fell and his warriors are gone, aren’t they?’

‘Not yet,’ replies Kartho, struggling with the gorget seals at his neck. ‘But soon.’

‘Why?’ asks Hol Beloth, knowing now that he will have to kill the Dark Apostle. Kartho has crossed a line, though for what purpose, he does not know.

‘Service to the Dark Monarchs requires a degree of sacrifice,’ says Kartho. ‘And the Ultramarines needed a target tempting enough to draw them from their cowardly bolthole.’

Kartho reaches up and removes his helmet. More accurately, he snaps his helmet apart in order to remove it. Zephyrs of dark smoke gust from within and Hol Beloth sees just how far the Dark Apostle has come in his service to Lorgar’s vision for the galaxy.

XXV

An electromagnetic haze hangs over the landscape. Dust swirls like ashen rain and heat blooms ripple the air over terrain that has been boiled to glass by the heat of multiple lance strikes. The Shadowsword crunches through the shattered remains of Foedral Fell’s strongpoint. The orbital weapons have destroyed his sheltering walls with horrifying ease.

Ventanus climbs down from the Shadowsword. Its hull is hot to the touch and the reactor ticks over noisily as it cools. Shapes move in the mist, but they are armoured in cobalt-blue and gold. They are Ultramarines, and they are marching alongside him.

His armour’s external pickups register a wide spectrum of exotic radiations and a lethal cocktail of poisonous elements in the air. This is only to be expected when such potent energies have been unleashed. Staggered lines of Legion warriors advance into the molten remnants of the enemy fortress, boltguns locked to their shoulders. They are blurred giants moving through a chemical fog that would dissolve the lungs of a mortal man with one breath.

Ventanus has his bolt pistol drawn and his sword unsheathed. He does not expect to use either in the immediate future, but a captain must be seen to be ready to fight. He sees no sign of the Word Bearers, but he knows that they will be here somewhere. They are Legion trained and Legion blooded. They will have survived this bombardment and will even now be readying a counter-attack.

Ventanus leads the Ultramarines deeper into the smoking, debris strewn wasteland. The Shadowsword rolls behind him, its engine a bone-deep rumble that he feels in his marrow. As the circle of Ultramarines tightens on the stronghold’s centre, a nagging suspicion takes shape in Ventanus’s head. Nebulous and unformed, but insistent.

Scattered groups of brotherhood soldiers have miraculously survived the barrage. They are blind and deaf, burned and desolate. They are slaughtered without mercy. The Ultramarines do not waste mass-reactives on them. Who knows when they will be resupplied? Chain-blades and fists put the enemy down, but there is little satisfaction in such wretched targets.

‘This is Ventanus,’ he voxes to his force commanders. ‘Report any sightings of enemy Legion forces.’

There are no reports of contacts beyond the scalded, crippled forms of the enemy’s mortal soldiery, and Ventanus feels a gnawing worry that something here is very wrong.

‘Where are the Word Bearers?’ he asks himself.

If Foedral Fell is not here, then where is he?

At the heart of the fortress the Ultramarines find a vast crater, a nightmarish hell of electrical fires and scorched meat. Almost nothing is left standing, and what the barrage did not level in the opening moments, secondary explosions and burning ammunition depots have knocked flat. Here and there, Ventanus sees evidence of retrenchments and redoubts, but it is hard to make out anything for sure any more. Tawren’s precision strikes have seen to that.

The Shadowsword’s main gun traverses over his head, searching for a target, but finding nothing worthy of its fire. The Burning Cloud is silhouetted in the flames, a great engine of destruction standing over the doom of its foe.

A dust- and grime-coated warrior emerges from the haze and raises a hand.

‘I thought there’d be at least someone left alive to fight,’ says Sydance.

‘So did I,’ replies Ventanus, sheathing his sword and mag-locking his pistol to his thigh.

‘You think they died in the bombardment?’

‘It looks that way,’ says Ventanus, though it seems too convenient an explanation.

‘Not much of a fortress then,’ says Sydance. ‘Lord Dorn would have words.’

Ventanus says nothing in reply, his friend’s sentiment striking at the nagging suspicion that has been building ever since the first shots were fired. He stops in his tracks as his thoughts cohere on an inherent flaw in what has happened here.

‘This fortress could never have stood,’ he says. ‘It’s completely ridiculous.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Why build anything we could level from orbit in moments?’ says Ventanus. ‘Why build it above ground at all? It doesn’t make any sense.’

‘Maybe they couldn’t find anywhere underground?’

‘They could have found somewhere to get underground,’ says Ventanus. ‘This isn’t making any sense. Damn it, what are we missing?’

The winds are clearing the smoke and haze, and Ventanus has something of an answer when he sees the cracked structure at the very heart of the fortress. Like the hardened structure of an aircraft hangar, it has withstood the barrage enough to remain standing. Sections of its roof have caved in where the supporting walls have collapsed. Ventanus can see no defensive works in its construction.

It is a giant dome, embellished with elaborate carvings, a pair of decorative towers and a wide entrance without gates. Its construction is grandiose and Ventanus realises he has seen its like before.

‘What do you think that is?’ asks Sydance. ‘A keep? Somewhere to make a last stand?’

‘No,’ says Ventanus. ‘It’s not a keep, but I know what it is now. I’ve seen buildings like this before.’

‘Where?’

‘On Monarchia,’ says Ventanus. ‘It’s a temple.’

XXVI

Ingenium Subiaco does not remember falling asleep, but that is surely what has happened.

It is understandable. Toiling in perpetual twilight, with no rest in the darkness and no respite from the task in hand, no one could remain awake for as long as he has. He is dreaming, of that he is sure, for he travels the same silvered caves of his nightmares.

He has come here night after night, dragged down into horrors that play out in an endless loop. That the experience never changes offers no respite, only dark foreknowledge of the nightmarish flight from the multi-jointed creatures with the polished steel claws that tap, tap, tap upon the rock.

The cave is the same strange silver, glistening with moisture and with the now omnipresent threat lurking just out of sight. He knows the apparently solid walls of the cave are nothing of the sort. He knows what lurks behind the fragile skin of reality and, as much as he wishes to, he cannot unknow it.

Half-glimpsed forms flit around him like darting smoke.

He moves through the caves hurriedly, expecting that at any moment the walls will start peeling back to reveal the corruption beneath. He hears voices, but they are meaningless to him and he cannot answer them. At every step he feels as though he is being guided, but by who or what, he cannot say.

The sense of expectation is almost unendurable, like a guillotine blade suspended a hair’s breadth over the back of his neck. Subiaco wills himself to wake, but he has long since learned that he is powerless to control the inevitable progression of this terror.

Sure enough, he hears the faint sound of tapping, like rats in the walls.

Tap, tap, tap...

Subiaco breaks into a run as he hears the clack of claws again and again.

Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap...

Louder now, coming from all around him. This is new, this is his nightmare moving to a higher level of terror. Then, as though a flame has been taken to the papier-mâché backing of the walls, they begin to disintegrate, blackening and spiralling away like dying embers. The walls slough from the familiar rusted lattice supporting them and the terrible void behind is revealed once again.

It churns like the depths of a hideously polluted ocean, saturated with the filth and mire of an entire species. What is in there is not alien. It is not the horrific by-product of some race inimical to mankind. With unasked-for clarity, he understands that this ocean of madness belongs to his people. Humanity creates this realm of insanity, and Subiaco runs as he hears the claws of his daemonic pursuers tearing their way through once more.

This time they are not just behind him. They are all around him.

The wall ahead of him bulges as something presses its unnatural bulk against the lath, and Subiaco sees gleaming fangs and amber eyes, each slitted with a dagger slash of onyx. The tear splits wider and a brood of beasts with claws of polished steel spill into the hollow cavern. Their blades gleam with murder and their flesh is fashioned from the skinless bodies of everyone he knows and loves. Screaming faces howl in torment from heaving, animal flanks, and their limbs are the beasts’ limbs, fused together in some awful biological abortion. The skulls of the beasts are metallic, gleaming wetly through pasted-on skin. Even stretched out he recognises the faces there, and his scream is one of abject loss.

Subiaco runs, and the beasts are hard on his heels, stalking him, toying with him.

They could catch and kill him any time they want, but there is too much pleasure to be taken in the hunt. He feels their hot breath upon him, rancid and empty.

Subiaco knows there is only one way out and he races onwards, hoping with every breathless stride that he will reach the great cyclopean gateway with its golden seal.

Only the gateway offers sanctuary.

Subiaco wakes, the cries of the daemons ringing in his ears.

And nothing has changed.

XXVII

The interior of the temple is a slaughterhouse, and Ventanus can make no sense of it.

It is cold inside, freezing even. The heat from the dying star and the bombardment does not penetrate here, and steam rises from every legionary’s backpack. Columns of light stab down from the cracked roof and the poisonous fumes of burning war materiel linger at the openings in the wall, as though unwilling to enter.

Ventanus smelled the blood before he took one step within, and now he has an answer as to what has become of the Word Bearers.

They are in the temple and they are all dead.

Their bodies are arranged in what is clearly a pattern, each one apparently still standing.

This is an illusion created by the fact that each enemy legionary is held upright by a sharpened spar of blackened iron. Several thousand Word Bearers have been impaled here, their bodies arranged in a form that clearly has some significance. What that might be is a mystery to Ventanus.

Eikos Lamiad and Kiuz Selaton lead their warriors through the columns of dead Word Bearers. Selaton carries the Fourth Company standard, that glorious, dented reminder of all they have lost and all they fight to keep.

The Contemptor, Telemechrus, keeps pace with Lamiad, as though he is the tetrarch’s personal bodyguard. The spinning barrels of his assault cannon whine as the weapon sweeps left and right in search of a living target.

Sydance stays at Ventanus’s side. His expression is unreadable behind his helm’s visor, but his body language is unambiguous.

‘Who did this?’ he asks. He doesn’t understand yet, but Ventanus does.

‘They did it to themselves.’

Sydance’s head snaps around. Ventanus doesn’t know whether the other captain is more horrified at the idea of warriors doing this to themselves or that Ventanus has understanding enough to know it. He shakes his head and moves on. Nearly a thousand Ultramarines stand within the temple, shocked beyond words at this latest atrocity. None of them can make sense of what they are seeing. It is too alien to their understanding and fits no model of war they have been taught.

Ventanus approaches the nearest Word Bearer and lifts his head. The dead man wears no helmet and his face has been cut open with hard slashes from a sharp blade. His features are contorted with a mixture of horror and devotion. The symbols are oddly geometric and unpleasant to look at in ways beyond the obvious.

The pattern of impaled bodies becomes clearer the closer Ventanus gets to the centre of the temple. The groups of Ultramarines are naturally funnelled together as they approach the middle of the vaulted chamber. Ventanus feels the temperature drop still further.

‘They are arranged in equidistant columns,’ says Lamiad, his half flesh, half cracked ceramic face managing to convey the disgust they all feel. ‘They radiate outwards from a central point.’

‘Suggesting that what’s at the centre is important,’ says Ventanus.

‘A fane’s nave is designed to lead to a central altar,’ agrees Lamiad. ‘The place of worship.’

‘Worship?’ Sydance spits the word. ‘I thought we’d cured them of that half a century ago.’

‘Clearly the lesson did not take,’ says Lamiad, gesturing with his one good arm to the sacrificial massacre around them. The limb he lost early in the conflict could be restored, his face repaired. The technology and the craftsmen required are available, but Lamiad has chosen to remain as he is. His mythology has become important to Calth and it is a sacrifice he bears willingly.

Ventanus has the utmost admiration for Eikos Lamiad, and hopes he will be as strong as the tetrarch when the time comes for him to make such a sacrifice.

‘So what’s at the centre?’ asks Selaton, holding the standard at his side. ‘I don’t see an altar.’

Selaton is right. There is no altar, merely a sunken pit, from which issue tendrils of drifting mist. Ventanus leads the way, his fingers closing over the hilt of his sword. Everyone here is already dead, but the reassurance of a weapon in his hand is always welcome.

As Ventanus approaches the pit, he sees that it goes down for three metres, and at its centre is another impaled body. A Word Bearer, one clad in crimson armour bedecked with fluttering oath paper and stamped with golden scriptwork.

This is no line warrior. Every plate and edge has been crafted by hand, shaped by a master artificer and polished with the devotion that only a high-ranking war leader could earn.

The parchment-white face is that of a cannibal ghoul, a lipless horror of gaunt cheekbones, sunken eyes and a hairless scalp. More of the geometric symbols have been cut into the bone of his exposed skull where the skin has been peeled away. A ragged hole has been smashed through into the empty void of his brainpan.

‘Foedral Fell, I presume,’ says Ventanus.

Bodies are heaped around Fell’s corpse: cultist warriors, their bodies cut open and emptied. They are staged in poses of devotion, arms chained to the spike-topped staff upon which Fell is impaled, mouths slack with praise, eyes stitched open in adoration.

‘What’s that he’s stuck with?’ asks Selaton. ‘It’s different from the others. That symbol...’

‘I saw the same thing over and over again,’ says Sydance. ‘I’d always thought it was some kind of unit marking. A load of the rabble we broke through to get to you at Numinus carried staves just like it.’

‘No,’ says Eikos Lamiad. ‘It is not a unit marking, not as we understand it. It is a totem, an icon of their new masters. As we still carry the aquila, our enemies now carry this. They call it the Octed.’

Ventanus feels a spasm of revulsion at the word. He looks at the staff, its thick, inscribed haft and eight radiating spoke blades mirroring the arrangement of the dead Word Bearers. He has seen enemy champions carrying this symbol before them, brandishing it like a holy relic.

‘We should get out of here,’ says Ventanus. ‘Let Tawren’s guns level this place.’

Foedral Fell’s head snaps up and his lipless sneer pulls tight over his skull.

‘Guns won’t save you now,’ says a bleak voice that tears from the corpse before a froth of tar-black fluid vomits from its mouth onto the corpses at its feet. ‘The Neverborn are coming for you all...’

The Ultramarines step back from the pit, revolted and shocked. Foedral Fell’s body spasms – a series of bone-snapping convulsions that would surely have killed him had any life remained in him. The Word Bearer dances in his impalement as a tidal wave of black bilious fluid, noxious and viscous, continues to pour from his mouth.

It is an impossible amount, more than a body could possibly contain. It squirts from his eyes and ears. It flows from his nose and jets from his mouth like a pressurised hose. The pit fills with piceous fluid, a seething cesspool of the darkest corruption. Foedral Fell’s skull is now fully submerged, but Ventanus can still hear his gleeful mantra.

The Neverborn are coming...

The Neverborn are coming...

Only the bladed finial of the Octed staff remains above the oily liquid. Inky smoke coils from its spiked tips. Ropes of it writhe like mating serpents, spreading overhead like a veil of shadows, reaching out to the impaled corpses spread throughout the fane.

‘Back!’ cries Ventanus, now understanding that they have been lured into a trap; the very doctrines that saved them from destruction now turned against them. ‘Get to your vehicles and withdraw. Go! Now!’

The pit bubbles over, the protoplasmic black ooze spreading over the bloody ground like an unstopped oil well. Bubbles of unnatural matter form and burst, carrying the stink of the charnel house and the buzz of a million corpse-eating flies.

The Neverborn are coming...

The Ultramarines retreat in good order from the growing pool of darkness at the heart of the chamber. A miasma of black smoke fills the temple, the vile breath of corrupt and daemonic gods.

The Neverborn are coming for you all...

And the dead warriors of Foedral Fell open eyes of blackest night.

XXVIII

Hol Beloth steps away from the Dark Apostle as he sees the curling horn was not some ornamentation wrought upon his helm, but a part of Maloq Kartho’s skull. The ridged appendage of bone extrudes from a swollen mass of necrotised tissue, veined with blood and coated with sticky, foul-smelling fluid.

Nor is that the only change in Maloq Kartho’s appearance.

His skin has taken on a rugose quality and his eyes are now opaque orbs of sickly orange.

‘Do you know Sorot Tchure?’ asks Kartho, his mouth a rip across a yellow skull. His lips are bloody where serrated, triangular teeth have torn them. ‘He understands many of the hidden truths of the universe, not least of which is the power of betrayal. He knows something of the potency of its impact in the immaterial realm. To betray a friend is one thing, a trusted friend even more so. He took that lesson to heart when he began this.’

Hol Beloth had heard the name, a whisper of one destined for great things.

‘But Lord Aurelian taught me that to betray a brother... ah, now that holds the greatest power of all,’ continues Kartho. ‘Their screams were like the Phoenician’s sweetest wine, their blood a baptism richer than any rained down by Angron himself. Fell was the greatest prize, a warrior whose dreams were on the very cusp of being realised when they were snatched away. Such towering desire unmade and dashed before his very eyes...’

Kartho gurgles with laughter at the memory.

Hol Beloth’s hand slides around the grip of his sword.

‘Fell is gone,’ says Kartho, ‘but you can still claim what he desired.’

‘Why should I trust you?’

‘Because you have no choice,’ says Kartho, pointing towards the horizon with a hand that looks a lot less like a hand with every passing moment.

‘Watch the melodrama of the universe at play,’ says Kartho as a darkly radiant light erupts on the horizon. Hol Beloth lifts a gauntlet to shield himself from the new sun that boils up in a mushrooming cloud of atomic fire. He knows where that sun has touched down and scorched the world to glass.

‘What have you done?’ he gasps.

The Dark Apostle does not answer, dropping to one knee and gasping in dark rapture.

‘What have you done?’ demands Hol Beloth again.

‘The old beliefs pass away, and a great light shows us the way,’ says Kartho, looking up at him with a predatory grin as he quotes from the Book of Lorgar. ‘Now brace yourself.’

Horrified, Hol Beloth can only shake his head.

‘For what?’ he asks.

‘A fall.’

XXIX

The conference chamber of the Ultimus is a hair’s breadth from panic. There was no warning, no hint of yet another disaster, but when it came, it was as sudden and shocking as the moment the Word Bearers first opened fire.

Another underground shelter is gone, transformed into a seething atomic cauldron of death. Even without the geo-sats, Arcology X’s surface augurs are more than able to read the unimaginable spike of radioactive energy from the west. Picters and rad-counters combine their data on the plotting table, and Tawren watches as the towering pyrocumulus of fire-lit smoke takes shape on the western horizon.

‘The Emperor protects,’ weeps Captain Ullyet, clutching at something hung around his neck. ‘He is the Light and the Way.’

‘We just lost another one, didn’t we?’ says Hamadri, gripping the edge of the plotter tightly as the first shockwaves transmitted through the lithosphere shake the walls of the Ultimus.

Tawren nods, too busy sifting the myriad inloads from her linked surveyors and augurs. Orbital scans combine with surface readings to build a more complete picture of what they have just lost.

A bone-deep rumble fills the room as the surface of Calth is wrenched and torn by the force of what Tawren now understands is a subterranean detonation powerful enough to have ripped its way to the surface. These are just the first shockwaves racing from the blast; there will be worse to come.

‘Which one?’ asks Ullyet, the steel in his voice unwavering as dust and shards of ceiling tiles fall to the floor in a clatter of stone fragments. ‘Magnesi? Gabrinius? Which one, damn it?’

His lapse into catechism has passed and he is barking orders like a soldier again.

‘Triangulating now,’ says Tawren.

The image of the atomic storm cloud fades from the plotter and a base-level topographical map of Calth’s surface takes its place. Data coheres, readings correlate. An icon to the west begins to blink furiously.

Hamadri and Ullyet look up in puzzlement, but Tawren is just as surprised.

‘Uranik Radial,’ she says, as though not yet ready to believe her own incontrovertible data conclusion. ‘It’s gone. Destroyed.’

‘But...’ begins Ullyet.

‘That’s Hol Beloth,’ finishes Hamadri as the main blast wave hits Arcology X.

XXX

They haul themselves from the spikes impaling them to the ground. Armour splits, dead flesh tears. Ventanus doesn’t see any blood pour from the huge holes in their bodies. Any fluid left in them has long since curdled in their veins. They move stiffly, as though they have forgotten how to walk.

Or they’re just learning.

The Neverborn. Ventanus does not know the term, but he immediately understands its substance. These are the fleshless horrors the Word Bearers brought forth from the warp. Nightmarish xenos things from a dimension shut away from the eyes of humanity for good reason. They look out from dead men’s skulls and he feels their insatiable hunger.

He doesn’t need to issue an order. The horror of the situation demands individual response.

Bolter fire rips through the reanimated Word Bearers, each one bleeding black smoke from the exploded meat of their bodies. Wounds sufficient to put down two legionaries barely slow them. They come on with limbs hanging off, bones shattered.

The warriors in red crash against the warriors in blue, all adaption complete. These are no sluggish revenants, but warriors as strong and fast in death as they were in life. The numbers are nothing like even, but the daemon things squatting in the Word Bearers’ skulls do not take up their hosts’ weapons to fight. Claws and teeth are their killing tools, not guns. An eternity of war in a timeless dimension has seen to that.

It is the only advantage the Ultramarines have.

Ventanus shoots with pinpoint accuracy. None of his shots are wasted.

Kill shots to the head every time.

Inside every skull a squalling mass of shrieking darkness, solid and gelatinous. A daemonic parasite taken up residence in the body of a dead man that vanishes in a screaming implosion of displaced matter. He shoots until the hammer strikes an empty chamber, ejects the magazine and reloads with a fluid economy of motion. He shoots until his last magazine is expended and then draws his power sword.

The Neverborn throw themselves at him, driven by desperate hunger and loathing. Ventanus sees the hatred in their dead eyes and does not know what he has done to earn it. His sword cuts through armour made heavy without power. Kinetic shock travels up his arm with every blow, but he is energised and ready for this fight.

He came here to kill Word Bearers and, damn it, that is what he will do.

The Neverborn are not silent. They scream as they claw at the Ultramarines and they shriek as they die. Their cries are tormented, but Ventanus has no pity left in him. Not for himself and certainly not for the Word Bearers.

Strobing flashes of gunfire light the dark umbra spreading overhead.

Ventanus and Sydance fight back to back. Both have exhausted their stock of ammunition.

‘A few more than twelve this time,’ grunts Sydance as he hacks his chainsword down through a Word Bearer’s collarbone and sternum with a two-handed grip.

‘You mean thirteen,’ says Ventanus.

‘No, only ever twelve,’ replies Sydance with a grin.

Ventanus understands that grin.

They are brothers and they are equals, and there is a purity to this fight. There are no lofty ideals at stake, no grand strategy in play. It is simple life or death, and there is something to be said for such simplicity.

Ventanus cuts heads from shoulders, opens chests and hacks legs from hips. His blade is always in motion. He employs every move he knows to stay alive; those learned from the blademasters of Macragge and those picked up in a lifetime of desperate brawls in almost two hundred years of war.

Telemechrus slaughters the Word Bearers by the dozen. His assault cannon shreds bodies and renders even a corpse warrior unable to fight. They claw at his body, beating broken fists to pulp against his casket. The Contemptor relishes this melee, fighting alongside Eikos of the Arm and his Shield Bearers.

The Tetrarch of Konor is no less lethal with only the one fighting limb. He has fired his pistol empty and kills with the precise strokes of a master fencer. He too has learned the lesson that the only way to put the enemy down for good is to make the decapitating strike.

Selaton and his squads are carrying the banner towards the arched portal through which they entered. He is not withdrawing, he is clearing a corridor for the rest of them to use.

Ventanus shouts the order to fall back.

Something huge and crimson slams into him, knocking him to the ground. He rolls as an armoured boot slams down. He swings his sword for the warrior’s centre-mass, but the blade clashes against the bladed Octed finial of a rune-inscribed staff.

‘Death has come to you,’ says Foedral Fell, still skewered.

‘Death will come when I’m good and ready,’ answers Ventanus.

XXXI

The world spins. Up becomes down and the ground falls away from Hol Beloth.

The starscraper, already on the brink of collapse, needed only a nudge to come crashing down. The blast wave from the cyclonic warhead’s detonation at Uranik Radial shatters what uneasy arrangement of vectors still holds it erect. Its foundations break apart and the structural members at its base buckle like wire in the face of the pounding shockwave.

Ten floors collapse in an instant, blown away like dust in a hurricane.

The building slumps, its own weight crushing it and dragging it down.

Hol Beloth grabs onto an exposed rebar, but it won’t be enough to save him. His stomach lurches and he feels momentarily weightless. He hears Kartho’s crazed laughter over the crescendo of shattering steel and exploding permacrete. Floor slabs snap like tinder and plasteel stanchions capable of holding up a building kilometres high unravel like twine.

Debris cascades around him, battering him and threatening to tear him from his handhold. The building itself wants to murder him, but he won’t let it. Hol Beloth has to stay alive long enough to kill Maloq Kartho.

The sky falls away. Through a break in the flooring slab that was once over a thousand metres above ground, he sees the surface of the world opening up.

Wide chasms rip jagged traceries through Lanshear’s outskirts. Hair-fine fault lines tear open and abyssal canyons gape like gateways to the underworld. Vast clouds of dust and smoke jet into the sky in a cloud to match that above the fiery crater that once housed his army.

Hol Beloth can see nothing of the world around him.

Everything is noise and fire, dust and impacts.

Then he hits the ground. The starscraper doesn’t stop.

Metres-thick columns smash through the surface of Calth like piledrivers slammed down by an angry god. The starscraper’s colossal mass and momentum plunge it through the rock like a sword thrust. Hundreds of metres down, previously unknown cave voids are broken into. Unconnected galleries and sinkholes appearing on no map are suddenly open to the sky.

Hol Beloth sees nothing of this. Hundreds of thousands of metric tonnes cascade down into the revealed cave systems. He is a speck of mortal flesh in a hurricane of aeons-old rock. The plates of his armour shatter like glass. Bones break and he feels the shock of furnace heat as his biological repair mechanisms fight to keep him alive.

He loses his grip on the rebar and drops through a storm of bludgeoning rock.

He falls, spinning downwards from impact to impact. Blood fills his helmet, threatening to drown him. He slams into a rock wall and it is torn away. He cannot see anything but darkness and a blitzing torrent of debris. Steel and glass fall with him in a shimmering rain.

Over the unending fury of deafening noise, Hol Beloth still hears the maddening laughter of the Dark Apostle.

At last his fall ends.

His broken body plunges into an icy lake of dark water. It is deep and the fortunate angle of impact means he only breaks six of his ribs and not his spinal column. Freezing water enfolds him, pouring down his throat and into his lungs. He gags and coughs, the deep cold shocking him from the disorientation of his fall.

Autonomic responses take over. His throat seals his primary lungs off. Implanted breathing organs alongside his genhanced ones take over. They siphon what little air is left in them and shunt that oxygen directly to his brain. Electrochemical shocks throughout his body jolt him into life, self-induced fibrillation to get his limbs working again.

Hol Beloth thrashes uselessly. He has no buoyancy, his armour is dragging him down.

Legionary armour is airtight and therefore watertight, but his has been broken open and shattered. Water rushes to fill it and the weight is enormous. He struggles to fight its sucking ballast, but his body is too badly hurt, his soul too grievously broken.

Hol Beloth sinks deeper, a stream of bubbles spuming from his lips.

An arm plunges into the water and a clawed hand grips the broken edge of his pauldron. It is bestial and scaled. Yellowed talons score deep grooves in the ceramite as he is dragged back to the surface.

Hol Beloth is hauled onto a shore of debris and rubble, gasping for breath. He rolls and vomits twin lungfuls of water so cold it burns his throat. He retches until his body is empty of fluid, tasting blood and bile in his mouth. He feels the intramuscular sphincters of his airways switch as he shifts back to his regular breathing pattern.

Cold air has never tasted so good.

Steam rises from his body, his skin hot to the touch. His incredible physiology is repairing damage that should have killed him outright. That he is alive at all is a miracle, and he looks up to see just how far he has fallen. Dust fogs the air and a rain of debris tumbles into the cave from the jagged tear in its ceiling. Latticed steelwork from the collapsed starscraper webs the opening torn in the rock like crude stitches, and sparking lengths of high-tensile wire and data cabling dangle like jungle creepers.

The gloom makes it hard to judge the cave’s dimensions, but it is not large. Perhaps a hundred metres at its widest. The water level of the lake is rising as more debris falls into it.

Maloq Kartho squats at the edge of the lake, impossibly unscathed by their fall. Icewater laps at his feet. Hol Beloth sees there is something wrong with the Dark Apostle. Darkness clings to the warrior, but it looks like there are too many joints in his legs.

Kartho turns his horned head and says, ‘You live,’ as though he is surprised.

‘You destroyed my army,’ says Hol Beloth.

Kartho nods. ‘Rabble,’ he says. ‘Fodder. A meat price.’

‘Why?’

‘You had no need of them,’ says Kartho. ‘You have a higher purpose than marching at the head of debased mortals.’

‘What purpose?’ asks Hol Beloth, hating that he cannot hide his urgent desire.

The Dark Apostle cocks his head to one side, as though the answer is self-evident, but furnishes him with no reply. He looks towards the broken ceiling of the cave, expectant.

‘And though the heavens rain fire upon the Bearers of the Truth, yet shall there be a greater boon given unto them,’ says Kartho, pulling himself erect. He is taller now, his body swelling with vitality. The Dark Apostle is on the verge of something incredible, a transformation or an ascension. Darkness seethes within him, a dangerous energy only kept in check by a monumental effort of will.

The coming hours will either transform Kartho or destroy him.

Hol Beloth does not know which he would rather see.

XXXII

Ventanus raises his sword in a two-handed block as Foedral Fell – or whatever dark force is animating his body – swings a toothed falchion in a diagonal cut. The force behind the blow is enormous. Energised sparks spray from the impact of the blades, and ozone stink fills his nostrils as the servos of his battle armour augment his strength. He rolls his wrists, letting the roaring teeth scrape down his power sword.

He sways aside from a blindingly swift return stroke and thrusts for Fell’s groin. It is a good strike, powerful and well-aimed. The point lances the crimped joint between Fell’s pelvis and thigh.

Ventanus twists, and wrenches the blade clear.

Black blood spills out. The stench is awful. The worst thing in the world. Even the filters of his helm cannot keep it out. He gags, retching dryly.

The blood stops flowing and Fell is not even slowed.

‘You kill my kin,’ says the Neverborn, a froth of disintegrating matter spilling over its lips.

Ventanus does not answer and attacks again.

They trade blows back and forth, and though his skill is the greater, the speed and strength of his opponent is phenomenal. Three times he avoids death by the narrowest margin. He hears his name called, but can’t spare a moment’s concentration to see who is shouting to him.

The sound of gunfire is a distant echo. The flash of mass-reactive detonations barely registers. He is in the middle of furious battle, but all he sees is the daemon creature trying to kill him. Fell still has the Octed staff piercing him, though it has snapped inside his body. Only the top half remains.

Two warriors in cobalt-blue and gold appear beside Ventanus. One has a face of broken porcelain and flesh, the other is in the battle colours of a Fourth Company captain. He knows them and loves them as brothers. Eikos Lamiad fights with economical grace, Lyros Sydance with vengeful fury. His brother captain was always a man given to passionate rages, most of which needed tempering, but Ventanus is grateful for this one.

To face a single Ultramarine is daunting. Three is certain death.

Foedral Fell laughs in their faces. His falchion is a blur, blocking, parrying and attacking with a speed that should be impossible. Liquid black fire leaps along the length of his blade and where it touches it burns Legion plate like dry wood.

‘The Saviour, the Lancer and the Cripple...’ giggles Fell, spinning and slamming an elbow into Lamiad’s cheek. Facial plates crack further. ‘The warp knows you...’

‘Bastard!’ cries Sydance, lunging forward. His sword cuts down through Fell’s left arm. A spray of the foul blood washes out, along with a host of wriggling things, segmented and waving like worms. Corpse feeders. Sydance gags on the stench and Fell’s falchion sweeps up to take his head.

Ventanus blocks the blow and hammers his boot into Fell’s gut. The Word Bearer staggers under the force of it, the bladed finials of the staff reflecting the light of gunfire. Something fast moving and powerful strikes it – a rogue shell or a ricochet.

The daemonic face behind Fell’s eyes shudders. Pain wracks its body and a gout of boiling black fluid jets from its mouth. It staggers and Ventanus sees his opening. He spins inside Fell’s guard and rams his sword through his breastplate.

Lightning streams the length of the blade as it punches through ceramite, flesh, bone and the stuff of night. The tip breaks through the backplate of Fell’s armour, but the metal of the blade has aged a thousand years.

Silvered steel is now corroded rust that flakes to ash within moments of exposure to the real world.

A pistoning fist slams Ventanus back as he hears his name being shouted again. He hits the ground hard and tries to rise. Something is holding him down.

Eikos Lamiad, his face a horror of ruined flesh where his mask has been shattered, has him pinned to the ground.

‘Tetrarch!’ shouts Ventanus. ‘What–’

Lamiad shakes his head as a towering shadow falls over them.

A giant in tar-slicked ceramite. A titan who fell from the skies and lived to tell of it. One arm is a crushing fist, the other a colossal cannon of spinning barrels. A hurricane of fire roars from its muzzles. Hundreds of shells expend in moments.

Foedral Fell’s body explodes.

The assault cannon’s fire is relentless. Unforgiving.

Its aim never wavers and the wretched matter of the Neverborn is atomised.

‘You will not. Harm. Him,’ says Telemechrus the Contemptor.

XXXIII

Maloq Kartho squats by the water’s edge. Waiting.

Time passes, but without his helmet Hol Beloth has no way to accurately measure it. Hours – two, maybe three. He drifts in and out of consciousness as his body diverts energy from his thought processes to healing.

There is no change in the light.

They have survived a fall that ought to have killed them instantly, which tells Hol Beloth that the Dark Apostle still has an endgame in mind. Yet they have wasted time in this cave doing nothing. If there is mayhem to be made, then Hol Beloth wishes to be about it.

Determined to take action, he looks for a way out.

Fifty metres to his left, a wide fissure in the walls leads deeper into the rock. Something metallic gleams on the ground next to the opening.

Hol Beloth forces himself upright. Pain from numerous fractures shoots up his legs. He forces it down as he limps around the edge of the lake to the fissure. Stagnant air wafts from the opening. He takes a long breath, his neuroglottis picking out chemical traces of welded steel and setting permacrete.

He squats at the opening and lifts the gleaming object from the ground, turning it around in his hands like a precious relic.

It is a cartographae drone, a bulbous cylinder equipped with a repulsor field and numerous auspex arrays. Its power cells are virtually exhausted and its calliper limbs twitch like the feelers of a dying insect. A blinking red gemlight on its frontal lobe tells Hol Beloth that it is trying and failing to link back to its control station. A Techmarine could easily repair it, but he has no skill with machines.

It takes a moment for Hol Beloth to realise the significance of this find.

He turns as booming splashes, like boulders falling into the lake, fill the cave with spray. Maloq Kartho rises on his oddly-jointed legs. He wipes cold water from his face as more huge objects splash down into the water from above. The surface of the lake churns and slaps the rock. A trail of bubbles moves towards to the shore.

Hol Beloth watches as Eriesh Kigal and his Terminators rise from the dark waters like drowned sailors returned to unnatural life. Water pours from the battered plates of their armour and as each one reaches the Dark Apostle, he is anointed with three crosswise slashes across his breastplate. Without knowing how, Hol Beloth senses a significance to the thrice clawed mark.

Then a bloated shape of hard red metal emerges from the water, a leviathan of the deeps. The Dreadnought Zu Gunara. Its casket drips black water and what look like molten scads of metal that are running in rivulets from its armoured flanks. It is as though the Dreadnought is melting, as though the void-dark within is consuming the matter containing its substance.

It still carries the weapon stolen from CV427/Praxor, its bio-hazard symbol like a beacon of hope in the gloom of the cave.

‘And the devourer of life shall be borne into the belly of the Beast,’ says Kartho, turning to Hol Beloth. The Dark Apostle gestures to the fissure in the rock where Hol Beloth found the damaged drone. A forked tongue of corrugated flesh licks jagged teeth. Hol Beloth knows the Dark Apostle tastes what he has tasted.

Turned earth, blasted rock. Construction.

A way in.

‘The Unveiled One shall open the way,’ says Kartho, ‘and he that was lost shall lead the faithful to the slaughter.’

Hol Beloth holds up the cartographae drone. Purpose fills him and he throws the machine out into the water. It drops into the darkness, the red gemlight fading as it sinks to the bottom of the lake. He looks back at the fissure that leads to the heart of the enemy’s lair.

‘The belly of the beast?’ says Hol Beloth, the pain of his many wounds forgotten.

‘We are the blade that opens it,’ promises Maloq Kartho.

XXXIV

Subiaco cannot escape the grip of his nightmare.

He is awake. He knows this, but wishes he were not.

His nightmare has followed him into the waking world.

His wife’s face, the skin ruddy and gracefully aged, is crumbling parchment, flaking and diseased. Even his children, youngsters barely of age to stand in the Youth Auxilia, bear the scars of time’s assault.

He flees his hab, barely dressed, and sees that everything he has feared has come to pass. Beyond the walls of the Ultimus, the billions of tonnes of rock that keeps them safe is no more than a paper-thin veneer of flaking ash and wire, a structure so fragile he cannot bear to look at it or the unimaginable, ocean-dark presences uncoiling behind it.

The planet shifts and creaks as void-born gales strip the world’s substance away with every breath. Subiaco screams, but his words are snatched away by cold winds whose origin has no place and no time. Thousands upon thousands of faces surround him, but he sees them for what they truly are: rotting puppets that degenerate with every passing second. A multitude that does not know how close their death really is.

Tap, tap, tap...

Subiaco hears the polished steel talons of the beasts once again. They have broken the walls of sleep and are coming for him. The ragged, cloth-tear sound of dread claws being ripped through dimensions grates down his spine and he breaks into a run.

Wounded faces turn and question him. Their words are gurgling death rattles. He pushes past them all, knocking many to the ground. Wet claws and lamprey-like mouths press up from the ground, sensing the nearness of prey. Nobody sees them, and Subiaco’s warnings fall upon deaf ears.

Subiaco runs, down into the deeps, away from the masses of the dead-in-waiting.

He runs past the places he has worked since finding sanctuary in Arcology X. He runs until the acid burns in his limbs and his lungs fill with bile. The hunting beasts are close. He feels their nearness. He dares not look back. The very sight of them will paralyse him, and there is only one escape.

He hears voices behind him and ignores them.

At last he reaches his salvation, the cyclopean gate with the Clockwork Angel puzzle sealing it shut. He is almost hysterical with relief. There are giants here, warriors whose bodies are just as rotten as those above, but which are locked in an eternal battle with the forces that drive their flesh to its doom.

Subiaco ignores them. They are just as dead as the thousands of people above.

Tap, tap, tap...

He has no time. None.

Subiaco climbs to the Clockwork Angel, and it seems that its wings reach out to enfold him. He hears his name barked in the booming tones of a being whose physiology has been so altered and enhanced that it barely qualifies as human.

The authority and warning are unmistakable, but he is too far gone to stop now.

He punches the solution to the age-old riddle of the Clockwork Angel into the ornate keyboard of brass and jet. The mechanisms of the door break apart as command codes of the Ingenium are accepted by the locking seal. Resonant harmonic frequencies blast through the permacrete, turning it to powder in the blink of an eye.

A falling curtain of dissolving permacrete is the last thing he sees as his chest cavity detonates explosively in a fan of shattered bone.

Sergeant Ankrion’s mass-reactive kills Ingenium Subiaco instantly.

His body falls from the platform before the locking seal as whetted chainfists, lightning claws and thunder hammers tear through from the other side.

XXXV

Eriesh Kigal kills the first Ultramarine with a spray of bolts from his combi-weapon. He kills the next one too. His warriors fan out around him. Those with guns fill the space with explosive bolts. Ricochets and splintered rock fly through the air. Answering gunfire spanks from the massive plates of their Terminator armour. Las-rounds are ineffective and mass-reactives only marginally less so.

Hol Beloth has only his sword and wades into the fight like one of Angron’s gladiators. Aside from a few Ultramarines who are even now falling back, there is little sport to be had here. His blade is wet and red, but it is the thin blood of mortals. It drips from his blade as Maloq Kartho squeezes his growing bulk through the hole torn in the shuttering that sealed this tunnel off from the underground lake.

Zu Gunara comes next, still carrying the world-killer in his mechanised arms.

Word of their coming will already be racing to the heart of this arcology.

Fear will strike at the hearts of its people. They will know that death has come to them.

Hol Beloth’s body is a searing furnace. His skin smokes with it and the rotten smell of sulphur fills his nose and mouth. It seems the Dark Apostle is not the only one on the verge of a transformation. Hol Beloth has longed for this moment since first he set foot on Calth, and he can literally taste his reward.

Eriesh Kigal and his Terminators lead the way, climbing higher with every passing moment. The cave is wide and filled with gunfire. A squad of Ultramarines and some uniformed mortals in the colours of the Defence Auxilia are shooting at them. They cower behind hastily-erected barricades. He sees that each man has a black X daubed somewhere on his armour. He does not understand the significance of this, and dismisses it as irrelevant.

Hol Beloth feels a stinging sensation at his chest and sees a black burn scar from a las-impact. The skin is curdled and scorched, but he feels no pain. None at all.

The tunnel turns and widens, its ceiling rising up to almost thirty metres. More soldiers are moving to intercept them. Gunfire intensifies. None of it matters. Three Ultramarines attempt to impose order on the few soldiers at their disposal. A pair of armoured vehicles rumble into view, a Rhino and a civilian cargo transporter with a pair of heavy stubbers welded onto a primitive turret.

The Rhino’s guns hammer the Terminators, and one of the mighty warriors stumbles as the heavier weight of fire finds a weak spot. Hol Beloth wonders why it is taking so long for the Ultramarines to respond to the terrible threat in their midst. Then he understands the sacrifice of Foedral Fell.

The Ultramarines are not here. Not in any numbers of significance.

The gunner of the Rhino brackets the wounded Terminator and hammers him again and again. It is a successful tactic, as the percussive chain of explosions eventually cracks the armour open. The warrior within is cut apart and his armour sags with his death.

Maloq Kartho leaps into the air, his reverse-jointed legs powering him over the heads of the Ultramarines. He is in amongst them, his clawed arms like threshing blades. He rips them apart, tearing war-plate open with his bare hands and hurling body parts aside like butcher’s waste. Bolt rounds flatten upon his iron-hard flesh, blades bounce off him; his laughter is that of a being who has achieved his heart’s desire and found it more wondrous than he ever hoped.

The Ultramarines are dead, and Kartho charges the Rhino. Its driver sees the danger and guns the engine. The tracks spin furiously, but not fast enough – Kartho smashes into the vehicle like a wrecking ball. The hull of the Rhino buckles inwards explosively. Flames rip from within and the engine gives out with a hard bang of combustion.

Kartho’s charge has broken the tank in two. A sweep of his bulging arms hurls the wreckage away.

Eriesh Kigal kills the up-armed civilian transporter. A hail of high-impact rounds blows its engine block apart and the explosion lifts it ten metres into the air.

His Terminators are unstoppable juggernauts; small-arms fire is an irrelevance and they are proof against most blades. Storms of fire batter their curved plates and layered plastrons, but none of it has any effect. An unstoppable line of armour pushes inexorably forward, climbing higher into the arcology with every passing moment. The armed forces that remain here will be mustering above, but they will be too late to prevent the wholesale destruction of Calth.

There are too few defences here to stop the Word Bearers. In their arrogance, the Ultramarines think they are secure, that their way of doing things is the only way. Blind to the virtues of free thinking, the XIII have sealed their fate by clinging to an outmoded way of war. The old ways are gone, and a new order is rising.

The Ultramarines have failed to embrace that. It will be their undoing.

Hol Beloth grunts in sudden pain. The enemy has not wounded him. This is not the already forgotten pain of a gunshot or a sword cut. Things are breaking inside his body. Bones shift, elongate. Organs squirm and reshape themselves. Blood grows sluggish as its composition alters. His vision blurs as nictitating membranes form over his eyes. Old pain diminishes and new pain replaces it.

Hol Beloth throws away his sword. The blade is broken just above the hilt, but he has no memory of it snapping. He has a dagger at his hip, one of the crude, flint-bladed things Erebus presented to the anointed ones. He does not draw it.

He has no need of it now, for his fingers sprout claws like sword blades.

Flames and the cries of the dying are all that they leave in their wake.

More slaughter awaits ahead.

Hol Beloth ascends into the administration level of Arcology X.

He sees thousands of mortals cowering here, clustered around a building of polished white marble. He no longer sees as he once did. His sight is that of a voracious predator.

His world is blood hues, flesh smells and fear-stink.

It is good.

XXXVI

The Defence Auxilia and Ingenium Support Division are responding with incredible speed. Army units integrated into the chain of command are already in place, but Hamadri fears it is too little, too late. She watches the Word Bearers fight their way into the sprawling administration level from the upper hatch of a Chimera.

‘How can they be here?’ she asks herself, knowing that the question is meaningless now.

Captain Ullyet is already fighting, his Salamander command vehicle racing back and forth at the entrance to the sub-caves. No sooner had Sergeant Ankrion’s warning of the breach in the lower levels gone out over every active vox-network than the tanks of the 77th Support Division roared into action.

His vehicles are cargo carriers, engineering rigs and combat support tanks – armed with anti-personnel weapons, they are no match for Space Marine Terminators. The Defence Auxilia moves to assist, Hamadri’s orders sending her tanks around the flanks to keep the enemy boxed in.

Her Chimera bounces over the uneven ground and Hamadri sees how few enemy warriors there are: six Terminators and a Dreadnought, and two monstrous things to which she can give no name. One is taller than the Dreadnought, its flesh blackening even as she looks at it, as though it burns in a fire she cannot see. The other is a hunched, swollen thing with scraps of blood-red plate embedded in the mass of its body. Its engorged muscles expand like overfilled fuel bladders and its arms end in flailing bone-swords.

It would, on paper, be a paltry force with which to invade Arcology X.

But it may well be enough.

‘Bring us in on the right,’ she orders her driver.

The Chimera slews around, its tracks spitting rock fragments. Hamadri brings the rotor cannon around and depresses the firing triggers. Thudding recoil slams back against her palms, but she keeps the weapon on target. A stream of bullets strikes the monster with the bone-swords, and her shots only falter when the thing looks up at her with eyes that are windows into madness.

The beast vaults into the air, an impossible leap. Hamadri cranks the pintle-mounted weapon around and opens fire. The angle is too steep, her shots too low. The creature lands against the Chimera’s frontal section with a ringing hammerblow. The impact is colossal, its weight out of all proportion to its size. The Chimera’s hull is crushed and the tank turns end over end like a flipped aquila coin.

Hamadri has a fraction of a second’s life left.

She wonders if her son in the Numinus 61st is still alive. Better for him to be dead than to have to fight a war against such monsters.

The Chimera slams down on its topside and Colonel Riuk Hamadri joins the long list of those killed in action.

XXXVII

The change is upon him.

His flesh is becoming. The rituals have been observed, the sacrifices made.

Maloq Kartho has attracted the eye of the gods and he feels the immense power that awaits him. He awaits the judgement of his worth. The muttering shadows are gone, drawn to the trap in Foedral Fell’s stronghold, but he has no need of them now. He will be his own shadow now, shedding his old identity and clearing out what could have been.

The last piece of him awaits his final offering.

He still senses the warp power’s unwillingness to give up its hunt. It has its prey practically in its jaws, but his need is the greater. Without that power, his frame will explosively mutate. It will be cast down into a wallowing pit of mindless depravity. A worthy fate for some, but not for him.

He watches Hol Beloth kill with ferocious abandon.

The commander’s mind has fractured and this last betrayal is the pact with which he seals his bargain with the monarchs of the warp. Eriesh Kigal’s Terminators are still in the fight, though another one has been brought down. The enemy is rallying and bringing their heavier guns to bear. They still think the Word Bearers are here to conquer, to capture.

He laughs, and those mortals who hear him fall dead instantly.

Kartho turns to Zu Gunara.

That name is meaningless. Zu Gunara died for the second time weeks ago. The Dreadnought that once housed his flesh still carries the bio-weapon and now it holds it out to him like an offering. He supposes that is exactly what it is.

The life eater virus is a gift from the gods.

The fighting continues behind him, but he no longer cares.

Kartho opens the arming panel and enters the codes he memorised long ago when the scrapcode attack first compromised Calth’s defence network. The virus bomb’s circuitry comes to life and a green light bathes the interior of its arming mechanics. The cog-skull insignia of the Mechanicum and the Ultima of the XIII Legion flash baleful warnings. No provision exists for instant deployment, only a preset countdown. It will make no difference.

More warnings chime from the interior of the bomb as he unlocks each security protocol. He ignores them and turns the final arming trigger before snapping it off. Numerous failsafes and redundancies exist to reset the countdown. Kartho destroys them all.

The bomb broadcasts a final countdown signal across a multitude of vox-bands and sets off an unmistakable alarum bray. Such warnings are pointless. Anything close enough to register them will be killed by the release of the virus within minutes.

He sees the realisation of what he has done spread through the Imperial soldiers. Those who don’t recognise the threat of the virus bomb’s shrieking warning learn through the vox what he has brought into their midst. Soldiers turn and flee. Armoured vehicles blow their engines as they throw their tracks into reverse. The panic and terror is almost overwhelming and Kartho roars with laughter as he sees the vaunted Ultramarian discipline collapse in the face of certain death.

A few braver souls run towards the bomb, perhaps thinking they can disarm it. They are deluding themselves.

He feels his bargain with the warp sealed in the depths of his transforming flesh.

His body has been prepared and now the communion of material and spiritual can take place.

Kartho lifts his hand and sees a glimmer of silver wreathe the tips of his claws.

His very flesh is a knife with which he can cut through the dimensional walls. He senses this is borrowed power, a fleeting gift to enable his union with the warp.

Kartho slashes his hand down through the air and the material wall of the universe parts before him. A poisoned wind gusts from the deep wound, a gateway to the domain of gods and monsters. Soon he will be both.

He feels another of Kigal’s Terminators die.

His senses are beyond anything he has known before, and this is just the beginning of his ascension. He pulls the wavering tear in the universe wider, tasting the dark promise of the miasmic void beyond. This will be his realm now, not the tasteless material plane of mortals.

But just before he steps through, Maloq Kartho experiences something he thought long since bled out onto the sands of Colchis.

He knows doubt.

He turns from the howling gate in time to see a pair of rad-scarred Land Speeders streak into the cavern. Their engines are overheating and flying on fumes. They have been pushed far beyond their limits to get here.

A pointless gesture.

This bomb will detonate. Nothing now can prevent that.

Riding tall in the lead skimmer is an unhelmed warrior in blue and gold. Maloq Kartho has never seen him before, but his transformed senses recognise him immediately.

Remus Ventanus.

XXXVIII

The administrative level is in chaos. Civilians and soldiers alike flee in terror from the figures standing at the heart of the cave – a Dreadnought, and a thick-limbed figure of black scales whose body seems to flicker with dark flame. This is the leader of this dark host.

Ventanus knows it in his bones.

The Dreadnought carries the screaming bomb in its hands, and every frequency is telling him that the life eater warhead is on the verge of detonation. A Word Bearers Terminator is still fighting, but Sydance’s speeder is diving towards him. The Terminator has armour that can survive impact with a super-heavy.

Sydance has a multi-melta.

He sees a flash and hears the roar of superheated air, but he doesn’t see what happens to the Terminator. The speeder lurches, its engine spluttering its death rattle. That it has brought him this far is nothing short of a miracle.

Selaton has pushed the engine as hard as he can and now it is done.

‘Take us down,’ Ventanus yells over the screams and chatter of gunfire.

Selaton nods. ‘Don’t think we’ve much choice, captain.’

Before the speeder can descend, Ventanus hears a bestial roar. An abominable creature with sword blade arms vaults from the back of a crushed Rhino. It is coming straight at them.

‘Incoming!’ he yells.

The speeder heels over as Selaton wrenches it around, but even legionary reflexes aren’t quite fast enough. The creature’s bladed arms slice the vehicle in half, taking Selaton’s legs at mid-thigh. Ventanus leaps clear as the speeder ploughs rock and wrecks itself in an explosion of flying steel.

He lands at the run and has his bolter out a second later.

He does not know if Selaton has survived the crash, and has no time to check.

The beast that brought them down rears up, a wall of expanding tissue and claws. He sees it was once a man, a legionary like him, but whatever hypermutations are wracking its frame are completely out of control. Limbs burst from gristly tumours and fanged mouths erupt across its malleable flesh.

Ventanus empties a magazine into the creature. His shells punch through its metamorphosing body. He hears the detonations, but the creature does not even appear to feel them. He reaches for another magazine, but a heavy paw the size of his chest slams him to the ground. Its bulk is enormous, swelling and evolving in an uncontrolled frenzy.

He reaches for his sword, a chain-weapon taken to replace his lost powerblade.

The creature is screaming. He cannot tell if it is in anger or pain.

Ventanus thrusts the sword into the rippling folds of new flesh and the suction is so great that it tears the blade from his grip. The monster’s body swallows the chainsword whole and Ventanus reaches for his next weapon – he unclips a pair of frag grenades from his belt, one in each hand.

Part of him knows that this is folly.

The life eater virus will destroy the monster, regardless of this fight’s outcome, but it matters to Ventanus that it dies by his hand.

He punches the grenades into the thing’s body, releasing them before his arms suffer the same fate as his sword. Both grenades detonate with a wet thump, showering him with rancid flesh as raw as protoplasm. Open wounds gape, bloody and stringy with unformed matter.

The creature doesn’t die. It is too large now, but he has hurt it.

It shrieks from its hundreds of mouths. He has a moment at best to capitalise on its pain.

Then he sees it.

In one gaping wound is a grey-bladed dagger, a weapon clinging to a leather belt that has been subsumed by the expanding flesh of the monster.

He knows what it is. He has used such a weapon before.

Hating that he has no choice, Ventanus reaches in and drags the dagger from the sopping, fleshy wound. He feels the legacy of murder imbued in the glitter-sheened blade. This weapon has a bloody history, but it also has power and he needs that now.

It is a pitifully small thing to wield against so bloated a foe, but Ventanus has first-hand experience of what harm such weapons are capable of wreaking.

The monster’s face looms over him, a bloated mass of gibbering mouths, lunatic eyes and lashing tongues. Whoever this once was, he is long gone. Ventanus wonders if he understands what he has become.

A wide mouth of erupting fangs and acidic bile snaps towards him.

‘For Calth!’ shouts Ventanus and rams the blade up into its throat.

The effect is instantaneous and horrific.

The monster tears open, folding in on itself in unravelling slabs of blood-soaked flesh and fat. Hybrid organs necrotise in seconds and its expanding matter blackens in the space of a breath. The reek of a mass grave gusts from its immediate decomposition and gouts of stinking black fluid jet from nameless masses of diseased flesh.

Ventanus staggers back, repulsed beyond measure at the creature’s death. Somewhere in the midst of its unmaking, he sees hints of a post-human body, but they too disintegrate before his eyes.

He spits a gobbet of rank fluid and switches his gaze to the immobile Dreadnought that holds the virus bomb.

The scaled black figure with the curling horn stares venom at him. It turns and vanishes through a shimmering hole in the world. Ventanus feels nauseous at the sight of such a violation, at the sickness he sees through the cut. The tear is already growing smaller – the fabric of the world is healing itself, and in seconds the opening will be gone.

The dagger in his hand tugs at his grip. It wants to return to that unclean realm, to go back to where it was made.

‘Sydance!’ shouts Ventanus, calling up the bomb’s countdown to his visor. ‘To me!’

A blue speeder slews around behind him.

‘How long?’ asks Sydance.

‘Ten seconds. Now get out!’

‘What? No! I’m going with you.’

‘Not this time,’ says Ventanus. ‘This time there is no thirteenth eldar.’

He kicks Sydance from the speeder and drops into the pilot’s seat. The engine belches a plume of irradiated smoke and the skimmer lurches forward, Ventanus coaxing it to one last ride.

The speeder vibrates as though it’s about to shake itself apart. The harsh bangs of engine misfire sound behind him, and a plume of flame billows in his wake.

‘Come on, fly, damn you!’ shouts Ventanus.

The speeder is descending on failing grav-plates, its power almost exhausted, its engine dead. He fights to keep it in the air, hauling the control column back and feeding his every last scrap of will and belief into the machine.

The Dreadnought looms before him, like some immovable leviathan.

Ventanus drops the warp-tainted dagger onto the gunner’s seat.

‘For courage and honour!’ he shouts. ‘For the Emperor!’

A last surge of power fills the engine and Ventanus triggers the forward guns as he throws himself from the speeder. He hits the ground hard and rolls as the skimmer smashes into the Dreadnought at full speed. The collision is ferocious, the speeder’s momentum unstoppable.

The Dreadnought rocks back on its piston legs. Then the Skimmer’s engine block explodes and the blast throws it back.

Its gyroscopic stabilisers fight for balance. They fail.

The Dreadnought falls and is swallowed by the sucking wound in the world. It vanishes from Calth and the tear seals up behind it.

Ventanus holds his breath, counting the seconds. He waits for an explosion that never comes. He doesn’t know where the bomb with its lethal life eater virus has gone, but it is not on Calth. That is good enough for him.

He turns to the sound of cheering. It takes him a moment to realise that it is for him.

The people of Arcology X are shouting his name.

No, not his name, his title.

Saviour of Calth.

And for the first time, Remus Ventanus feels that he has earned it.

No one is coming, then. Our numbers don’t count – that’s it, isn’t it? We southern islanders are just too scattered. Our cities aren’t big enough. The enemy turned our lands to glass and ash. How could there be survivors? No point in looking, right?

To whoever finds this – I don’t want this to be easy for you. I survived. Do you understand? I survived the wave and the fires. The enemy is gone, and I’m still out here. Only now the sun is killing me, and I don’t know why, and the sky is still empty of help.

Damn you. Damn all of you.

Heavy footsteps halted outside the makeshift cell. The postulant’s time of judgement had arrived.

He was sitting cross-legged upon the deck, his back straight. He had been sitting in that position for the better part of a day. In that time, his body had healed the worst of the injuries his brothers had inflicted upon him.

The postulant lifted his head and saw himself reflected in the locked cell door. For all his advanced transhuman physiology, his face was still mottled with purple bruises. Dried, flaking blood caked his cheek and lips. Like all born under the relentless suns of Colchis, his skin was swarthy and his eyes dark. His bloodshot gaze was sullen.

He knew his features were broader and heavier than those of unaltered humans, who looked strangely fragile and delicate to him now. He still dimly remembered what he had looked like before his rebirth into this more exalted form; most of the Legion did not. In time, he supposed that he too would forget his life in the temple before he became a part of the XVII Legion.

He had been stripped of his armour. It had once been granite-grey, but now it was the red of congealed blood, in honour of the revered Gal Vorbak. Oh, to see the things that they had seen...

His thoughts were interrupted as the cell locks were thrown, accompanied by a groan of metal. The hatch swung wide, and a pair of crimson-armoured veterans stepped into the cell, ducking their helmeted heads. Their heavy plate was hung with fetishes and inscribed with Colchisian cuneiform.

He knew them, of course. They were Bel Ashared’s warriors. Between them, they had seen a century and a half more warfare than he had.

There was a controlled aggression in their posture, and their gauntleted hands were clenched into fists. That they wanted to rip him limb from limb was obvious. That they had not yet done so was... surprising. Something held them back.

‘Well?’ he said.

‘Stand up, Marduk,’ said one of them, his vox-grille turning his voice to a throaty, animalistic growl.

‘Why?’ he said. ‘What is to be done with me?’

He saw the blow coming, but refused to flinch from it. It struck him on the side of his head, slamming him hard into the unforgiving metal of the cell wall. He crashed to the deck, and hot blood ran down his face. He tasted it on his lips.

But he did not cry out. He did not wipe the blood from his face. He merely stared up at his attacker, uncowed.

He was hauled to his feet, and did not resist. His own distorted reflection stared back at him in the emotionless lenses of the veteran warrior holding him upright. His cracked lips parted into a bloody grin.

‘You hit like a feeble woman,’ he chuckled.

The veteran growled and slammed his armoured forehead into Marduk’s face.

Darkness.

He turned the helmet over in his hands. It was a prototype Mark VI design, part of the last shipment the Legion had received from Mars, in a deep, arterial crimson – the colour of the Legion reborn. Its lenses glittered like emeralds, slanted menacingly as it stared back at him.

He flipped it over and set it into the waiting calliper-stand, which adjusted itself to the helmet’s weight and shape, cradling and holding it steady. He reached for his electro-stylus, drawing it from its holder. Tapping the activation rune with his index finger, it began to vibrate with a dull hum. With his free hand, he adjusted the position of the helmet, angling it to best allow him access to its curved interior. He brought the fine synth-diamond tip down towards the smooth, unadorned surface.

He paused.

Looking away, he glanced towards the ritual Octed, enshrined in the shadow of a small alcove in the corner opposite the low-burning brazier. The flames seemed to dim, and the temperature dropped. Hoarfrost crept across the walls. The darkness itself began to move, writhing and growing.

Tendrils of shadow reached out, groping blindly. They felt their way up the walls, worming across the ceiling and the deck. One of them touched him. Its caress was like ice. The darkness closed in, drawing his robed body into its embrace.

A steaming breath touched his neck. It reeked of tainted nightmares and rotting flesh.

The creeping darkness whispered to him, a dozen voices of madness blended into one. Blood began to leak from his ears. The stylus in his hand began to twitch.

He communed with this envoy of the Primordial Truth. Pledges were made. More blood was spilled.

An hour passed. Perhaps more.

Hell retreated finally, uncoiling itself from him and sliding back through the worn-thin veil of reality. The brazier came back to life, flames crackling, and its low light filled the room once again. Marduk winced as he released his grip on the stylus. His hand was locked in a painful claw. In fact, his whole body ached.

He glanced down at the helmet still cradled in the arms of the calliper-stand. The curved interior was covered in tiny cuneiform script. Not a single centimetre was untouched.

The handwriting was not his own.

‘Let it be so,’ he said.

He came to with a start, jerking into wakefulness. Something was inside his mind, squirming and probing. It was oily and vile, the intrusion sickening.

Marduk resisted. It pushed deeper in response, asserting its dominance.

Finally, content with its vulgar display of power, the presence retreated. A throbbing pain behind Marduk’s eyes was all that was left in its wake, aside from the acrid taste of warp-spoor in the back of his throat.

He struggled to focus. The lights were too bright. He blinked heavily, clearing his head.

He was in the master control room. Zetsun Verid Yard.

He was on his knees, and veteran legionaries stood nearby – the newest of the Gal Vorbak. He felt their anger. It radiated from them like the heat of a furnace.

Calth filled the view portal. Even from orbit, evidence of the war below was clearly visible. Plumes of smoke and dust spread from the continent below like vast algal blooms. They reached high into the atmosphere, shot through with light of varied hues.

A cracked voice laden with authority echoed in the chamber. ‘All things are at their most beautiful in death, are they not?’

Marduk struggled to locate its source. Focus.

Robed magi scurried about the platform’s control centre, while others were hunched over consoles and plugged into MIU ports. It was not one of them that had spoken, however.

‘The battle still rages, though the war is as good as won.’

Marduk’s eyes were drawn to a figure standing apart from the others, staring out into the void.

There.

The air shimmered around this unholy figure. The membrane between reality and the realm of the Primordial Truth was stretched thin in his presence.

Kor Phaeron. Master of the Faith.

‘The Thirteenth Legion is crippled, and Calth forever scarred. The sun is dying. The surface will be scoured. The last pockets of resistance will be forced underground, but it will do them no good. The planet is in its death throes. This is my victory. Not Erebus’s. Not even Lorgar’s. This victory is mine.’

The revered cardinal turned. His eyes radiated fervour and flickered with unnatural energies. ‘This whole system is a corpse,’ he said. ‘It just doesn’t yet realise it’s already dead.’

He came closer, and Marduk fought the urge to step back.

‘Bel Ashared’s warriors wish to rip out your hearts and feast upon them while you still draw breath,’ growled Kor Phaeron. ‘I am tempted to indulge them. What did you hope to achieve?’

Marduk’s skin tingled. Looking upon Kor Phaeron made his eyes hurt and he lowered his gaze.

‘Look at me,’ wheezed Kor Phaeron, his voice laced with thunder.

Marduk did as he was commanded; he doubted he would have been able to resist even had he tried.

By the time the Legion found Colchis and were reunited with their primarch, Kor Phaeron was already suffering the ravages of mortality. He was old then, too old to undergo the full augmentation procedures required to become a true Space Marine. He still looked old now, but as frail and hunched as he was within his armour, there was an undeniable, fierce vitality about him.

It was more than constant rejuvenat treatments that fuelled him – it was a dangerous and fevered energy that burned hot, voracious and dangerous. It must have taken supreme willpower to keep it from consuming him. There were likely only a handful of beings in the galaxy that could have maintained that state without quickly becoming a hollow, burned out shell.

‘This is my war, postulant,’ hissed Kor Phaeron. ‘Mine. To fail in it was never an option. Taking this platform was integral to the plan. Our victory depended upon it. You understand this?’

‘Yes, my lord,’ said Marduk.

‘Yes, my lord,’ mimicked Kor Phaeron with a sneer. ‘Yet it is at this precious moment, with success or failure hanging in the balance, that you chose to turn against your mentor?’

‘It was not my–’ began Marduk, but he was silenced as the Black Cardinal’s eyes flared. Warp-vapour steamed from his cadaverous sockets.

‘It was not your intention to imperil the taking of this station?’ Kor Phaeron snarled. ‘Perhaps not, but that is what you did. Perhaps you thought nothing at all, blinded by your lust to rise above your station by murdering one of your betters. Your own mentor. Your lack of respect is an insult.’

‘What is the purpose of a teacher who will not teach?’ asked Marduk. ‘He was no mentor to me. I was glad to kill him.’

There was a wordless objection from one of the veterans standing at his back, and he heard a blade drawn from its sheath.

‘No,’ growled Kor Phaeron to the warrior, malignant light flickering around him like a halo. The blade slid back into place.

‘Even if he had any inclination to teach me, I would have learnt nothing from him,’ Marduk continued, boldly. ‘His soul was blunted to the Primordial Truth, and his mind rigid and inflexible. It angered him that I was more attuned to the pantheon than he could ever be. That is why he refused to teach me. I was sent here to learn the ways of an acolyte, and yet I was placed under the guidance of a warrior with no aptitude for warp-craft.’

‘Clearly, then, he deserved to die,’ said Kor Phaeron.

Marduk grimaced. ‘No, I do not mean–’

‘You feel insulted in having been placed under Bel Ashared’s tutelage? Bel Ashared served the Legion faithfully for almost a century, while you are barely more than a neophyte. How long have you fought as part of the Seventeenth? Two decades? Three? You are nothing but an ingrate child.’

‘I am young,’ said Marduk, ‘but I am not without talent. I yearn to master the powers that you command, my lord.’

Kor Phaeron glared at him, and Marduk’s soul shrank from the vitriol apparent in that gaze.

‘Something you would not have known is that Bel Ashared was of the Dark Heart,’ said Kor Phaeron. ‘A member of that sect which has served as my bloody right hand since the time of the Covenant. The Dark Heart served me at a time when Lorgar Aurelian was but an infant, and has continued to serve me through everything that has come about since then. Bel Ashared was of the Dark Heart, and you killed him because he was not the teacher you had hoped for?’

Marduk’s mouth had gone dry. ‘I... I did not know,’ he muttered.

Kor Phaeron glared at him for a moment, before swinging away, hands twisted into claws. When he spoke, his voice was more measured.

‘You say you wish to master such powers as I command. Why?’ he said, looking out towards Calth.

Marduk did not answer immediately.

‘It’s a simple question,’ said Kor Phaeron. ‘Answer it.’

‘I want to serve our primarch and the Legion to the best of my abilities,’ said Marduk, finally.

Kor Phaeron laughed then. It was an ugly sound, like the wet cough of a sick animal.

‘You would have best served the Legion by not killing your own mentor during a critical tactical insertion,’ he said. Warp-light flashed, exposing Kor Phaeron’s skull, jawbone and teeth within his emaciated flesh. ‘Power is your motivation. Do not insult me by pretending otherwise. You lust for power.’

‘Don’t you?’ Marduk replied.

Kor Phaeron eyed Marduk for a long moment, and then snorted.

‘Why need I lust for that which I already possess?’

‘I don’t imagine a man could ever possess enough power,’ Marduk replied, carefully loading his words with subtle emphasis. ‘They could always have more. Yes, I lust for power. Teach me. I implore you.’

Kor Phaeron narrowed his eyes. ‘What makes you think I would wish to share my knowledge with you?’

‘Because you want to know how I did it,’ Marduk replied. ‘Otherwise, I’d be dead already.’

Before he could reply, a wracking cough shook Kor Phaeron’s body. He wiped black saliva from his lips. ‘Bel Ashared had some power, but perhaps I misjudged him,’ he said, a gauntleted hand held over his mouth. ‘Clearly he misjudged you. I have no real interest in teaching an arrogant upstart such as yourself, but you are right in one thing – I am intrigued. So tell me, how did you manage it?’

Marduk licked his lips, knowing that his life hung by the most slender of threads. He knew that he would have to frame his answer carefully.

The shipyards were burning. Twisted wreckage and debris spun silently in the blackness; some of that wreckage was recognisable as having once been battleships and defence platforms, though most was so mangled as to be practically unidentifiable. There was a serene kind of beauty to the gently rotating junk and flotsam, each tortured chunk of metal turning at its own speed and pitch. The absolute silence of the void made the scene of destruction almost peaceful.

Close your eyes, thought Marduk, and you would never know anything was amiss.

The Samothrace cut through the silently spinning debris like a blade. It passed through the slip gates of the Zetsun Verid Yard unopposed. There was no reason for the weapons platform to suspect the Samothrace of anything untoward. The ship was one of the lucky few of the Ultramarines fleet to have escaped the mayhem unscathed.

It slowed its approach, and docked unchallenged.

Sorot Tchure led the way through, as ever. Bel Ashared followed closely, and the legionaries of the XVII advanced in the wake of the two officers. They all understood that theirs was a key component of this most critical of endeavours. They knew that they were blessed to have been chosen for this task. Their hunger to begin the cleansing of the station was strong.

Marduk’s secondary heart had kicked in. To fight alongside such august warriors as the Gal Vorbak was a great honour.

Kor Phaeron would join them when the deed was done. The crawling sensation that had tingled at the back of Marduk’s skull was tantalising and electric as the Keeper of the Faith let the minions of the warp bear him away to wherever he had gone. Marduk hungered for the day when he too would wield such power.

Those serving on board the Zetsun Verid Yard had no idea what was about to befall them. Nor were the arrogant sons of the XIII Legion assigned to the platform aware of the events that were already in motion. Their ignorance was delicious.

As they left the first transit voidlock, an Ultramarine stepped forward to challenge the unexpected boarding party. He was not wearing his cobalt-blue helm, clearly not expecting an attack, nor yet realising that he had but seconds to live. Absurdly, he did not even reach for his weapon. His face bore an expression of puzzlement.

Marduk laughed to himself. Oh, this was too good.

The Ultramarine – a sergeant, by his markings – opened his mouth to voice... what? A greeting? A challenge? Either way, he never got the chance to speak. A bolt-round was fired, the first of many that would be unleashed in the next few minutes. The Ultramarine was struck in the face, just under his left cheekbone. Boom.

The first kill again belonged to Sorot Tchure.

There was something special about killing Space Marines, something powerful. It was utterly unlike killing lesser beings. Humans had such fleeting, insignificant lives. Yes, he remembered being one of them, but it felt like a dream, or a life that belonged to someone else. He felt little in ending their lives, but severing the life-thread of legionaries gave a thrill unlike any he had known. It was intoxicating.

The Ultramarine fell to the ground with a resounding crash, seeming like a fallen Titan in the enclosed space. The reverberating sound faded, and for a moment, there was silence.

Faces turned. Mouths gaped open, aghast, as crew members registered the headless Ultramarine splayed out on the deck. Blood was spreading in a widening circle around him. It dripped down through the metal slats of the decking. Drip. Drip. Drip.

Most of those stationed here were non-combatants, the majority being technicians and adepts. Moderati. Magi. Officers. Ratings. Most had never drawn the sidearms worn at their hips – it was merely a part of their uniform, like their epaulets or their pins of servitude. They were working hard to restore communications, trying desperately to contact Calth and the fleet via vox or the local noosphere, but nothing was working.

They were completely unprepared for this new attack.

The Word Bearers did not waste their ammunition. They moved in with chain-blade and fist, snapping bodies like dry tinder, punching heads from shoulders. Marduk crushed a skull with the butt of his bolter. It collapsed pleasingly. He grabbed a robed adept as he tried to flee, clasping the man’s neck in his gauntlet. He lifted him off his feet and shook him; vertebrae snapped and the adept went limp. Marduk hurled the dead weight back into the terrified mob.

High-powered las-fire peppered the deck, stabbing into red armour, burning and scorching. The platform was, it seemed, not completely defenceless. Marduk turned, scanning. There, atop a raised gantry – Mechanicum praetorians. Here at least was a foe worthy of his bolter.

Beasts of war bedecked in baroque bronzed armour, the praetorians laid down a torrent of fire. Two of the assaulting XVII went down, their armour smoking. Marduk pumped a pair of bolt rounds into one of the armoured creatures, forcing it back on reverse-hinged piston legs. Flesh and metal ruptured, black oil blending with milky synth-blood splattering forth from the wounds Marduk had inflicted, but it did not fall.

His aim was thrown off as a human wretch stumbled blindly into him. Marduk cursed, and bashed the man to the ground. He stamped down hard, silencing the pitiful mewling.

He raised his bolter, seeking to fire upon the praetorian again. His assigned mentor, Bel Ashared, had closed the distance, and was engaging the creature of the Mechanicum up close. The Word Bearers captain was blocking his kill-shot. Marduk cursed again.

Angrily, he took a quick step to the side and slammed his bolter into the face of a man who happened to be staggering past, his face ashen grey. The mortal, a robed adept of some kind, was missing one arm – it had been ripped off at the shoulder by one of Bel Ashared’s warriors. Marduk’s blow caved in his face, and he fell. Marduk flicked a chunk of bloody flesh and hair from his weapon’s casing.

He saw Bel Ashared knock the praetorian war-beast to the ground with a backhand blow. The captain stepped on its weapon arm, pinning it to the ground with his boot, and buried his humming power axe in its chest. The praetorian brayed an enraged mix of binary code and flesh-voice. It died slowly, gargling and twitching.

Marduk reached his master’s side. Blood and oil spattered the captain’s armour, forming rivulets in the gaps between the interlocking plates. Marduk could feel the tingle of warp presence all around them – things beyond the ken of mortal men rippled and writhed just beyond the veil. Cracked voices whispered at the edge of his hearing, scratching at his sanity.

‘Fear and death are thinning the shroud between this world and the other,’ Marduk noted, glancing around him.

‘What?’ said Bel Ashared.

‘The Dwellers Beyond hunger to cross over,’ said Marduk. ‘Do you not feel it, my lord?’

He saw Bel Ashared’s clenched fists tighten, perhaps sensing that he was being mocked.

‘Your insight is astounding, whelp,’ the captain snapped, contempt thick in his voice. ‘An idiot abhuman child could feel it.’

‘Most within the Legion do not,’ said Marduk. ‘They are blind.’

As are you, he thought.

‘Do not think yourself special,’ said Bel Ashared. ‘Far from it. You are chaff. Even your own Chapter didn’t want you. You know nothing yet of the truth of the universe, nor of the powers growing on the other side.’

‘So teach me,’ replied Marduk.

‘Some things cannot be rushed.’

‘Such as your ascension into the Gal Vorbak, lord?’

His mentor looked at him. Hidden behind his helm, his expression was impossible to read, but after a moment he laughed. It was an ugly sound, his grilled vox-unit turning it to a harsh bark.

‘Go away, whelp,’ he said. He waved a hand dismissively, splattering flecks of blood across Marduk’s faceplate – a droplet settled on one of his visor lenses, tingeing the postulant’s vision red. ‘I have no time for your nonsense.’

‘You are my mentor,’ said Marduk. ‘My place is at your side.’

‘I am not a nursemaid. Leave me. We have a station to take,’ said Bel Ashared, turning away. ‘Go with Dralzir’s squad.’

Marduk swung away, saying nothing.

The dock was clear. Corpses were scattered across the deck like broken and discarded playthings. The Word Bearers were splitting into smaller detachments and spreading out to penetrate deeper into the weapons platform. They were all familiar with the schematics of Zetsun Verid, and they needed no prompting.

From one of the adjoining passageways came the deep boom of bolter fire. Evidently the enemy were not going to be difficult to find, but the members of Dralzir Assault Squad were still sifting through the fleshy ruin of the fallen along the dock. They moved from body to body, checking for any signs of life, cutting the throats of those who still remained – one quick slash from ear to ear with their combat blades – before moving on. Not for them the grace and grandeur of a ritual blade, Marduk noted. He joined them as they continued their grisly task.

Dralzir was a tight unit of veterans. They had won the praise of the primarch himself in years past, and been decorated for their deeds in more than a dozen compliance actions; kill-markings, campaign badges and cult symbols decorated the curved surfaces of their plate. They tolerated his presence, but their disdain for him was always there. He was not one of them.

Only one of the squad’s members acknowledged him – a novitiate, just recently bonded with his first suit of power armour. He was as much an outsider as Marduk and the only warrior within the boarding party who was newer to the Legion than he. His armour was almost embarrassingly untouched.

This new recruit was kneeling over a fallen adept who was sprawled upon the deck, one of his legs twisted unnaturally beneath him. The man was trying to get away, but the novitiate had one knee on his chest, which was slowly crushing him, forcing his breath in ragged, pained gasps.

‘Did you see that blue bastard’s head go up?’ asked the novitiate, looking up at Marduk.

‘I did, Burias,’ said Marduk.

‘And the expression on the arrogant bastard’s face just before he was hit? Glorious!’

The robed adept tried to draw a pistol. It was a simple las-weapon, but it shook wildly in his hand. Burias grabbed the man’s wrist before he could level the barrel, and he bent it backwards with almost no effort.

Snap.

The man screamed. Burias silenced him with a blow to the temple that broke his neck.

‘He didn’t even get a chance to say anything. He just opened his mouth, and boom!’ Burias stood, wiping blood from his hands. ‘You are fighting with us today?’

‘So it would seem,’ said Marduk.

Burias cocked his head for a moment. ‘Is it true that you were expelled from your own Chapter and sent here to join the Calth assault?’

Marduk snorted.

‘It may as well be,’ he said. ‘I was sent here to learn the ways of the acolyte. There was no ulterior motive in that, as far as I am aware.’

‘You will be an Apostle some day, then?’

‘Not at this rate,’ said Marduk.

‘Enough chatter,’ snarled the squad’s sergeant, Dralzir, striding towards them. Two Ultramarines helmets hung at his waist – the sergeant was not a warrior to be trifled with. ‘It’s time to move.’

‘Everyone here’s dead anyway,’ Burias muttered, kicking the corpse at his feet.

Marduk smiled to himself.

Burias’s armour was smoking. Plasma burn. He had been lucky, though – a direct hit would have cored right through him. He hugged the bulkhead, using it for cover as he reloaded his Umbra-pattern bolter, ramming a fresh sickle-magazine home.

Another blur of white-blue plasma screamed through the hatchway, narrowly missing Burias, who merely laughed. The novitiate had some skill, but he was reckless. He would be lucky to see another battle after this, Marduk thought. He hoped he would, though. He had come to enjoy watching Burias kill.

Plasma slammed against the wall opposite the open portal, exploding in a burst of searing light. From within the chamber there came an angry, screeching hiss: the telltale sound of a plasma gun overheat.

‘Take them!’ Dralzir bellowed.

Responding instantly, Marduk spun out from cover. Dralzir, Burias and Udama-sin were with him, charging through the gap.

Only small pockets of resistance such as this now remained upon the Zetsun Verid Yard, though their defiance merely prolonged the inevitable. Still, the delay had angered Bel Ashared, and that had in turn angered Sergeant Dralzir. Other squads were already pushing towards the control room at the heart of the platform, while they lagged behind.

He had split his warriors into two smaller combat squads – a tactic first adopted, ironically, by Guilliman’s Legion – and it was his task to root out any resistance in the lower levels of Zetsun Verid before proceeding.

A bolt round took Udama-sin almost as soon as they were in the open. Marduk did not look back to see if he lived. Gunfire lit up the darkened room in stark bursts, and Marduk saw blue-armoured targets in front of him. His focus narrowed.

There were only two still standing. There had been others, but they had been taken down in the first moments of the firefight. One had been caught by a frag grenade detonation; another had been dropped by a clean headshot from Dralzir’s bolt pistol.

The two Ultramarines were hunkered down behind a makeshift barricade of jumbled cargo crates and machinery. One had a bolter at his shoulder, firing in controlled bursts; he had a vertical white crest on his helmet, a XIII Legion honorific marking him as a ‘Company First Sergeant’ or some such rank. The other held a malfunctioning plasma gun away from his body as it vented white-hot vapour, while firing a bolt pistol in his off-hand.

Marduk unleashed a fresh burst of bolter fire as he advanced, covering his brethren as they charged forwards, chainswords roaring. Most of his shots were wild, but one took the bolter-wielding Ultramarine in the shoulder. The damage inflicted was only superficial, though, and not enough to put him down.

A bolt round half spun the young novitiate, Burias, making him stumble. Marduk heard him curse – he was clearly desperate to close with the enemy before his sergeant and more experienced brethren, and prove his worth in the heat of battle.

Marduk kept his bolter pressed to his shoulder, continuing to fire. He was moving out to one side, outflanking the Ultramarines as the others raced straight for the barricade. He concentrated on the same target he had already hit, striking him twice in the chest. He adjusted his aim for a head shot, but his target dropped into cover – the incoming weight of fire was too heavy.

Smoothly switching targets, Marduk swung his aim towards the other Ultramarine. His first shot struck the warrior in the wrist; the mass-reactive shell detonated, blowing his hand clean off and robbing him of his pistol in the process. Undeterred, the Ultramarine simply brought up the vented plasma gun, adjusting his grip so that it rested upon his forearm, which now ended in a bloodied stump, and levelled it at Marduk.

The Word Bearer hurled himself aside. The sun-like flare of the discharge overwhelmed his armour’s auto-senses, and a white haze filled his helmet’s vision, rendering him blind for a few heartbeats. Even through his ceramite-insulated armour, he could feel the intense, burning heat of the shot as it screamed past, making the air fizzle.

His vision began to clear, enough to see Dralzir vault the barricade and bury his chainsword in the plasma gunner’s neck, the teeth whirring madly as they tore through one of the variant plate’s few weak points. He drove the weapon in deep, ripping into flesh, churning through meat and bone. Blood drenched the sergeant’s faceplate and chest.

A bolter fired from behind the barricade. Dralzir staggered, struck from behind, and fell forwards over the mutilated body of the Ultramarine he had just cut down.

Now Marduk had a target lock once more. He squeezed off a pair of quick shots, but they missed the mark by scant centimetres. He was about to fire again when a red-armoured figure cut in front of him.

Burias.

Marduk cursed his name, and broke into a run.

Dralzir was trying to rise, struggling to push himself up off the ground. It was impossible to see the extent of his injuries, but it was clear that he was seriously wounded by his sluggish, pained movements.

‘Whatever you traitors hope to achieve, it will fail!’ roared the Ultramarine, leaning forward and jamming his gun barrel into Dralzir’s exposed neck seal, ready to execute the Word Bearers sergeant. ‘Know that before you die.’

‘Infidel!’ screamed Marduk as he drove forwards, only a few steps behind that over-eager fool Burias.

Two shots rang out, the bolts’ detonation taking Dralzir’s head almost completely from his neck and blowing out his eye lenses. He crashed down and blood pooled beneath him, and the Ultramarine shoved his body away.

Marduk spat and grunted in frustration. Burias was still obscuring his shot.

With a bellow, the headstrong young novitiate leapt over his fallen sergeant’s corpse, bringing his chainsword down in a double-handed blow. The Ultramarine used the stock of his bolter to block, but the roaring adamantium teeth still bore down towards the legionary’s helmet, chewing and spitting against the weapon’s casing.

With a swift movement, the Ultramarine stepped to one side and turned, shifting the angle of his bolter sharply and unbalancing Burias. The momentum carried the novitiate forwards, his chainsword roaring as it lost traction and slid down to the deck. Stepping back in close, the Ultramarine brought his elbow around in a perfectly timed strike that hit Burias square in the faceplate as he staggered into it.

The force of the blow dropped him onto his back, hard. He lay there, momentarily dazed. One of his visor’s lenses had cracked, and his faceplate was visibly buckled.

Without pausing, the Ultramarine rounded on Marduk, but the Word Bearer was upon him before he could fire, slamming into him with a lowered shoulder. The armoured impact lifted the Ultramarine off his feet and drove him into a stabilising pylon, which gave a groan of tortured metal as it was wrenched out of shape. The Ultramarine’s weapon clattered to the floor and Marduk kicked it away, sending it skidding across the deck.

The legionary recovered quickly. He grabbed Marduk and pulled him into a knee strike that took him in the midsection. The force of the blow would have broken a lesser being – that was clearly what the warrior had been trained for, not the killing of other Space Marines. Until this day, the merest thought of such a thing would have been beyond his dim comprehension.

But not for Marduk.

He had killed Space Marines before. Battle-brothers of his own Legion, no less.

Still, the Ultramarine was a fast learner, as were all the warriors of Ultramar; they were not to be underestimated. Another sharp knee sent a hairline fracture splintering up Marduk’s breastplate, and integrity warnings flashed within his helm. Rising fast, he struck the Ultramarine under the chin with his bolter, snapping his head back sharply.

The legionary reeled, and Marduk had a clear shot, but even as he squeezed the trigger the Ultramarine slapped the weapon aside. The report was deafening, but the bolt missed, slicing past the Ultramarine’s smooth faceplate.

The veteran XIII Legion warrior had a hold of Marduk’s bolter then, and he disarmed him with a vicious twist of the weapon’s grip. He planted a boot squarely in Marduk’s chest, sending him stumbling backwards, and took aim with the bolter.

Behind him, a chainsword revved.

The Ultramarine spun, turning aside from the murderous, decapitating strike from Burias. He avoided another wild blow and planted a fist into Burias’s already damaged helmet. Sparks danced across the shattered faceplate. The stolen bolter came up again.

Marduk grappled him, wrapping an arm around his neck. In his other hand he held a blade – not a combat blade, but his sacred athame, its hilt wrapped in copper wire. The Ultramarine dropped the bolter, grasping at Marduk’s arm, but the Word Bearer’s grip was like iron.

‘The gods will feast on your soul, son of Ultramar,’ Marduk hissed.

‘There... are... no... gods!’ the stricken legionary choked.

‘You’ve been lied to,’ said Marduk, ‘but you’ll know the truth soon enough.’

He wrenched the Ultramarine’s blue helmet to the side, exposing the vulnerable fibre-bundles and cabling behind the gorget, and rammed his blade in.

The Ultramarine was not dead, though he was as good as.

Joint servos and interlocking gears whined as he continually struggled to rise. His strength was all but gone, and Marduk kept him pinned to the deck, one foot pressing down hard against his breastplate.

Blood had pooled. It was already congealing, turning the deck into a sticky, clinging quagmire. It continued to flow sluggishly from the Ultramarine’s wounded neck. Even the hyper-coagulants in his bloodstream were unable to seal the cut that Marduk’s athame had made.

He writhed weakly, gauntleted fingertips twitching.

‘What are you doing?’ demanded Burias. The novitiate still hovered at Marduk’s shoulder, casting nervous glances up and down the corridor outside as the sounds of battle rang through the platform’s superstructure. ‘Just kill him.’

‘Wait,’ said Marduk.

‘For what?’

‘I want to try something,’ said Marduk. ‘Watch. Learn.’

He took his boot off the Ultramarine’s chest. The breastplate groaned at the release in pressure. The legionary tried to push himself upright, lifting himself on one shaking, faltering arm. Marduk kicked it out from under him, and he fell back to the deck with a crash of ceramite on metal.

Kneeling, he cradled the Ultramarine’s crested blue helm in his hands. Disengaging the locking seals, he removed the helmet with a hiss of venting air pressure and placed it to one side.

The warrior’s face was an unhealthy, ghostly pallor. What little colour remained was being drawn out before Marduk’s very eyes. It made the splash of blood upon his neck and cheek appear even brighter in contrast.

He had a strong, proud visage: angular and imbued of a cold, arrogant nobility that was utterly foreign to one born on Colchis. It was the lined, careworn face of a senator or a diplomat – not a warrior, in spite of the scars, the blood and the three service studs embedded in his brow. Red foam bubbled on his lips. He struggled to focus upon his tormentor with eyes the colour of iron.

‘Lorgar... is sending… children to fight us now?’ breathed the Ultramarine, with a hint of cold mirth.

‘I am no child,’ snapped Marduk.

‘But you are… a traitor...’

‘History will not regard us so. We will be hailed as the heroes of this war, those who ushered in a new era of understanding and belief.’

The Ultramarine gurgled something that might have been a derisive laugh.

‘You are... a foolish youngling,’ he said. ‘You will learn... the folly... of... of your actions.’

‘Let me show you what can be achieved with true belief, noble son of Ultramar,’ Marduk snarled. He leaned forward and placed a hand upon the Ultramarine’s chest. The dying legionary jolted. ‘Let me show you the power of the gods you would deny.’

‘What is this?’ hissed Burias, seemingly unable to look away.

‘Can I trust you, brother?’

‘Of course. Always.’

‘Then be silent,’ said Marduk, and closed his eyes.

Shapeless things writhed in the darkness behind his eyelids. Amongst them he felt the presence of another – his true mentor. It pushed to the fore and the rest gave way before it. He felt its presence swell, testing the boundaries of reality. It longed to be made real.

Soon, he promised.

He breathed deeply, turning his focus inwards. Unreality blossomed like a flower, unfurling itself, and the sentient darkness spoke to him.

It knew what he wanted. It whispered to him, a thousand voices blended together into one insidious drawl. It spoke directly into his head, each unfathomable vowel and syllable stabbing into his brain like an incision.

Feal’shneth’doth’khaerne’drak’shal’roth.

Marduk opened his eyes.

The Ultramarine looked up at him, his unfocused gaze one of pure horror. He tried vainly to pull away. Even with his blunted mind he could feel that something was happening.

‘Feal’shneth’doth’khaerne’drak’shal’roth,’ Marduk intoned.

An electric itch crept beneath his amour, beneath the sub-dermal fibre-bundles and cabling of his mechanical musculature, beneath the bonded black carapace that was as one with his flesh. His eyes itched from the inside. Insubstantial tendrils scratched at the interior of his skull.

Dol’atha’lin’korohk’bha’naeth’la’kor.

‘What is that?’ hissed Burias, looking around them in the growing gloom. ‘Where is it coming from?’

Marduk ignored him.

‘Dol’atha’lin’korohk’bha’naeth’la’kor,’ he said. He felt the power in the words even as he spoke them. They made his lips tingle and sting. He tasted an acidic burn on his tongue.

But it was working.

The Ultramarine began to shudder, moaning softly. He convulsed on the deck, turning his head from side to side. His eyes had rolled back, with only the blood-flecked whites now visible.

Raeth’ma’goerdh’mek’koeth.

Burias had fallen silent. Marduk was thankful for that.

‘Raeth’ma’goerdh’mek’koeth.’

The Ultramarine’s muscles tensed in a sudden, violent spasm that curved his back and lifted him off the deck. Marduk kept his hand firmly upon the legionary’s chest.

The breastplate had begun to smoke beneath his touch.

Things moved beneath the Ultramarine’s flesh, like ripworms wriggling under the skin. His armour began to bulge at the seals, as if a great pressure built within.

‘Blood of the Aurelian,’ whispered Burias.

Bony spurs and thorn-like barbs rose along the edges of the Ultramarine’s armour, twisting and contorting the armoured plates of his suit. It was of a design unfamiliar to the Word Bearers, but its regal lines were now marred by a more pleasing, corrupted aspect.

The Ultramarine’s eyes were screwed tightly shut now, and bloody tears began to flow from their corners. When they snapped opened again, his eyeballs were gone, revealing only hollows of darkness rimmed by small, jagged teeth. Those teeth began to chatter. Burias laughed with a child’s delight.

The Ultramarine scratched at his own face with fingers turned to claws, ripping at his flesh. Wriggling things were revealed in those rents – ribbed, leech-like things with snapping lamprey mouths. An anguished cry escaped his lips.

‘Don’t fight it, kinsman,’ said Marduk. His hand was still pressed to the altered warrior’s chest. The Ultramarine’s ribs had pushed through his breastplate, forming a crude exoskeleton that squirmed and twisted. ‘This is a great honour.’

There was agitated movement in the corner of his vision. Marduk looked into the shadows with a smile.

‘The Dwellers Beyond await you,’ he said. ‘Can you feel them? They are close.’

The Ultramarine cried out again. He was unable to form coherent words – his tongue had become a grotesque lolling slug-like lump covered in hundreds of fleshy protuberances – but the sound was undeniably one of horror and agony.

‘What blasphemy is this?’ roared a voice, suddenly loud and bold within the chamber.

Burias gave a low warning growl in the back of his throat, and Marduk removed his hand sharply from the Ultramarine’s chest. Ceramite boots echoed upon the deck. Marduk stood and turned to face them.

Bel Ashared, flanked by four company veterans, was stalking towards him. Blood-matted furs hung from the captain’s broad shoulders. They swung from side to side with each determined, enraged step that he took. His face was hidden within his helm, but his anger was a seething, raging, palpable thing.

Marduk lifted his head high, undaunted. His master loomed over him, an intimidating, glowering presence. The slanted lenses of his visor gleamed with a hellish inner light.

‘Only those with closed minds would see this as blasphemy,’ Marduk shrugged.

The hulking captain struck him, and the blow dropped him to one knee. It took Marduk a moment to recover from the force of it.

When he did, Bel Ashared was staring down at the twisted, broken figure of the Ultramarine. This once proud warrior of the XIII Legion, his body now vacated by the energies that had been trying to inhabit it, was slumped lifelessly upon the deck – limbs and spine bent at unnatural angles, his entire form twisted into something horrific. It looked somehow even more vile now that the warp-things had fled from its flesh. Acrid vapours rose lazily from the corpse.

Bel Ashared hauled Marduk to his feet, and wrenched his helmet off, but the postulant’s eyes burned with defiance and belief. The captain hurled the helm aside and pushed his own visor in close. The steaming breath from his frontal grille washed over Marduk’s grinning face.

‘Your arrogance and your insolence I could tolerate,’ growled Bel Ashared. ‘But this is an abomination. This is–’

‘It is the next stage on our path,’ Marduk interrupted him. ‘To not use the Dwellers Beyond as a weapon is to hobble ourselves. We must use every advantage we possess, if we are to win the coming war.’

Bel Ashared pulled Marduk into a brutal head-butt, and pain exploded across the postulant’s face. He would have fallen, but the captain held him upright. His feet were not even touching the ground.

‘You are a foolish child playing with things that you do not understand,’ Bel Ashared snarled, his vox-emitters turning his voice into a mechanical growl. ‘Where did you learn this madness?’

Bel Ashared head-butted him again, fracturing his skull.

‘Tell me!’ he demanded.

‘Are you jealous that you’d not be able to manage such a feat, my honourable mentor?’ Marduk slurred. ‘Your mind is as limited as your rigid adherence to your beliefs. You refused to teach me, so I found a teacher who would.’

Again, Bel Ashared slammed his armoured forehead into Marduk’s. Pain blossomed across the dazed Word Bearer’s skull, shooting through hairline fractures and into his temples, yet still he grinned lopsidedly.

‘You lie,’ said Bel Ashared. ‘None of my warriors would teach you.’

‘Perhaps I found a teacher beyond your company,’ said Marduk, blood trickling from his nostrils. ‘One with far more power than you could ever hope to wield.’

In disgust, Bel Ashared thrust Marduk away, sending him sprawling to the deck.

‘The Ultramarine killed Sergeant Dralzir,’ said Burias. ‘Now he has been avenged. Does it matter how that death was achieved?’

The captain glanced over at Burias and levelled a finger at him.

‘Do not speak another word, novitiate. I will judge your complicity in this sacrilege once the mission is complete.’

Burias bowed his head in deference and backed away.

Bel Ashared stepped carefully around the corpse. Its flesh was rotting at an accelerated rate, liquefying and sloughing from the contorted bones.

Marduk was rising, his face slick with his own blood. Bel Ashared lifted him back to his feet and slammed one of his gauntleted fists into his face, splintering teeth and breaking his nose. The force of the blow put Marduk straight back down.

‘To become one with the forces of the empyrean is something honoured and revered,’ said Bel Ashared. ‘It is a holy union. To force it on an unbeliever is abhorrent! An affront! Sacrilege. Such is the decree of Kor Phaeron himself.’

‘Decrees can be wrong,’ said Marduk, spitting blood and shards of tooth. ‘The Emperor’s lapdogs will find that out soon enough. Once even you worshipped the Emperor as a god.’

‘The Legion has seen the folly of its former ways,’ said Bel Ashared.

‘And it will once again,’ said Marduk.

‘Enough!’ Bel Ashared roared. ‘How did you do this? Tell me!’

‘You could never master it,’ sneered Marduk. ‘You’re pathetic. You want so badly to be ushered into the Gal Vorbak. It will never happen. You’re too unwilling to open yourself up to the Dwellers Beyond. The lack of knowing, the uncertainty – it terrifies you.’

The silence of the other assembled Word Bearers was absolute. Bel Ashared laughed, almost in disbelief.

‘I do not have time for this,’ he said. ‘I will not be shamed in this manner. Hold him.’

Two of his warriors stepped forward, grabbing Marduk roughly between them, and Bel Ashared unslung his axe. Insulated cabling linked the weapon to his armour’s power source; its head was fashioned in the likeness of a leering hell-creature, and its crescent blade hummed as it came to life in his hand.

‘By your actions have you damned yourself, postulant,’ said Bel Ashared. ‘Kneel and accept your fate.’

Marduk spat at the captain’s feet.

‘The knowledge of your limitations has blinded you with bitterness, Bel Ashared,’ said Marduk. ‘I pity you. You are cursed. You know your limitations, but you cannot accept them. You are doomed to mediocrity, and that knowledge eats away at you like a cancer.’

‘Kneel,’ the captain growled.

Marduk was forced to his knees. Bel Ashared’s axe blade crackled. The scorched ozone stink was strong.

‘This is a path that I had hoped to avoid,’ said Marduk, glaring up at his appointed mentor, his eyes narrowed venomously. Bel Ashared’s emerald visors, set deep in his grim Mark VI helm, glowered down at him. ‘But you leave me no option.’

‘You brought this upon yourself,’ said Bel Ashared. ‘It is time for you to swim the Sea of Souls, and be damned for all eternity.’

‘No,’ said Marduk. ‘The time is yours.’

The shadows coiled, knowing what was to come.

Dhar’khor’del’mesh Arak’sho’del’mesh Drak’shal’more’del’mesh.

The voice stabbed into Marduk’s mind like a needle. Fresh blood trickled from his nose, and his eyes turned black.

‘Dhar’khor’del’mesh Arak’sho’del’mesh Drak’shal’more’del’mesh,’ he said. The words made his mouth bleed.

Hidden runes carved inside Bel Ashared’s armour flared, and then in one sudden, violent twist of unreality, he was turned inside out.

Kor Phaeron pursed his blackened lips. ‘With no instruction, you were able to do this?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ said Marduk, still on his knees. ‘The Primordial Truth itself guided me.’

Kor Phaeron turned away, staring out through the view portal at Calth. The uncomfortable tingling in Marduk’s flesh lessened somewhat in response.

Marduk waited for Kor Phaeron to speak, knowing that his fate would be decided here and now.

‘Bel Ashared was a fine soldier,’ said Kor Phaeron, finally. ‘But he was limited, perhaps, in ways that you are not.’

A ghost of a smile crept onto Marduk’s face. ‘You will teach me, then?’ he said.

Kor Phaeron turned back towards Marduk. Impatient energy played across his skin, lighting it from within.

‘Jarulek spoke highly of you,’ he muttered. ‘He tells me that you acquitted yourself well during the Purge.’

‘I did what was asked of me,’ said Marduk. He raised a hand to his throat where a knot of old scars encircled his flesh like a necklace. ‘I did my duty.’

‘And what did you feel as you killed your own kin?’

‘They were not my kin.’

‘They were of the XVII and the blood of Lorgar ran in their veins, as it does in yours,’ said Kor Phaeron, though Marduk felt that the Black Cardinal was pleased with his answer.

‘They were not of Colchis,’ said Marduk. ‘They were not my kin. It felt... good to kill them.’

‘Why?’ said Kor Phaeron, leaning forwards like a predator. His eyes glittered.

‘Their deaths were significant. They had meaning. There was power in their sacrifice.’

‘Ah. “Power” once again.’

‘Am I wrong, master?’ said Marduk.

‘No. Even the most primitive cultures instinctively understand that there is power in death. A child ails with fever? His parents sacrifice a feed-beast and beg whatever god they pray to for his recovery. They sacrifice to the Primordial Truth, no matter what names they give to their bloodthirsty deities.’ Kor Phaeron took on an evangelical tone, as he might when delivering one of his potent sermons to the Legion. ‘But some times require larger sacrifices, something more significant. Famine and plague ravage your cities? Your enemies march upon your walls with murder in their hearts? The sacrifice of a lowly bovid will not suffice then. It is in the human psyche to understand this. Without needing to be told, we all know that some deaths are intrinsically more meaningful than others. The death of a man is more powerful than the death of a beast – and as men are raised above beasts, so too are the Legiones Astartes raised above men. It follows that their sacrifice has a subsequently higher significance.’

Kor Phaeron turned.

‘And much more can be achieved with the power that blossoms from such a sacrifice.’

Marduk’s gaze drifted towards the vision of Calth beyond the station’s viewscreens.

‘What could be achieved with the death of a world?’ Marduk wondered out loud.

‘What indeed.’

‘And the death of a primarch?’ whispered Marduk. ‘I see the truth of it. They are the next step.’

‘Yes,’ said Kor Phaeron, ‘they are. Ferrus Manus will not be the last.’

A klaxon blared, and Marduk saw Kor Phaeron’s thin lips part in an unpleasant, grimacing smile. He had a fevered, hungry look in his eyes.

‘Teleport signature,’ said one of the dark magi hunched over a console. ‘We are boarded.’

‘Guilliman,’ hissed Kor Phaeron. ‘At last.’

‘He’s here?’ said Marduk. ‘You knew he would come?’

Filthy light gathered around Kor Phaeron, and Marduk could hear the gibbering beasts of the empyrean – whispers and cries that crowded in through every speaker, vox-link and console on the station.

Kor Phaeron seemed to grow in stature, coiled in darkness.

‘This is my time,’ he said, rising up from the deck, black vapours oozing from his eyes and mouth. Unholy energies played across his splayed, skeletal fingers, and the currents of the warp washed over Marduk like a drowning tide, emanating from the Black Cardinal in waves.

‘Today is a great day, my sons,’ said Kor Phaeron, his voice raised to be heard over the infernal cacophony. ‘Today we will see a primarch brought to his knees. He comes to us, drawn like a moth to the flame, not realising that the flame will be his ending.’

Marduk made to rise, but felt a hand upon his shoulder, holding him in place. The grip was strong; it was that of Sorot Tchure. He had a blade in his hand.

An athame.

‘My lord?’ said Tchure. ‘The postulant?’

Kor Phaeron was like an angel of darkness, haloed in terror. He looked down at Marduk. There was no mercy in his expression, merely a vicious hunger and yearning. His eyes had turned completely black – the deepest black of the dark spaces between the stars.

‘He has their favour,’ rumbled Kor Phaeron. ‘This is the source of all power. Release him.’

Tchure’s blade disappeared, and Marduk was raised to his feet. He gaped up at Kor Phaeron, bathing in his unholy majesty.

‘Whatever power I have is yours,’ he said, eyes shining with devotion.

Kor Phaeron drifted down towards him, dragging the darkness in his wake. Marduk bowed his head and dropped to one knee, this time as a devotee rather than a prisoner. He felt the heat radiating from Kor Phaeron’s body as he came close, and he flinched as a burning hand was placed upon his head.

Marduk struggled not to cry out. His skin blistered under the unholy benediction.

‘Do not attempt to use your new talents in this battle, postulant,’ Kor Phaeron hissed. ‘The power of the empyrean flows strong. I will have all of it.’

‘It will be as you wish, my lord,’ said Marduk.

‘You are blessed, child,’ said Kor Phaeron. ‘Today, you will witness an act that will echo down through the ages. Today you will witness true greatness.’

Kor Phaeron released Marduk and stood resplendent as the warriors of the Legion readied themselves for battle around him.

‘Today, my sons, you will witness the death of Roboute Guilliman,’ declared Kor Phaeron, his voice resonant. ‘Or perhaps,’ he added, slyly, ‘something greater still...’

A bolter was pressed into Marduk’s hands without ceremony.

‘Be ready, lad,’ said Sorot Tchure. ‘They come.’

Marduk cast the bolter aside, its magazine spent. He picked up a heavier double-barrelled weapon from the dead grasp of a fallen veteran and squeezed the trigger, unleashing a torrent of fire into the charging horde of Ultramarines as they stormed the master control room.

The Ultramarines were dying, but the Word Bearers were dying faster.

Bodies lay scattered across the deck. The giant leading the Ultramarines was like unto an unstoppable force of nature.

The hated primarch. Guilliman.

Nothing could stand in his path. He swatted Word Bearers aside, sending Gal Vorbak and legionaries flying. A grim warrior in a red helm fought at the giant’s side, wielding an exotic longsword that sliced through armour like wet fabric. Some sort of champion, most likely.

Marduk dropped one Ultramarine with a well-aimed bolt round, and sent another reeling, his armour shredded. He tried to gun down the red-helmeted swordsman, but another warrior was caught in the crossfire – ceramite chunks were blasted from his armour, before he was cut in two by the scything arm-claw of one of the Gal Vorbak. The clash of armoured bodies as the Ultramarines slammed into the Word Bearers was almost deafening.

Kor Phaeron flew at Guilliman, black energies trailing in his wake.

Marduk had no chainsword, and his athame had been taken from him. He stepped backwards, trying to keep his distance from the rush of the enemy. The combi-bolter bucked like a wild beast in his hands; he fought to keep its aim down.

There was a flash through the press of bodies and a blade cleaved his weapon in two in a shower of sparks. The red-helmed swordsman made to lunge for him, but the surging melee kept them apart, and moments later the disarmed postulant was evidently forgotten amidst the throng.

Marduk cast his ruined weapon aside. There was a blinding flash of plasma and an Ultramarine’s chest was burned out not three paces away – Marduk plucked a power maul from the dying warrior’s hands and set about with it. Chainswords were built to rend flesh, not power armour, but a power maul was more effective against Legion plate, crushing ceramite and bone with equal vigour.

Beyond them, Marduk could see the hunched figure of Kor Phaeron, robed in shadowlight, standing triumphantly over the downed giant, Guilliman.

Marduk saw Kor Phaeron’s blade at the giant’s throat, and his bitter hearts sang.

Victory was at hand.

The postulant cried out in elation, swinging his maul left and right. He would be a righteous agent of the Word until the end of time. The heavens themselves would–

Something changed. The currents of the warp fluctuated for a moment, before a cry of anguish went up.

The Black Cardinal had fallen.

Marduk shrieked, staving in the skull of an Ultramarines officer with a dozen frenzied blows.

The Black Cardinal had fallen.

There was a scramble of armoured bodies, a frantic press which obscured Marduk’s view of the scene. Beyond, fires were breaking out across the control deck. Alarms sounded with renewed vigour.

In a single moment of horror, Marduk caught sight of Kor Phaeron again.

He was being dragged across the deck, pulled in several directions by Ultramarines and Word Bearers alike, who screamed and spat and struck at each other as they heaved and tugged.

Both sides wanted to claim the body.

‘Help us, damn you!’ Sorot Tchure cried over the din. Half of the veteran’s face was missing, exposing bone and teeth. Marduk did as he was bidden, his eyes wide in shock.

This was not how it was meant to be. Guilliman should be dead. This should be their moment of triumph. Marduk skidded on the deck plates, smeared with Kor Phaeron’s dark blood.

Together with the last remaining members of the Gal Vorbak, Marduk helped to bear the shattered body of Kor Phaeron from the burning master control room.

How the Master of the Faith still drew breath was beyond him. His chest was a mangled ruin. The gaping hole in his breastplate and fused ribcage exposed a pulsing crater of ruined flesh. Black, foul-smelling fluid covered his armour and bubbled from his lips, while wisps of warp-shadow streamed from his eyes, mouth and nose.

‘Quickly,’ barked Tchure, urging them on through the flames and the smoke. At any moment, Marduk expected to be cut down by bolter fire, or for Guilliman to fall upon them, tearing them apart with his bare hands.

Kor Phaeron was gurgling and gasping, his eyes rolling in their sockets. He clutched at Marduk, clinging to his robe with an emaciated claw. His eyes bled tainted darkness, burning with a fiery intensity even now.

He should be dead.

In the void where his primary heart should have been, instead a vile blackness roiled, wriggling like a pseudopod. Oily smoke coursed through Kor Phaeron’s veins and arteries, spurting from where they were ruptured and severed and dissipating into the foul air. His ravaged flesh stank of dead meat and spent batteries.

Kor Phaeron writhed. Was this the power that he had desired?

Sorot Tchure raised his left wrist. ‘Get us out of here,’ he growled into the Octed-inscribed glass blister embedded in his vambrace. The glistening, unliving thing within squirmed as it relayed his order.

The Ultramarines were coming for them, determined to cut off their escape.

Marduk saw his own death written in the eyes of the red-helmed swordsman and his fellows. He would not be able to avoid it.

The flames of the brazier seemed to dim, and the temperature dropped. Hoarfrost crept across the walls. The darkness itself began to move, writhing and growing.

Tendrils of shadow reached out, groping blindly. They felt their way up the walls, worming across the ceiling and the deck. One of them touched him. Its caress was like ice. The darkness closed in, drawing his robed body into its embrace.

A steaming breath touched his neck. It reeked of tainted nightmares and rotting flesh.

The creeping darkness whispered to him, a dozen voices of madness blended into one. Blood began to leak from his ears. The stylus in his hand began to twitch.

I will give you the means to overwhelm your mentor, if that is your wish.

‘A precaution, only,’ said Marduk. ‘I feel there will come a time when it will be necessary.’

And in return?

The darkness was agitated, the shadows coiling around themselves and itching against the borders of reality.

‘And in return I will find you a suitable host,’ said Marduk.

Pledge it in the blood.

Marduk put down his stylus and drew his athame. Without hesitation he sliced it across the palm of his hand, the blade biting deep. The shadows redoubled their agitated movement, crowding in close.

‘This I pledge,’ said Marduk, squeezing his hand into a fist and letting the blood flow. It hissed and smoked where it fell upon the carved Octed on the bench top. Then he took up his stylus once more, and allowed the daemon to guide his hand.

An hour passed. Perhaps more.

Hell retreated, finally, uncoiling itself from him and sliding back through the worn-thin veil of reality. The brazier came back to life, flames crackling, and its low light filled the room once again. Marduk winced as he released his grip on the stylus. His hand was locked in a painful claw. In fact, his whole body ached.

He glanced down at the helmet still cradled in the arms of the calliper-stand: his mentor’s helmet, now inscribed with a thousand upon a thousand curses. Not a single centimetre was untouched.

The handwriting was not his own.

All that the potent curse required was the speaking of a trigger phrase and his mentor would be undone.

‘Let it be so,’ he said.

Let it be so.

++ALL CHANNELS EMERGENCY BROADCAST – PRIORITY CODE ALPHA-I TO ALL SHIPS WITHIN THE VERIDIAN SYSTEM++

++IDENT: Ultramarines battle-barge
Constellation of Tarmus, tethered at high anchor over Calth++

++TRANSCRIPT FOLLOWS++

This is Brother-Captain Ruben Indusio of the XIII Legion. We have suffered a catastrophic systems failure. Requesting immediate assistance. We have zero reactor capability, no weapons, no auspex. Please confirm greenskin presence? We saw noth-

Who’s firing? Vox-master, open a link to the orbital. I need shields now, damn it.

[Detonation, followed by severe signal distortion]

Throne, the Sons of Ultramar! They’re gone. We’re trapped. Cut the docking lines, you damned fool! Cut them or we die here and now.

Brothers of the XVII Legion, cease fire! In the name of the Emperor, this is a mistake! You’ve made a mis-

[Transmission terminated at Calth mark: -0.17.13]

++END TRANSCRIPT++

It started during his second week below ground.

Jassiq Blanchot was on digging duty. He was nearing the end of his shift. The ache in his limbs from hauling collapsed rock was so constant, so enveloping, that his arms and legs didn’t seem to belong to him anymore. For six hours, his work detail had chipped at the cave-in, dragging away hundreds of kilos of stone. The large chamber to the rear was filling up with debris, but the collapse was intractable. He could easily believe that the barrier went on forever. Still, he kept working. He loaded up a makeshift sled – just a plasteel door and rope – and began dragging it away from the dig. The rope worked deeper grooves into his neck and shoulders.

He leaned forward into his burden. As he was reaching the storage chamber, he crossed paths with Narya Mellisen. The lieutenant from the Numinus 61st Infantry was taking her empty sled back for another load.

‘You lead a charmed life,’ she said.

He stopped, brought up short. He’d just been thinking dark thoughts about eternity.

He was trapped in an underground arcology along with hundreds of other refugees. Over half the system had collapsed, hammered by the earth-shaking blows of the war on the surface, except ‘war’ was really too weak a word. ‘Cataclysm’ was closer to the truth. Could a simple war turn the universe upside down, and shatter his every taken-for-granted conception of how reality worked? He didn’t think so. That was what cataclysms did.

So there was the little matter of soul-deep trauma added to the overcrowding, the shortage of basic supplies, the isolation from the rest of Calth’s subterranean network, and the absence of any communication from the outside world since the warning voxed by Captain Ventanus of the Ultramarines. The surface of Calth was now being scoured by its agonised sun. Survival meant staying underground indefinitely – underground was where the war now raged – but it also meant escaping this particular arcology by somehow digging through who-knew-how-many thousands of metres of blocked tunnel. Blanchot was becoming quite comfortable with cataclysm.

A charmed life? Was Mellisen trying to be funny?

She didn’t strike him as the joking sort. Her face was streaked with sweat and grime. A long burn from glancing las-fire ran from right cheek to temple. Her eyes, a pale green, were serious. They were not laughing. They didn’t seem hopeless, though, either.

‘I’m not sure what you mean,’ Blanchot said. He ran a ragged sleeve over his brow. The cloth came away soaked.

‘I heard that you were on Veridius Maxim.’

Yes, he had been there. He had been there to see the Word Bearers cruisers, Annunciation and Gospel of Steel, and the heavier Vox Finalis, move up to bracket the fort. They unleashed an interlacing web of lance and destructor-cannon fire so dense, so continuous, that it was as if the orbitting fort were caught in the birth of a star. Retaliatory fire was a brief, pointless flare of impotent anger. Death had come quickly to the fort, the implosion of its core unleashing, in turn, a nova outburst of agony, searing the void with a terminal cry. Precious few shuttles and salvation pods were launched before the end. Many of them were vaporised by the fort’s destruction. XVII Legion fighters descended upon the others, predators striking at weak prey.

Blanchot’s shuttle made it through. His impression of the flight from the star fort was a smear of end-times fragments. He had no memory of conscious, rational thought from the moment of the attack to the terrible arrival on the surface of Calth. What he retained, instead, were jagged shards of sense impressions. The bone-rattling shaking of the craft, which tested the limits of the G-force webbing’s strength. The shriek of threat klaxons. The light and flame of the terrible revelation that so modestly called itself ‘war.’

The hunters had caught up with the shuttle in the upper atmosphere. Blanchot had one clear memory of that event. He saw, through a viewing block, the shuttle’s port wing sheared off by cannon shells. For a moment, the craft continued its controlled descent. Then it tumbled into a crazy, cartwheeling spin. The terror of that plunge was so absolute that it flooded all of his senses with white noise. There were no concrete images he could grasp until after the impact.

He had become self-aware again when he was standing on a rocky plain a dozen metres from the smouldering wreckage of the shuttle. He was surrounded by blackened, twisted remains – some from the craft, many from his fellow passengers. He was the only survivor.

He did not know how he had emerged from the crash. He’d been thrown clear, he supposed, by the providence of blind luck. Thrown clear into a world of newborn bedlam. Before him was a storm of black smoke, fire and a monster’s skeleton as big as a mountain range. It was a sight so colossal, so hideous in its contortions of ruin, that it defied comprehension. It was simply destruction, the concept given form, and it made him scream. It would not be until much later that he would learn that he had been looking at the infernal grave of Kalkas Fortalice.

He had stumbled away, then, through a shattered landscape, beneath a flaming sky. There had been no purpose to his steps, no direction, and no hope. He had moved through vistas of devastation that he revisited now every time he closed his eyes. He doubted that he would every truly escape them. Somehow, the luck that had deemed he should witness nightmare after nightmare had guided him to this arcology in the last moments before the solar rage had reached Calth.

So yes, he had been on Veridius Maxim.

‘That’s right,’ he said, simply.

‘And you’re alive.’

With that simple statement, she brought home the immensity of his good fortune. He felt ashamed of his despair. He had experienced horrors, but survived them all. He was, to his knowledge, the one remaining soul who could bear witness to the star fort’s tragedy. His continued existence was so improbable, it could be nothing less than a miracle. He should be grateful.

With a swelling heart, he realised that he was.

The joy surprised him into a response more frank than cautious. ‘I don’t know if “charmed” is the right word,’ he said, then caught himself, hoping he had sounded casual, nervous that he had not. He glanced around, but they were alone. The rest of the detail was at the barrier, thirty metres away. No one other than Mellisen would have heard him over the din of improvised digging tools.

The lieutenant’s gaze was serious, unwavering. ‘Blessed, then?’ she asked, reading him easily and reassuring him at the same time.

So she, too, followed the Lectitio Divinitatus. He nodded. ‘Blessed,’ he agreed. The missing time wasn’t inexplicable at all if he viewed his survival as miraculous.

Mellisen nodded. ‘Then if you were spared, you are here for a reason,’ she said. ‘Why would you be saved only to die a slow, futile death here?’

‘There would be no point in that.’

‘Exactly. You have a destiny that must exist beyond this blocked tunnel. And if you do, then I must believe that so do the rest of us. Your presence here gives us hope.’

‘Us?’

‘Those with eyes to see,’ she said, and smiled. When she did, the battle-scarred soldier vanished, replaced by a worshipful recipient of the God-Emperor’s light. ‘We aren’t alone.’ She clapped him on the shoulder. ‘And we are getting out.’

‘Yes,’ he said to her as she moved away, ‘we are.’

He started pulling his sled again, and it felt lighter. It was then, as he saw the first glimpse of a bright, possible future since the war had begun, that / dark and ready / it happened.

He blinked away the passing splinter of a thought, but then / a voice of razors, needles on bone / he heard the whisper. He stopped moving. Perhaps it had been an echo of the sled’s grind against the stone floor. Perhaps his imagination.

He had thought whisper, but that was wrong, surely. No whisper sounded like that. Still, he looked around the space of the chamber. The cold light of guttering lumen orbs played over the heaps of broken rock. There was no one here. A doorway on the other side of the chamber opened onto another tunnel leading back to the main body of what remained of the arcology.

The scream came next. It was a howl of despair, of anger, of frustration, and of unending agony. Insects crawled down Blanchot’s spine. His flesh puckered at a sudden cold. He held his breath, straining to hear past the deafening beat of his own heart, yet desperate to hear nothing at all.

His prayer was answered. The scream was not repeated.

After a minute, his heart stopped trying to batter its way out of his chest. Idiot, he thought. Alarmed by a scream. In this place of suffering, it tended to be more alarming when the screams stopped.

He’d been frightened by the acoustic echoes of the pain of his fellow refugees. His cowardice shamed him.

So did his lack of feeling.

He decided to do penance by spending an hour after his shift helping Tal Verlun in the medicae centre. The designation was a label of necessity, not reality. The arcology was one of the oldest on Calth, and one of the smallest – though there had been extensive under-surface construction, large portions of the complex had made use of the pre-existing honeycomb of natural caverns. And though living quarters and support facilities had also been constructed, this particular arcology was not primarily a hab. It was an archive, a repository of the bureaucratic, administrative and technological minutiae that had poured out of Kalkas Fortalice and Numinus City, as inevitable a by-product of those centres’ existence as smoke from a fire. Records had to be kept, history had to be preserved, but preferably not through piling it up in the way of the production of more records and more history.

So the unwanted, yet precious, information was sent to this city-sized vault, where a skeleton staff of adepts managed the flow of arrivals and occasionally made abortive attempts to catalogue the infinite for the day when someone, anyone, would come, needing a very specific taxation entry from a decade ago. Blanchot had heard tales, in recent years, of a naïve curator who had not only convinced himself that stored here was a goldmine of future exhibits for the Holophusikon, but had mounted a campaign as wrong-headed as it was obsessive to make his dream a reality.

That dream was ash and dust now. Ash from fires that had broken out across the arcology as the battles in Numinus City had brutalised the surface, and what lay below. Dust that would gather on records sealed off from human eyes forever.

The archive had never been designed as a shelter, and it did not have the strength to stand up to the tremors created by gods at war. Almost all of the newer zones had been destroyed, levels pancaking one on top of the other, annihilating everything that had been designed for habitation, including the original medicae facility. What remained were the caves and some of the tunnels that had been built to rationalise the warren of chambers. A few storage warehouses had survived, and there was food that might have seen a dozen people through the crisis, but not hundreds. There was an underground stream that flowed through one of the outlying caves. There was plenty of water, then, to ensure slow death by starvation. There were no beds, and the mountainous stacks of records took up so much space that there was barely room to stretch out and die.

The new medicae centre was a small cave just off the largest chamber. As a location, it worked: close to the greatest number of refugees, while allowing Verlun to create some measure of order as he tended the wounded, the sick and the dying. As an actual surgery, the space made very little sense. Iron boxes of records were stacked up along the walls, creating some room in the centre of the floor, where tables had been set up for the patients. All Verlun had for equipment was what he had carried in his pack, and that pack was the surgeon’s last connection to his regiment. His uniform was gone, as were the men who had been under his charge. Blanchot knew, from fragments of conversation between Mellisen and Verlun, that the surgeon wasn’t from the 61st. Beyond that, he didn’t know what the man had gone through before arriving here. His eyes held the recent past contained behind iron doors. Blanchot respected the need to keep it there.

Blanchot made his way through the main chamber towards Verlun’s domain. The records here had been removed altogether and burned, history erased to create a bit more space for the witnesses of Calth’s agony. The shelving that had filled the chamber had been torn apart to create benches and other ramshackle sticks of furniture. Blanchot had to pick his way over sprawled limbs with every step. People slept where they fell, exhausted. The lucky ones found a wall to lean against, and the very fortunate had corners in which to curl up, as if becoming a ball would protect them from the misery of the universe for just a little while longer. The stench was a clammy mix of unwashed bodies and the gathering filth of collective living on the sword-edge of desperation. The floor was sticky with blood, pooling over other patches now dry and darkened. Time had passed since the onset of war, yet there seemed to be no end to the parade of wounds inflicted on that first, awful day. That end must come, Blanchot knew. The injured would heal, or they would die, and that parade would be finished.

But disease – disease lurked in the shadows, and it marched closer with every day the refugees spent sealed in the arcology. The smell in this cave was its herald.

The closer Blanchot came to the medicae centre, the more ruined were the people he passed. To the right of the entrance were those who had seen Verlun. To the left were those who waited. The only difference between many of them was the presence of bandages. The medic’s supply of drugs had been exhausted a few hours into the first day, so the most he could do was bind wounds.

The chorus of groans greeted Blanchot as he approached. This was what he had heard earlier. Of course it was. It was the constant music of the refuge.

On his left, Blanchot saw a family group: a middle-aged couple and an old woman. The man’s shirt was soaked in blood, and the woman – his wife, Blanchot guessed – was cradling his head. His breathing was very shallow. The older woman sat behind them, propped up on one of the shelving benches, slumped against the cavern wall. Her eyes were open, favouring Blanchot with the unblinking, empty stare of the dead.

He thought of saying something to the other woman, but then the screams came again, no louder than before, still in the distance, and clearly not in this chamber. He looked around. No one else reacted. Either the people here were too deep in their own pain to notice, or they hadn’t heard. Blanchot swallowed, throat very dry, and hurried into the medicae centre.

There was an infantry trooper on the table. His right leg was shredded below the knee, bone fragments sticking out like ivory hooks. Verlun was trying to hold him still with the help of his volunteer assistant, Krudge. The trooper’s breathing and his cries were one and the same, an agonised, frantic, high-pitched wheeze. He thrashed, tugging his shattered leg out of Krudge’s grip. Blanchot stepped forward to hold the man’s thigh down while Krudge immobilised the patient.

Verlun nodded and picked up a chainsword. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said to the soldier. ‘It has to be done, and at least it will be quick.’

‘Please...’ the soldier began, but Verlun drowned him out with the growl of the weapon.

The amputation was quick but messy / whispered hisssssss of satisfaction / and Blanchot almost retched. He kept his grip and stared hard at Krudge. The other man appeared to have his attention focused on his task. Blanchot kept watching him while Verlun worked to staunch the now unconscious trooper’s bleeding.

‘Will he live?’ Krudge asked.

Verlun shrugged, exhausted. ‘Long enough to have made this worthwhile? I don’t know. Maybe.’ The medic was a veteran, grey of hair, now grey of face, too. His shoulders were stooped, as if bearing the weight of the entire refugee population. ‘Citizen Krudge,’ he said, ‘you’ve been here eight hours. Go get some rest. Adept Blanchot can help me now.’

‘What about you?’ Krudge grunted.

Verlun straightened up and gave his head a shake to throw off the fatigue. It seemed to work, as if declaring himself refreshed made it so. ‘I’m fine for a bit longer, thank you.’

Krudge nodded to them both and limped out of the chamber. Blanchot wasn’t sorry to see him go. The man disturbed him. Krudge looked old. Whether he was as ancient as he seemed, or simply aged by manufactorum labour, Blanchot didn’t know. His face was cracked and weathered, like leather hide that was falling apart. At some point in the past, he had lost his left eye. The socket was covered over with a rusting metal plate. Scar tissue crept from beneath it all the way down to his cheek. His hair was long, sparse and fine, and the grey of oil-stained rockcrete. His mouth was an ugly, lopsided slash that dropped open on the right side. His legs were different lengths. So were his arms, though they were both long. His mere presence put Blanchot on edge. Even so, Blanchot didn’t think it was Krudge who had snake-whispered to him as the blade had bitten down.

‘Who’s next?’ Verlun asked, snapping him back to the moment.

‘Uh...’ he cleared his throat. ‘There’s a man with a chest wound. I think he’s still alive, but there’s a lot of blood.’

‘No,’ Verlun said. ‘Pointless.’

‘His wife is holding him, and they have an old woman sitting with them, and... and she’s dead, and I thought–’

Verlun cut him off. ‘Unfortunate. But I can’t waste my time on someone I know is going to die on my table. It will be over for him soon, and that will be a mercy. Find me someone I might be able to save.’

‘All right,’ Blanchot answered, but didn’t move right away. His mind was already chasing screams and whispers again. Screams and whispers heard by no one else.

‘What is it?’ Verlun asked.

Blanchot took a breath. ‘I’m hearing things that aren’t there,’ he said. ‘I think I’m seeing some, too.’

‘Is that right?’ Verlun sounded irritated rather than concerned. ‘Movement in the corner of your eyes, sounds that you can’t quite make out?’

‘A bit like that, but–’

‘And when was the last time you had more than a couple of hours’ sleep?’

It took Blanchot a moment to work out the answer. He had last slept in his own bed the night before the attack began. ‘I don’t really know,’ he said.

‘I’d be more worried if you weren’t hallucinating. Get some sleep when you can, but first make yourself useful instead of a nuisance, yes?’

He did his best. He spent the next hour engaged in crude triage, dragging in the wounded who looked like they might benefit from Verlun’s efforts, and cleaning up the spilled blood. Then he wandered through the communal caverns until he found a bare patch of floor. He slept / the darkness physical, a muscle and wave, a tide of flesh, rippling with strength / and awoke, sweating. Trembling.

He was tempted to go back to Verlun, ask him if it was unusual for hallucinations to follow people into their dreams. But he could imagine how the conversation would go. You saw the same thing? Well, no, not exactly. What did you see? It’s hard to describe. And the whispering? What’s being said? I don’t know. I can’t make it out.

Diagnosis? Stop wasting my time.

So he did the right thing. He did not see Verlun. He spent a couple of hours helping to distribute rations, and then he was back at the dig. Krudge was working there too. He nodded to Blanchot, who managed to return the gesture, but only just. It was not, he told himself, simply Krudge’s deformities that bothered him. There was something wrong with the man at a deeper level.

To his dismay, Krudge was on the tunnel detail with him again the next day, and the next. It was then, midway through that third shift, with the rubble still unmoving – still infinite – that Blanchot realised Krudge had something to do with the whispering.

He cursed himself for a fool, for having taken so long to see what was going on. Every time he heard the whispers, Krudge was somewhere nearby. He never saw the labourer speak the twisted, sibilant sounds. The screams had died away but the whispers were now his constant companions, always close, but never there, always just around the corner, behind a door, in the next cavern. The same with Krudge, at those moments: not far, but ever present.

The craven way the man went about his campaign was contemptible. Blanchot didn’t know if he was speaking with anyone else, or engaged in malevolent prayer – it was hard to tell if it was one voice or several. The echoes and syllables / prey, everywhere prey / twined around each other, overlapping, repeating, building into a choir and then falling back to a lone, barely audible maggot of sound. But he was hearing more all the time, and he was hearing more clearly. The whispering wasn’t just a rasp reaching into his ear and his soul like a gnarled finger of ice. The syllables were becoming more distinct. They were coalescing / meat for the teeth, blood for the claws, bones for the truth / into words, phrases. The terror he had first felt at the sounds was now joined by the horror of their meaning.

And there were other words. At least, he thought they were words. He didn’t understand them. They couldn’t have come from his mind. They were beyond alien. The mere sound of them drove a spike through the centre of his forehead. He didn’t know what they meant, and for that he was grateful. To understand those words, he was sure, would be to fall into madness.

There was one consolation. He knew, now, that he wasn’t hallucinating the whispers. He was incapable, at any level, of imagining / taste the worship of their little god-king, it grows and spreads and feeds us, yes yes let him be a god, smash the rational, plunge them into the dark / such blasphemies.

The situation was clear. Krudge was in league with forces inimical to the divine God-Emperor. He was working to bring death and ruin to the arcology, just as those forces had done to Calth.

He had to be stopped.

Major Devayne did not have a headquarters as such. But, as the senior officer in the arcology, with responsibility for all the lives within it falling to him, he needed a location where people could have a reasonable expectation of finding him. He had chosen the chamber adjacent to where the debris from the exit tunnel was being dumped, where the dig teams mustered. This put him close to the most vital operation in the arcology. If it failed, everything else became futile.

He had dozens of kilometres of tunnels and caverns to oversee, but Blanchot knew that if he waited long enough, Devayne would show up here. So he waited.

About two hours later, the major arrived. He was Verlun’s age, but carried his years and his fatigue with greater vigour. His posture and the lines of his movement were so precise that it was as if he had been assembled by a carpenter. He gave the impression that his uniform, as torn and stained as everyone else’s clothing, was still pressed and parade-worthy. While most of the other men in the refuge wore several days of stubble, he was clean-shaven.

Exhaustion had hardened his eyes into flints, and his expression was cold when Blanchot walked up to him. The adept understood: Devayne saw only a man who had been standing here, doing nothing. Idleness wasn’t a luxury in the arcology. It was treason.

Blanchot’s nerve wavered. He almost said nothing. But then Narya Mellisen entered the chamber from the side leading towards the cave-in, and the presence of another believer gave him the strength he needed.

He told Devayne everything. He tried to do so calmly, but he was so conscious of the man’s impatience that the words came in a torrent.

He sounded ridiculous.

Devayne did him the courtesy of looking to Mellisen for any sort of confirmation. ‘Have you heard these whispers, too?’

‘No, sir.’

‘And you’ve worked many of the same shifts as both men.’

‘Yes, sir.’

He turned back to Blanchot. ‘I don’t suppose a single other person heard any–’

‘They couldn’t have,’ Blanchot tried to explain, and heard himself making things even worse. ‘Except for once in the medicae centre, there has never been anyone else close by when they’ve been going on.’

‘I see.’ Devayne’s lip curled. He was about to dismiss a nuisance. ‘I hesitate to ask, but why do you suppose that is?’

‘I–’ Blanchot stammered. ‘I think Lassar Krudge knows I suspect him, and he’s taunting me.’

Devayne rolled his eyes. ‘Adept Blanchot,’ he said, turning each carefully enunciated syllable into the snap of a whip, ‘I would not be surprised to learn that there were traitors among us. Given the events that drove us to this location, there is very little that can still surprise me. But you are describing a conspiracy so ineffective, so trivial, I dearly wish you were right. We would be facing an enemy so incompetent that the war would already be over. But it isn’t, and if you take up another minute of my time, I’ll have you arrested.’

He was about to say something else, but then he cocked his head, listening to the vox-bead in his ear. The garbled, scratchy sounds made Blanchot’s skin crawl. They were too much like whispers.

Devayne touched the bead. ‘I’ll be right there,’ he said. He pointed at Blanchot. ‘Enough from you,’ he said, and turned to Mellisen. ‘Lieutenant, we’re needed at the medicae chamber.’

‘Sir.’

She gave Blanchot a sympathetic look as she began to follow the major.

Blanchot’s shoulders slumped under the weight of despair and anxiety. Then / a great kill, a worthy sacrifice, now, now, now, he does it now / the whisper shot across the room, strong / hhhhhiiihhhhhh / as pitiless laughter.

‘Stop!’ Blanchot pleaded, both to the voice and to the officers, but Devayne disappeared down the tunnel toward the main cavern. Mellisen hesitated, and Blanchot ran to her. ‘Something terrible is about to happen!’

‘Where?’

He didn’t know. ‘I heard it again,’ he said. ‘Just now. I don’t know how. I was wrong before. I see that. I can’t have been hearing people speaking. But the voices are real, lieutenant. I swear it on the book we both hold dear. You said my survival must have a purpose. This must be it. I have been blessed to hear these things so we can act against them.’ The words tumbled from him without forethought, but he knew them to be true. He spoke with the conviction of faith, and the urgency of prophecy.

There was uncertainty in Mellisen’s eyes, but he could tell that she wanted to believe. ‘Act how?’ she said. ‘You don’t know where the attack will occur.’

She was right. He wanted to weep. His vision blurred / a flash, limbs everywhere, a fanged smile the size of anguish / and in that blur, the truth became clear. ‘An explosion,’ he said.

Blood drained from Mellisen’s face. ‘The dig,’ she said.

Of course. A bomb planted there – triggering a second collapse – would be a death sentence for every soul in the arcology. Mellisen ran back to the cave-in and he took off after Devayne. That has to be it, he thought. We’ll stop it.

Yet doubt ate at the base of his fervour. There was something wrong with the answer. It had come from Mellisen, not him. It had the ring of logic, not revelation.

Devayne’s strides had carried him far. He had just reached the main cavern when Blanchot caught up with him. ‘Major,’ he began.

The officer gave him a murderous look and did not break his stride. Ahead of them, Verlun waited at the entrance to the medicae centre. Devayne moved through the chamber as though the floor were clear of the sleeping, the weeping, the groaning, the wounded and the dying. Blanchot stumbled as he tried to keep up.

‘Out of my sight,’ Devayne ordered.

‘You don’t understand,’ Blanchot tried again, but then stopped dead in the middle of the cave. He gasped as / intake of breath, hissing with eagerness, a world-eating serpent about to strike / he felt something rejoice in the moment. He saw that Verlun had suddenly crouched, curled tight in his doorway. The medic was laughing, and it was the ugliest sound Blanchot had ever heard a human being make.

There were a dozen explosions. They were almost simultaneous, two demolition charges and a cluster of frag grenades, concealed under wrecked shelving and discarded crates along the perimeter of the cavern, projecting their force and shrapnel inward. Another frag went off at Devayne’s feet. The major vanished in a mist of blood.

Blanchot was slammed to the ground. The huge cave was suddenly a confined space, filled with thunder, fire, slashing metal and wind like a fist. Light flared behind his eyes, and then there was darkness filled with the roar of tonnes of falling rock, a shrieking rumble that buried the screams of the victims.

There was what seemed like an eye-blink of oblivion. It must have been longer, because when Blanchot opened his eyes, there were no sounds of ongoing collapse. He heard muffled voices, some yelling, some screaming. He could see nothing. He was lying on his back, pressed down onto the rock by a soft weight. It was warm, too, and wet. The liquid dribbled into his open mouth.

It was blood. He was buried under the bodies of the murdered.

He panicked. He clawed at slabs of butchered meat. He couldn’t push them away. They were held in place by a greater, immovable weight. There had been a collapse, he realised. He was trapped in a grave of stone and flesh. He tried to scream, but choked on a mouthful of bloody grit. He struggled harder, mewling, reason evaporating in the blast of claustrophobic horror. His fingers hooked into claws as they dug for purchase in the yielding, cooling flesh. They tangled in ripped clothing, tore into muscle. Blanchot felt like he was trying to swim in a quagmire of meat and blood. His mewling turned into a rasping whine.

But then the dead weight of flesh shifted. In tiny increments, he pulled it away from his face. He heard rock shifting. The rubble above him moved, but did not crush him. At last he could breathe properly, and at last he could scream.

His hands encountered dirt and stone. He dug and pushed, and the rubble moved just enough to let him change position. Perhaps that was an illusion of progress, but he grasped it, the sliver of hope restoring a sliver of sanity. He fought against the fallen rock, and it shifted again, and he could move again, and now he was beginning to crawl. He didn’t know if he was going in the right direction. In the absolute dark, the only sounds were his shrieks and the muttered grinding of settling rubble.

He fought with his tomb, feeling his hands tear and bleed. Wherever he felt something give, that was where he went. He told himself he was getting out. ‘Just a bit more,’ he whispered. ‘Just a bit more. Just a bit more.’ He needed the litany. It was the only thing that kept the image of the never-ending dig in the exit tunnel from his mind. It kept him from descending into howling despair when he struggled through more crushed bodies.

The despair came for him anyway. It was stronger than he, and it reached out for him.

Then, as he began to fall into its embrace, the miracle happened. He heard voices other than his own. He heard shouts, muffled but real. He heard the sounds of other hands pulling rocks away. He called out. He shouted with real hope.

And he was answered.

It was still hours before the rescue party hauled him out. He emerged into a dimness as welcome as daylight. Mellisen helped him to his feet. Reborn, slicked in the blood of many, he looked around at the shattered chamber. Dangling lumen strips and a few guttering fires provided a ghostly illumination through the still-hovering dust. The cavern had not collapsed, though large chunks of the ceiling had come away, dropping slabs of rockcrete and natural limestone down from the structural supports above. In the centre of the space there was a hill of jagged rock, rising halfway to the new vault. He was standing shakily at its base.

‘How many survivors?’ he asked Mellisen.

‘Only you,’ she answered.

There was something strange in the lieutenant’s voice. It was in her eyes, too, which he could see shining even in the wavering light of the cavern. At first, Blanchot didn’t know what this thing was. Then he realised it burned in the eyes of all the rescue party members as they gazed at him.

It was reverence.

The truth of yet another miracle jolted him. He had been standing only a couple of paces from the grenade that had disintegrated Devayne. He had been buried under tonnes of rock. He was bruised and cut, but in every important way, he was unharmed.

He shivered, feeling the touch of revelation. How many times had he cheated certain death since the war had begun? Could he really pretend that there was no purpose in his survival? No, he could not. He had been singled out for some special task by the will of the God-Emperor. Mellisen and the others understood this. Now, so did he.

But what was his purpose?

The answer came a few minutes later. He was washing away the blood with a rag Mellisen had handed him. The crowd was growing larger as word spread through the arcology of the man with the charmed life. The blessed life. Mellisen told him, ‘You knew this was going to happen.’

‘This?’

‘The attack. You knew there was a betrayer in our midst. You heard the whispers of treachery.’ She spoke softly, but her voice carried far over the awed silence of the crowd.

‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘Yes, I did.’ His role in the destiny of the Imperium took shape before him. What he saw made him shake with excitement and coursing adrenaline. He understood the truth of his terrifying visions. He understood why he had to suffer the whispering corrosion. It was given to him to know the enemy.

Mellisen was still looking at him. So were the others. They were all waiting for him, he realised. They were waiting for guidance.

‘Is it over, then?’ Mellisen asked.

No. It was not. Behind Mellisen, in the doorway leading back towards the dig, Krudge stood. He was not much more than a silhouette in the dim light, but Blanchot knew that distorted figure. ‘Him!’ he shouted, stretching out his arm as if he could grab Krudge himself. ‘He’s part of it!’ Then a word rose to his lips, unbidden, foreign to his life until now, yet so perfect, so completely true.

‘Heretic!’ he screamed.

He didn’t have to do more than that. The people scrambled after Krudge, pouring into the tunnel like a river bursting a dam and plunging into a channel long denied. Krudge fled, and Blanchot and Mellisen were swept up in the current.

Blanchot kept losing sight of the fleeing man. He ran faster. The tunnel took a sharp turn to the right. Blanchot came around it, and straight into a milling, confused crowd.

Krudge had vanished.

‘He went in there,’ someone said, pointing up. A ventilation grille hung from an opening in the wall just below the ceiling. The hole was wide enough for a man to fit through, if the man was desperate enough. No one here seemed as desperate to follow Krudge as he had been to escape. The arcology’s ventilation system was an even more haphazard construction than the main network of caves itself. Shafts had been drilled, but there was also a tracery of fissures running from cavern to cavern. It had proven impossible to isolate one from the other. The result was a hugely inefficient network, one that was also a lethal rat’s warren.

‘Who’s going in after him?’ someone else asked.

‘No one,’ Mellisen answered. ‘If he’s crawling around in there, it’s only a matter of time before he picks the wrong path and gets stuck. If he wants to starve to death caught in a tight squeeze, let him.’

Blanchot nodded, thinking that Mellisen was right. Krudge hadn’t escaped. He had opted for a slower execution.

‘Is that it, then?’ Mellisen asked. ‘Is it over?’

There was no whispering coming from Krudge now. The cost had been high, but the treasonous conspiracy had been crushed. ‘Yes,’ Blanchot said. Trapped underground, covered in blood, unsure if he would ever see the light of day again, he had never been more proud.

And yet...

There was the aftermath of the bombing, and the discovery that Verlun had planted explosives in more than one cavern. They had all gone off at the same moment. One of the major living quarters had utterly collapsed, killing everyone inside. The medic had also rigged incendiary devices that had destroyed the arcology’s cache of emergency rations. The food was gone. If the exit tunnel was not opened up in the next few days, it would never be opened at all.

As those days fell into darkness, Blanchot felt his moment of triumph slipping away, its meaning turning to dust. The doubts crept back. Mellisen’s belief in his divine mission was unwavering, and through her it spread like a grass fire amongst people desperate for hope. She insisted that Blanchot keep to Devayne’s former haunt when he wasn’t working on the dig. He was important, and, as with Devayne before and herself now, he should be where he could be found. He was living his moment of glory.

It frightened him. He would accept his duty, if only he knew what it truly was. Perhaps it was over. He had issued the warning. But he had understood it too late.

This was what he believed when he finally curled up in a corner of the chamber, next to some broken digging equipment. The sound of the work at the cave-in was no more than a distant clamour, and he fell asleep within seconds. His dreams were disturbing, but they were the expected nightmares of shredded bodies and waves of blood.

He woke with a gasp, and / the strength of darkness reaching in from the walls, stone no barrier to the slayer of reality, and the tides of black sweeping through, devouring, jaws opening to reveal stars within, the maw of the universe coming for all / his illusions died, hammered to bloody shards by the force of the visions, images that now blinded him to the real world while they unveiled their parade of horrors. He moaned in terror, but he couldn’t hear his own voice because / the faithful servant of the path, he did well, yes yes yesssssss, we accept that sacrifice, but we have more to do, the work is just beginning / the whispers were back. Louder. More mocking. The words were perfectly clear now, if not their meaning.

Some of those words could not be spoken by humans. They could not be spoken by anything from this plane of reality. They were chanted by something with more than one mouth. Their letters were bones and glass, their syllables corruption and doom. When he heard them, Blanchot tried to scream, but he choked instead, his mouth filling with blood.

Mellisen found him there. He couldn’t stand without her help. Shifts at the dig changed while she walked him slowly back and forth until he found his footing and his breath again. He wiped the blood from his chin, aware of the looks he was getting. Mellisen waited until he had a measure of composure before questioning him.

‘There are more of them, aren’t there?’

‘Yes.’ He had to resist checking over his shoulder and peering into shadows. ‘There must be many more. I can hear them so clearly. I can see...’ He still didn’t know / python-black, dragon void / what he was seeing. The visions had to be symbolic. He shut down any thought that began to consider the alternative.

Symbols, then. Metaphors of coming catastrophe. Prophecies and warnings of what would come if he did not use his gift. The God-Emperor had blessed him with this perception and this duty. He must not lay this burden down.

‘Do you know who they are?’ she asked, gently.

‘No.’ So many faces in the refuge, all of them blurring together in a uniformity of filth, exhaustion, misery and despair.

Mellisen cursed. ‘What would you have me do, then? If Verlun was a traitor, anyone could be. How do we stop them?’

‘I’ll know,’ he said, speaking and realising the answer at the same moment. ‘They can’t hide their nature from me. Not now.’ The taste of blood in his mouth was a testament to his gift’s rising power. ‘I’ll see and hear who they really are.’

‘All right,’ Mellisen said after a minute. ‘All right. Then come with me. We’ll make a tour of inspection.’

They began with the exit tunnel, the site of the last ember of hope, and so of their greatest vulnerability. Blanchot stumbled as they approached / black swallowing the rock, the tunnel a drop into the hungry void, the rushing void, the void that was no void but a terrible presence, a thing whose being was the destruction / the work teams.

Once more, he couldn’t see the world in front of him. It was replaced by reality being ravaged by a thing he couldn’t name, couldn’t describe, and feared utterly. The visions did not last long, but they seemed to be growing in duration and intensity.

Mellisen caught him by the elbow, held him up. ‘What is it?’ she said. She was suddenly holding her laspistol. ‘Who is it?’

The whispers / he cannot see us, he looks and hears, but he cannot see us, he cannot see / arrived with the vision. They stayed. They were loud, mocking / small worship, hopeless worship, where is your god, boy, boy god, toy god / and came from all sides, but never in the direction he was looking. The words were nails and drums in his head. He held onto his concentration with slipping fingers. He was surrounded by hissing echoes that built upon one another, growing louder, prying deeper into his skull.

If he didn’t silence them, he was certain that his skull would split.

Blanchot stared at the people before him. All work had stopped. Everyone was staring back at him. Through the blood-pound behind his eyes, the faces lost definition, becoming a collection of abstracted expressions. Though he could no longer identify individuals, he could read their emotions as if they were signposts.

He saw belief. He saw hope. He saw a great deal of fear that blossomed the longer he looked at a single face. He saw scepticism, too.

No, he thought. That’s not what it is. Call it by its true name – unbelief.

In these desperate times, to deny the Emperor’s divinity was to turn away from him. There was no difference, then, between unbelief and treason. When Blanchot realised this, everything came easily. He began pointing. When he did, he read a surge of determination in the faces on either side of the people he singled out. Their belief in what he was, and in what he stood for – what they should all be standing for – hardened into diamond, and they expelled the accused from their ranks. Mellisen didn’t give them a chance to strike. She shot each one in the head. In a few seconds, there were four bodies on the ground, and the whispers had faded.

But they weren’t gone. They were scraping at the back of Blanchot’s mind, an abscess that would give him no rest until the purge was complete.

‘More?’ Mellisen asked.

‘Yes.’

She turned back to the dig team. ‘You’re sure about the others here?’

‘I am.’

There was a thrill in conferring grace. It felt like he was a direct conduit for the Emperor’s will. The pleasure he experienced in saving a life gave him the courage to admit that there had also been a rush when nothing more than a gesture on his part had ended lives. These were the realities of power. He must accept them. He must accept the power that was the necessary means to the ends of his duty.

Mellisen picked three of the strongest-looking members of the detail. ‘You’re with us,’ she told them. To Blanchot, she explained, ‘Word will get around to the traitors. They will fight back.’

‘Of course,’ Blanchot agreed.

They left the dig and headed back towards the main body of the arcology. Blanchot led the way, following the aural spoor of the whispers. The scratching mockery would grow loud in his ears and mind as he set foot in a cavern with more of the heretics. Then he passed judgement, and Mellisen’s laspistol did the rest. They purged chamber after chamber. Word of their march travelled before them. They encountered no resistance.

Mellisen didn’t have to conscript any further enforcers of justice. There were plenty of volunteers. And increasingly, they would reach a cavern to find that the guilty had already been identified and, sometimes, already beaten to death.

But even with so much of the arcology in ruins, there were still too many tunnels and caves, too many people, and not enough time. The whispering never stopped now. Blanchot felt a growing premonition of impending doom. Panic gnawed at the joy of duty fulfilled. The process was too slow. There were so many traitors. He didn’t understand how they could have infiltrated the shelter so quickly. But the devastation of Calth was proof of what the enemy could do.

Blanchot judged, and judged and judged, and still the whispering would not stop.

After twelve long hours, he had lost track of which caverns they had scoured, and which they had not. The whispers were becoming too insistent, the visions / closer and closer, the grasp of clawed night, smashing aside barriers and prayers, the terrible momentum of the unstoppable, the hunger of the night tearing bodies and souls and worlds / more frequent. Mellisen had to hold him up almost all the time now. His legs wouldn’t move properly. Each step was so beset / the slash, drawing blood, of a mind inhuman and vast, serpent coil, constrictor of light and hope / by the stabbing vistas / prey taken over an endless plain, the forever-land of bones and savage dying, madness given flesh and given force, devouring life, crunching its succulent skull / that his coordination fell apart, as if his body couldn’t remember what action it was taking from one moment to the next. What triumph he had felt earlier was leaking away. He was trying to hold back the tide, and he was beginning to drown.

Accompanied by a mob almost a hundred strong, he and Mellisen moved through the ruined cavern where Devayne had died. Blanchot wondered, hadn’t they been here already? He didn’t know. But people moved around, and by now the conspirators would be desperate to stay ahead of the hunting party. Exhausted, he looked at the hill of debris. ‘I can’t go on,’ he said to Mellisen.

‘We should rest,’ she agreed.

‘No,’ he shook his head. ‘There’s no time. We have to find them all. I’ll wait here.’ He pointed to the hill. ‘There are enough of us now.’ He winced as / hunger / a piercing virulence wracked his head. The blow was vision and shout, need and words. It was a prophecy / humanity a corpse, dangling, shredded, ribs exposed and broken by the crushing teeth of laughter, the corpse never released to peace, forever dancing to the wail of the cosmos, dead but agonised, no pain ever enough, no butchery ever enough to quench the thirst of the grinning rage / and it was a command. It was an assault. No, he thought, fighting back as best he could, but he barely knew what he was denying. As the intensity rose, the whispers became indistinguishable from visions. When the words were spoken in the language of the dark, it was all he could do not to scream.

He wiped blood / a drop a stream a torrent the deluge filling the galaxy the drowning that comes for all / from his nose. He found enough breath to speak to Mellisen again. ‘Split into teams,’ he said. ‘Cover more ground.’

‘Yes,’ said Mellisen. ‘We’ll bring everyone to you.’ She was concerned. ‘Will you be all right?’

He nodded. ‘Need to sit,’ he mumbled as he crawled up the rubble. Sharp edges of rockcrete cut the flesh of his hands and arms. He reached the top of the mound and collapsed, gasping. The whispers / listen listen listen listen lisssssssssssSSSSSS / sank their claws into his ears. They filled his head with / why hope, why reach for the sad and lifeless lie when there are greater lies, lies of majesty, the grandeur of absolute denial, the lie so magnificent that it tramples the real with its becoming-truth / poison. They were an endless round of hatred and chaos. Promises, rants, and seductions of blood / turn from the self-denying god, tear him down, break him into shards, taste the power of exultant betrayal / scrabbled over each other. Sentences broke apart / give me your mind your will your self your soul give me feast give me the waste of martyrs the capering never of dawn the roaring always of night-black blades / and devoured each other. Phrases lost all meaning / spider clutch of ripping flesh in bursting eye and sssssssliiiiiiiicccccccce the innocent with tooth of ending / except threat. But there were / dark-eye darkjaw darkclaw darkdown darkcall darkthought darksong darkgod darkgod darkgod DARKGOD / refrains, too. They were / soon soon soon oh the bloodtwist / the laughter of imminence. They were the smile / spineshatterkill / of a blade sawing through bone. Why, after all the good work of the day, were the whispers not dying down? Perhaps they were the voice of desperate evil lashing out as it died.

That had to be it. That, and they were proof of his growing power.

So was what happened next.

Mellisen and her expanding army fanned out through the arcology. They rounded up the population. An endless parade began under Blanchot’s eyes. This was a different sort of power. This was authority. He was sitting with his back against a slab of rock that jutted from the peak of the rubble heap, and it was as if he sprawled upon a broken throne.

He did not revel in the power. Through the mounting agony, he took a fragment of solace from the fact that he was no tyrant, that he was only doing what was right and necessary. Even that much came close to slipping from his grasp. The whispers gabbled with hysteria as the guilty were marched before him. He was horrified by how many people were involved in the conspiracy.

But what he felt didn’t matter. There was only the duty to stamp out the traitors.

He threw all that he had of strength and coherent thought into performing his task. The voices and the visions struck back, blinding him with / the walls of the real collapsing, an avalanche of reason and light smashed into crushing fragments, annihilating all that depended on them, and in their wake the darkness that moved and hissed, the dance of the murderous dreams / pain and monstrous sights. He saw little more than a line of shapes going by, hearing only a vague din of protests and screams as he pointed and pointed and pointed, his hand palsied with pain and fury, and the executions filled the chamber with the clammy stench of blood and torn bodies.

He was the centre of a maelstrom of hatred, and in a moment of morbid irony he realised that his work – though it seemed like an eternity ago – as a shipping controller had prepared him for this trial. It had taught him the management of overwhelming levels of information and the making of instant decisions. Instead of guiding vessels, he now guided souls, turning the guilty over to the black mercies of the innocent.

War-shattered and trapped, the people of the arcology loosed their passions and fears upon the traitors in their midst. They took revenge with fist and stone and blade, their fevered belief in Blanchot rising with every jab of his finger.

If he hadn’t been the agent of divine will, he would have recoiled in horror from the atrocities that surrounded him, and perhaps it was a blessing that the unseen enemy’s clawing of his ears and eyes and mind kept him from witnessing the worst of what was done at his behest.

But no matter how many criminals were found, no matter how many killed, the whispers / still whispers but whisper-howls, whisper-shrieks, whisper-roars, and the slithering approach of some great beast / grew in power.

Finally, with blood running from his eyes, from his ears, from his mouth, he screamed.

‘Enough!’

Mercy, or perhaps exhaustion, granted him a moment of oblivion. When he opened his eyes, the cavern was empty except for Mellisen. She sat at the base of the debris, watching him. The whispers were silent. He could see the real world again. His sigh of relief turned into a sob.

Mellisen stood. ‘Are you all right?’

He had to swallow a few times before his parched, lacerated throat let him speak. ‘I think so.’ He took in the litter of gore and body parts strewn throughout the rubble. Many of the dead were the victims of Verlun’s bombs, but it was easy to see that they had been joined by countless more.

‘How many?’ he asked.

She shook her head. ‘Too many. I stopped counting. I didn’t want to know.’

‘Where are the others?’

‘At the dig.’

‘All of them?’

‘Yes. There aren’t many of us true souls left. A few dozen perhaps.’ Her voice shrank to a murmur, as if shying away from the scale of the calamity. She looked down at the blood on her hands, then back up at him. ‘So?’ she asked. ‘Now is it over? Did we get them all?’

The blessed quiet. His heart swelled with hope. ‘I think–’ he began, and then the / slash the gibbering face of faith / silence ended. The whispers pounced upon him, raptors streaking to prey. They had been waiting for him to think them gone, so they might sink their talons in all the more deeply. Obscenity / life is a futile excrescence on the sublimity of Chaos, blind your tiny god, strike him down, he plays with your existence for his own purposes, you are nothing, he is nothing, everything is nothing / beat at him with huge wings, and his bludgeoned soul dragged his body down.

How could this be? How could the serpent voices be so loud? There was no one here but Mellisen and himself. There was no–

He froze. Realisation dawned, with a force to overpower the insinuations spreading like oil on water through his mind.

‘You,’ he gasped. He started down the slope towards her.

‘What?’ Mellisen said, the confusion and innocence of her words adding a knife-twist of mockery to the monstrousness of her betrayal.

‘It was always you,’ Blanchot said, horrified. Had he been doing her bidding all along? Had he been so short-sighted that he had delivered hundreds of unwitting sacrifices to her dark gods? No. Surely not. There had been no question as to the guilt of the people he had condemned. He had to believe that. Perhaps she had been getting rid of rival factions. Yes. There was a logic that would allow him to sleep, if that luxury ever came his way again. He stared at Mellisen with loathing. ‘Traitor,’ he hissed. ‘Heretic.’ Then, when he thought of how she must surely have savaged his mind, and of the powers she must have, he snarled, ‘Witch!’

‘Adept Blanchot!’ Mellisen warned him. ‘Stand down!’

He threw himself the rest of the way. She had combat training. He did not. She should have been able to make short work of him in that moment, but she seemed to be holding back. Instead of shooting him in mid-flight, she simply shrieked at him to stop.

He collided with her. They rolled together in the mire of death. He reached for her throat, but she kicked him away, scrambled backwards and stood, her laspistol drawn. This time, as he lunged, she did fire. That should have been the end of it – the experienced trooper killing the shipping controller who had never fought a day in his life.

But it wasn’t. Mellisen’s shot did not go wild. He saw the pistol flash, aimed squarely at his chest. Blanchot seemed to lose a fraction of a second / save this body / as though he had fallen into a momentary slumber. It was a tiny version of the vagueness that surrounded his survival of the death of the Veridius Maxim Star Fort. All he knew was that he was not hit. He was still flying at Mellisen, and she wore an expression of stunned shock.

Then he knocked the pistol from her grip, and had her by the neck.

She slammed her palms against his ears. Blood spurted from his mouth, and he understood that he should be down. He wasn’t. He was strong. He was the hand of justice, and he was not to be turned.

Movement in the ruined ceiling distracted him. He looked up. A face stared at him from above the debris: it took him a moment to recognise it as Krudge. Blanchot’s jaw dropped in surprise, and his grip loosened just enough for Mellisen to bring her elbows down on his forearms and break his hold. She rolled away as Krudge dropped from the fissures in the cavern roof, and he scuttled down the debris, more animal than human.

Blanchot turned to meet Krudge’s charge, but Mellisen kicked his legs out from under him. He fell backwards, and Mellisen held him down. Krudge raised a chunk of rock and brought it down at his head.

No. Blanchot’s soul cried out in despair at a duty left undone. Instinctively, he surrendered completely to the source of the strength that had taken him this far. Krudge’s rock was taking an age to complete its arc, all the time in the world for something to shift inside Blanchot. It squirmed like an eel, but it fit into his body like a hand / claw talon iron / in a glove.

Then / ahhhhhhhh, hello and farewell / the whisper smiled.

And Blanchot screamed.

He did not scream aloud. He no longer had that privilege. His body was no longer his. His mind screamed. It shrieked as he found himself in a prison he knew that he would never escape. It howled as it was smashed not by Krudge’s rock, but by the hard stone of truth. Blanchot saw now the truth of the whispers.

Always with you. Always the beat of your pulse.

The words were human, but they were borrowed. The voice was made of rotting dreams.

The thing in his body snapped out a hand and shattered Krudge’s rock to dust. Fingers splayed wide, and it grabbed Krudge’s face. It squeezed.

His mouth shut tight, his teeth splintering against each other, Krudge let out a rising whine of purest agony before the gripping hand crushed the front half of his skull to bloody pulp and bone shards.

Mellisen leapt back, but she wasn’t fast enough. No human could be. A single kick shattered her spine and sent her tumbling away to lie like a discarded rag doll in the rubble.

And then Blanchot was truly alone. He could still see through the eyes that had been his, but there was a writhing darkness at the periphery of his vision, the undulating blackness of night’s corruption. His body looked around the abattoir and smiled.

Work together. Kill together. As we did before.

The shade of a question was added to the tincture of Blanchot’s despair.

Remember, remember, flesh-dancer, your help to this traveller. Remember our words together.

They had not spoken. The thing was lying. Of this last shred of honour, he could be sure.

Words through the void, words from name to name, the flesh-dancer listening well on the dead-hope. On Veridius Maxim.

The enormity of it swept Blanchot up. He was carried by a monstrous wave as the memories surfaced and the pattern revealed itself. The wave was rushing him towards a mountain face. The words of the thing were irresistible – when it whispered, he understood it too well, and he saw then that the truth could be as dreadful as any lie.

Laughter slithering around the syllables of thought, the thing spoke the words it had uttered before, the words that had been its initial assault on Blanchot, the words that had been the act of his infection.

‘We have corrected vox failure, Veridius Maxim. Please respond.’

Blanchot had responded. He had spoken to what he had thought was a crew, and so let the thing complete its voyage of horror.

No. Not the crew, but this traveller. The darkness they had swallowed, and that had swallowed them. We spoke. I travel. In ships or along the links created by speech, it is all one to me. We spoke. You let me in. To Calth. To you. We have travelled far. We have travelled well.

The thing picked up Mellisen’s laspistol. A task to finish now. There will be visitors soon. More words. More travel.

It headed off in the direction of the dig.

Blanchot struggled. He fought for his body, and when that failed he fought to die. The traveller denied him both. It made him watch the final slaughter, and then it made him stare at the bodies for the three days it took before a rescue team from one of the other arcologies at last broke through the cave-in.

A squad of troopers entered, their uniforms grey beneath a layer of dust. With them was a single Ultramarines legionary officer.

The humans stared at the lone survivor. It had thrown away the laspistol and sat slumped in a position of carefully crafted despair. The giant warrior barely glanced at the Blanchot-thing, eyeing the bodies and already moving ahead, scanning for threats.

The thing’s eyes tracked the Space Marine.

Speak to me.

An infantry sergeant squatted before it. ‘Are there other survivors?’ he asked.

The thing did not answer the human, but it did open its mouth.

‘The Campanile...’

The legionary froze at the ugly, croaking sound. His ferocious battle-helm turned.

Don’t speak to it! Blanchot’s mind howled. Kill it! Please! Please, please kill it! Kill it now!

A clearing of the throat. A licking of the lips, and a crooked smile.

‘I let the Campanile in.’

The legionary was upon the traveller in a single stride. He picked it up by the neck. Blanchot’s hope flared that the massive gauntlet would now squeeze, crushing the unlife from the horrid thing. But instead the Space Marine spoke, rage blasting from the helm’s augmitter grille.

‘What did you say?’

The final dark was coming for Blanchot now, dragging him down into an infinite abyss of teeth and despair. And the screams. The screams returning in the full force of truth: the eternal screams of the crew of the Campanile.

His body kept grinning.

‘So pleased to finally speak with you, my lord,’ it said to the Legion warrior.

So very pleased.

The death of hope. That is what the XVII Legion tried to achieve, and they came close – so very close. The citizens of Calth were innocent bystanders in a war that they had no hope of understanding, and yet they suffered worst of all.

But hope did not die. In the shadowed caverns beneath the ravaged surface, those of us who were left regrouped and continued the fight. We all knew that as long as we held out, the XVII had failed in their primary goal: they did not break the people of Calth. Far from it, in fact.

Hope clung to life in the caverns like a beacon, and a beacon always burns most brightly in the darkest depths of night. That seems an appropriate analogy, given what was yet to come.

I shake the bolt round about the inside of my armoured fist. Like a die, it rattles. Like a die, it awaits an outcome. An outcome unknowable in the enclosed space of my gauntlet, a realisation it can find only in the breech of the pistol that sits brusque and empty upon my belt. I feel its inevitability, hot in my grasp, as though it might burn a hole through my ceramite palm. Heavy with the impending doom it carries, the round is a waiting demonstration of form and function – it aches perfection. Like the Ultramarines themselves, it was crafted for one purpose: to take life.

Who am I to deny such imminence? Who am I?

My name – for all that it matters – is Hylas Pelion. My brothers call me ‘Pelion the Lesser’, for there have been others of that name who have done more to earn their place in our Legion’s history. My achievements are many, but I stand pauldron to pauldron with champions and heroes every day, for Guilliman’s sons are blessed with many honours and a victorious tradition. My pistol has consigned many a xenos abomination to death; the edge of my blade is the world’s end to all who refuse the Emperor’s beneficent offer of unification. For my small part in the Imperium’s rebuilding, I have earned the Chapter rank of Honorarius.

My Chapter Master died in defence of noble Calth. Sergeant Arcadas leads those left of the 82nd Company as I forge ahead with my blade, cutting a path through new enemies. Brother Molossus bears the company’s tattered standard. There is little room to manoeuvre the mighty banner in the cragged confines of Calth’s labyrinthine arcologies, but this matters little to Molossus. The standard is a part of him, the most honourable part, it seems – like so many who carry such a burden, he would rather lose the arm that bears the banner than the banner itself.

Fighting from the front, we have taken the arcology known as Tantoraem. Arcology Magnesi had been our shelter from the solar storm – the cool darkness of the rocky enclave was a subterranean womb, where the indomitable people of Calth might begin again. The sunblind and the scarred, the scorched and the marked, they refused to let the blessed memory of their home world die.

Calth lived on. This tiny corner of Ultramar endured.

Over time, columned caverns became centres of basic industry and food production. Winding catacombs became thoroughfares, lined with improvised habs and grottos. Archways became sentry posts and vaulted caves housed the reverential masses, who gathered to give thanks to the Legiones Astartes – Guilliman’s sons, the Ultramarines who had stayed behind. It mattered not that we too had been left behind on ailing Calth. Our presence alone seemed to give the survivors hope and purpose. They shared our determination to fight for what was left of their world.

Our number fought on, as we were bred to do. The battle for Calth descended into an underground war. The enemy was the same: our Word Bearers cousins, carrying with them a hatred unsought and the shame of our fraternal failure. They had become dark beacons to weak-minded multitudes, and held congress with daemons. A new camaraderie to replace the old, perhaps? The stakes were the same and had never been higher. We fought for the bodies and souls of our small empire. We were the shield upon which the enemy smashed itself, desperate for innocent blood.

In defence of that blood, we took our fight into the depths – to the arcologies and the darkness beyond. We crafted the saviour stone of our havens into watchposts, tactical redoubts and the Arcropolis – the Ultramarines fort that dominated the dome-primaris of the Magnesi system.

Our conquering instinct – an irrepressible genetic trait – took us through the rubble, smoke and ruin. As ever, my sword led the way, since ammunition for our ranged weapons was by now precious and scarce. It took me and my brothers into the Thurcyon and Edanthe arcologies. The battles were bloody and the tunnels confined, with sword and combat shield the order of both day and night. Like a blue torrent through the foe-choked branches and systems, we battered and stabbed our way to untidy victories.

Thurcyon held for us Dusa Dactyl, the Kreedstress of the Edictae-Ghuul. Her cultist maniacs worshipped their Word Bearers overlords – for them it was a dubious yet all-encompassing honour, securing them a martyr’s place in some after-hell of their own devising.

Edanthe was a nightmare. A nest of otherworldly beasts, summoned to do our former kinsmen’s bidding. What they lacked of the cultists’ suicidal fanaticism, they more than made up for with murderous savagery. Things of every shape and size, monsters of fang and flame and horn and scale. Creatures crafted of whim. Some were death-dealing creations of infernal perfection while others were unshapely fantasies of a disturbed mind. A madness in flesh, forced upon my eyes. I made scabbards of the wretched beasts, my sword slipping in and out of their horrific forms. They died hard, sapping our precious strength, before screeching back to inexistence.

Cutting through the mobs and monstrosities, we finally faced our dark brothers once more. Their plate was a parody in ceramite; seductive sigils of forbidden lore snaked their way across legionary red. Spikes, shanks and skewers erupted from their armour, cutting serrated silhouettes in the darkness. Worst of all was the pinpoint loathing in their eyes – their faces were masks of grinning derangement, where murderous fantasies were willed into reality.

We ended all but one, the same soul escaping our wrath in both arcologies.

A bearer of the word. A trader in lies. A living untruth known as Ungol Shax.

I had faced Ungol Shax on the slaughterfields of Komesh but his throat eluded the edge of my blade. I would have silenced the bastard altogether, if it hadn’t been for the frothing sea of blood and madness rising and falling before my weapons. Cultists. I spit the word.

One after another, in a continuous train of insanity, the Chaplain’s knife-disciples threw themselves before him. Each met the blessed release of my blade or the demolishing crash of my pistol. Each death kept me seconds from my enemy’s end. When the poison-star Veridian razed the very memory of Calth from the surface of the dying world, Ungol Shax and his foetid minions followed us into the deeps. His raving multitudes swarmed the Thurcyon and Edanthe arcologies. They bred and sacrificed in equal measure, bringing forth monsters from the shadows. It took us the better part of a year to clear the systems and bring silence to the darkness once more.

The tetrarch had warned against further expansion. He had fought alongside the legendary Ventanus on the surface and was the best of our blades, but also had a gift for arithmata and reckoning. He had the measure of a man with but a glance, and knew his worth with blade, boltgun or fusil mere moments into his company. Besides the primarch himself, he was the best tactical mind for several sectors – perhaps the whole of Ultramar – and, despite having little to work with beneath the surface of Calth, had created an unfaltering enclave of order, sanity and survival amidst the chaos of war and want.

He was not above compassion either. Those who had fled the fallen arcologies, who had run the gauntlet of daemon-haunted caves and had held out in small groups until they could hold out no more – they were welcomed through the collapsed arches of Arcology Magnesi. Not just the fighting men and women, and those that might be trained as such, but the bedraggled trickle of innocents too. The young, the aged, the infirm and the injured: all were welcome to our dwindling supplies.

We could only hold so much ground, however. The tetrarch’s strategic calculations said so. It was better to hold three arcology systems firmly in our grip, denied to the enemy, than fail to hold five or more and allow Word Bearers and their creed-slaves to pour in, flooding the system once more with death and destruction. Whereas rock and vigilance were enough to keep cultists and brother-betrayers from the territory that we’d carved, the daemon-things were something else. Frequent patrols through our own arcologies became necessary. Screams of the awoken would report eaten limbs and the scamper of tiny monstrosities into the shadows. Outbreaks of violence and cluster-killings amongst the survivors were ascribed to the whisperings of dark entities. Strange contagions swept through the crowded arcologies but were eventually traced back to water supplies contaminated by daemon feculence.

These obscenities were thought to originate from Tantoraem, a nearby arcology system overrun with Word Bearers and their filthy allies. During our early fortification of Arcology Magnesi, the tetrarch had ordered the connecting mag-lev tunnels collapsed, sealing off the hab-branch of caves and caverns. What had been formerly thought of as tactically unadvisable became a strategic necessity: Tantoraem had to be cleansed for Magnesi to be safe, in the same way that the Fiend of Abydox and its greenskin empire could not be tolerated on Ultramar’s borders, when the empire was still young.

The order was given. With Sergeant Arcadas and Brother Molossus at my side, and the standard of the 82nd Company held high above the helms of the thirty battle-brothers making up the expedition force, I led the invasion of Arcology Tantoraem.

Our blades cut through the swarming cultists. Our battered plate took all of the hatred they had to offer. Behind, the fighting men and women of the amalgamated Magnesi garrison – former Imperial Army soldiers and members of various decimated defence force contingents – lit up the darkness with power-conserving streams of las-fire from their fusils.

Once again, I felt the presence of Ungol Shax. There was something about the arcology’s rancid defences, something familiar, like an echo of the nightmare that had been Edanthe and Thurcyon. Ultramarines were lost and many among the amalgamates perished. Victory had its price – as it always does – but eventually Arcology Tantoraem was ours. The cavern-complex now lies carpeted with slaughtered cultists, ritually-summoned spawn and the cardinal colours of armoured cadavers – the Word Bearers who brought the righteous fury of Guilliman’s Legion down upon themselves.

At the very rear of the Tantoraem system, in the far reaches of the hell-hole’s pillared caverns, I discover that Ungol Shax has once again eluded me. Instead I find the remaining few who would stand in the way of victory absolute.

I shake the bolt round about the inside of my armoured fist. Like a die, it rattles. Like a die, it awaits an outcome. An outcome unknowable in the enclosed space of my gauntlet.

I look up. Standing in the shallows of a groundwater lake is a battle-brother in red. His plate is splattered with the blood of innocents, but you wouldn’t know. The gore has soaked into the paint, in the same way that some wayward darkness has saturated his soul. He clutches a boltgun – it clunks its emptiness about the chamber with every twitch of the recreant’s ceramite finger. The hollow sound of defeat.

He stares into the shallows, his sallow face defiant and fearless. There is shame there; not for what he has done, but rather shame for what he has failed to do. A bitter vexation that plays out upon his cracked and mumbling lips. He is surrounded. Five believers who, their weapons being spent also, have taken to clutching and touching the armoured Word Bearer, like an honoured statue or protective totem. They whisper murderous encouragement and traitor-faith to their lord. They think their demigods and monsters will save them still.

One among them is the cultist leader Seid Phegl, Cognosci of the Red Munion. I’ve encountered him before, in the dark and the deep – he came to Calth at the head of ten thousand fools, bought with lies and the simple tricks of beings from the beyond.

The Word Bearer turns to look into the lake depths. He watches the dark water lap against the craggy walls, then turns back to the rest of the Ultramarines lining the shore.

There will be no escape for him. He knows it, and the boltgun tumbles into the water. The reaction from the cultists is instantaneous, like a sudden affliction. They hiss and writhe about his impassive, armoured form. There are tears. There is fear.

‘A word with you, cousin,’ I call out across the water.

The Word Bearer bridles. His acolytes haul at his ceramite limbs, but to no avail. He takes one last lingering look into the lake. My free hand unconsciously comes to rest upon the pommel of my sword. If my enemy attempts an escape, then I want to be ready.

He doesn’t, though. Shrugging off his followers like a second skin, he strides through the shallows towards me. I hear the creak of my brothers’ plate. Brother Phornax – formerly of the Librarius, and therefore invaluable in his knowledge of the Word Bearers immaterial allies – draws up beside me. Molossus has his hand upon the hilt of his chainsword. Sergeant Arcadas’s all-but-empty boltgun comes level with his helmet optics.

‘Pelion…’

‘I have this, sergeant,’ I tell him.

My enemy’s eyes are furtive and furious, but they are finally fixed upon my own. Arcadas won’t back down, though. ‘That’s far enough,’ he tells the Word Bearer.

The legionary slows but keeps coming. His face screws up with spite, barely suppressed.

‘It is you who have gone as far as you’re going to go, Ultramarine.’

Arcadas steps forward, the muzzle of his bolter aiming at the Word Bearer’s face. I extend two digits of my gauntlet and gently push the boltgun down towards the ground.

‘Our brother seems to have something to say,’ I announce, meeting the Word Bearer’s wretched gaze once more. ‘Let’s hear him out.’

‘I have but one thing to say to you, son of Ultramar,’ the forsaken Space Marine spits back.

He was fast. He was very fast. A knife – some kind of kris or sacrificial blade, like so many of them carried now. It was there, suddenly between us. Perhaps it had been mag-locked to the rear of his belt, or perhaps it had been passed to him by one of his tactual followers. It was there, regardless, blood-stained and sharpened on the thousand souls it had taken in the service of some infernal pact.

It would have claimed my soul, of that I have no doubt – but fast as he was, I was faster.

The Word Bearer’s face had no sooner formed the ugly mask of murderous intention, than my sword cleared its scabbard. The blade, light in my grip, sweeps down, taking the Word Bearer’s hand off at the wrist. In shock, the renegade instinctively reaches for the gushing stump with his other hand. Before both gauntlet and knife clatter to the stone floor, my short blade streaks around and slices the other off as well.

Moments pass. My blade is still – but ready – and sings with the ruthless execution of the manoeuvre. The Word Bearer stumbles back into the shallows, staring down at his armoured stumps. Blood squirts into the groundwater lake.

His acolytes need no order. They throw themselves at me.

Seid Phegl, Cognosci of the Red Munion, is suddenly torn back, lost in the bloody crash of a single bolt round from Sergeant Arcadas’s gun.

‘Hold!’ I order, such human detritus being not worthy of our precious ammunition. ‘Blades only.’

The cultists come at me, and they die. Thrusts and sweeps, as fluid and economical as they are brutal, tear through their squalid forms. The Word Bearer splashes down onto his knees and looks up at me. Bodies, and parts thereof, fall about him.

‘As far as we’re going to go…’ I say. ‘Well, we’re still going, cousin, despite the sick attempt by your wayward Legion to destroy us. It’s more than I can say for you. Now you’ll hear me out – where is your master, Ungol Shax?’

He sneers. ‘You really think my last words in this universe will be the answers to your questions, Ultramarine?’

‘They will be if you desire a clean death. A death befitting a Space Marine, and not some carcass of corrupted meat that lost its way to false enlightenment.’

‘Go suckle at your father’s teat, boy,’ the Word Bearer seethes. ‘You are but a babe in the great affairs of the galaxy and your sire the wet nurse of calamity.’

‘Where is Ungol Shax, Word Bearer?’ I repeat, struggling to hold my temper.

The renegade goes on. ‘Those that fear the great truths of our times are not long for this universe.’

‘Longer than you, cousin,’ I tell him. I nod to Molossus, who has unclipped his chainsword and guns the weapon to a throaty roar.

‘Belay that,’ a commanding voice booms from behind us.

I turn. Through the gloom strides the tetrarch himself. Tauro Nicodemus – Prince of Saramanth, Tetrarch of Ultramar, Champion of Roboute Guilliman himself – now, lowly master of Arcology Magnesi. However, this does not prevent Nicodemus from presenting himself with a regal bearing. His plate is polished to perfection. His weapons gleam with care and lethal proficiency. The plume of his helm, clutched under one armoured arm, matches his pteruges and scarlet mantle. The cloak follows him like a river of blood, through the damp darkness of the caves, flapping aside to reveal the bejewelled Crux Aureas – the mark of a champion.

To the unknowing eye, such ceremony might appear as an exercise in vanity. Serfs and seneschals should have more important duties to attend to in times of war than lacquering the filigree of their tetrarch’s pauldrons. As in all things, Nicodemus has prioritised strategy over self-importance. Like the arcology itself, men’s souls required fortification. The people of Calth – decimated and returned to the mean existence of survival underground – need a symbol of pride and defiance. There are no better symbols of Ultramar’s superiority and grandeur in the face of catastrophe than the Legiones Astartes themselves. Nicodemus needs them to feel that dignity and worth, to know that they are so much, despite having so little. There is still a war to be fought, and the tetrarch cannot allow the emptiness of men’s hearts to fill with defeat, for then the war would be lost before it had even begun.

Nicodemus has been blessed with the primarch’s eyes, and I find the familiar, reproving gaze of Guilliman upon me.

‘The Seventeenth Legion are our cousins no more,’ the tetrarch says, marching up, flanked by two honour guards. He passes his helmet on and holds out his gleaming gauntlets. The first Ultramarine places a master-crafted bolt pistol in his hand; the other a magazine of precious ammunition. ‘They are the heralds of their own oblivion. Their words hold no interest for us. The only deed to warrant our attention is their death, and we shall be the instrument thereof.’

Tauro Nicodemus steps up to the kneeling Word Bearer. The renegade goes to speak but the tetrarch puts a single bolt through his skull before the words escape his cracked lips. The shot echoes about the cave.

‘Am I understood?’ he asks.

‘Yes, tetrarch,’ the Ultramarines answer in unison.

Nicodemus nods. ‘Sergeant Arcadas.’

‘Yes, my lord.’

‘The 82nd Company’s work here is done,’ he says. ‘Have your men gather what ammunition remains – rounds, flasks and power packs. Collect it bolt by bolt, if you have to. Anything we can send back at these armoured mongrels upon their return. Leave everything else to rot.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Arcadas, Molossus and the Ultramarines go to disperse.

‘Tetrarch,’ I say.

‘Speak,’ Nicodemus replies, the word knowing and heavy. Molossus hovers with his tattered banner, while the sergeant searches the corpse-plate of a nearby Word Bearer, watching the storm between his masters quietly unfold.

‘Would it not further the Legion’s interest to hold this arcology?’ I ask. ‘If we abandon it, won’t the enemy return over time to threaten our security once more?’

‘I forgive you your conquering spirit, brother,’ Nicodemus says, ‘for it burns as bright as any in Ultramar. The time for empire building will come, trust me, but we are not building empires here. This is attrition. This is survival. We look to more than just the Legion’s interests. The people come first. We were bred in service of humanity, not to simply gratify our own warrior desires.’

‘Ungol Shax was here,’ I counter. ‘He will be a threat to the people and their survival until we end him.’

‘So you would clear out arcology after arcology in your search for this one enemy, building a guttering empire in the darkness as you go,’ the tetrarch says. ‘What of the other diseased minds that will prey upon our vulnerability in the meantime? We don’t presently have the numbers to hold that much territory.’

‘We are Ultramarines…’ I venture. Nicodemus narrows his eyes.

‘You do not need to tell me that, Pelion. We are Ultramarines and we could do it, but ask yourself whether we should do it. It is a question you ought consider. For example, I do not know what you expected to gain from engaging the enemy in conversation there.’

His tone confuses me. ‘I was drawing information from the prisoner, tetrarch.’

‘No, Hylas. This man had no information to give you. You were pointlessly toying with him, as though you expect to create fear in the hearts of such men with petty threats of violence and the promise of an executioner’s mercy. They have turned from the Emperor’s wisdom and consigned themselves to damnation. They are already living out their greatest fear. Your only duty is to end such abomination, and end it quickly. You thought you were drawing information from him, while he drew you further into his lies and ignorance. The only words that the Seventeenth Legion now bear are poison.’

‘Tetrarch–’

‘Enough,’ Nicodemus commands. ‘We will not play their games in the shadows. It is what the Word Bearers want for us, and they wait for us there. You will stand to your post, Honorarius Pelion, and not be drawn into such dark–’

A sudden splashing from the far reaches of the groundwater lake attracts the attention of every Ultramarine in the chamber. Someone, or something, is surfacing.

Sergeant Arcadas and the tetrarch’s honour guard bring up their bolters in a flash, and once more Molossus guns his chainsword into life. Tauro Nicodemus, still with pistol in hand, stares into the dark waters. It is I, however, leading with the short blade of my sword, that first advances into the shallows.

A spiked and armoured shape breaks the surface. It gasps and gurgles in the icy, gritty water, hauling itself up from the depths and over the jagged rocky bed of the lake. The colour of the plate identifies it as an enemy. A Word Bearer.

As I close on the prone form, my suit lamps shine upon a scarred and shaven head. He brings up his chin and sputters the remaining water from his multi-lungs, and sharp, Colchisian features greet the illumination.

I halt in the shallows when I see his eyes. They are gone.

The flesh about the empty sockets is bloody and botched. His eyes have either been taken by another, or he has cut them out himself. The senseless barbarism and despoliation of the Emperor’s flesh disgusts me.

The Word Bearer senses the movement about him and reaches out for my armoured leg.

‘Friend?’ he coughs.

I wade behind my enemy. My blade slips beneath the renegade’s chin and rests against his inviting throat.

‘Foe,’ I correct him.

The Word Bearer finds his way to a smile.

I look to Tauro Nicodemus. ‘At your command, my lord,’ I say. The tetrarch does not look pleased.

‘Sergeant,’ he says. ‘Where does that lake lead?’

‘I was not under the impression that lakes led anywhere, tetrarch,’ Arcadas replies.

‘Tetrarch…’ the Word Bearer mouths with obvious relish, until my sword presses harder into his Colchisian flesh.

‘Those about to die have no business addressing princes,’ I tell him. ‘Now hold your tongue, or you’ll force me to cut it out.’

‘I fear you may merely end what he has started,’ Nicodemus says, looking at the mutilation already wrought on the Word Bearer’s face. ‘What are these markings on his head?’

I look down at the hatch-scarring across the Word Bearer’s shaven skull. It looks like a grate or portcullis.

‘Exalted Gate Chapter,’ I inform him. ‘Just like Shax.’

The Word Bearer’s pained smile broadens. I look to Nicodemus. ‘It would be my honour to end this abomination now,’ I say, echoing his earlier sentiment. ‘However, I think it might be prudent to put questions to this prisoner.’

‘Pelion…’ the tetrarch warns. I am testing a hero’s patience.

‘The lake clearly leads somewhere my lord,’ I say. ‘The dark depths alone did not give birth to this aberrant brother.’

‘I wouldn’t bet on that,’ Nicodemus mutters.

I turn to the tetrarch in a formal salute. ‘Ungol Shax remains a threat, my lord. His men are operating in the region. He might be operating in the region. Surely, it would be tactically perilous to allow that? The prisoner might have information to that end. I request an interrogation-audience, Lord Nicodemus.’

Vexation ripples across his patrician features. ‘Sergeant Arcadas,’ he calls out.

‘My lord.’

‘Have your men complete their sweep of Tantoraem.’

‘Yes, tetrarch.’

‘In the meantime,’ Nicodemus tells him, ‘have a chamber cleared and set aside for the questioning of the prisoner.’

‘Straight away, my lord.’

‘Pelion,’ the tetrarch says, turning to walk away. ‘Have the prisoner gagged, secured and brought before me.’

‘Sir?’

‘I shall conduct the questioning myself,’ Nicodemus says. ‘Have no doubt, Honorarius Pelion, that if I suspect treachery of any breed or creed, I will order the prisoner ended – information or not.’

I don’t quite know what to say. I watch his scarlet cloak stream about him and follow the tetrarch into the darkness.

‘Thank you, my lord,’ I call after him.

The chamber has clearly been used for sacrifices in the recent past. Splatters of browning blood form a collage with other forms of filth across the walls, floor and ceiling. What Sergeant Arcadas had taken for some kind of stone table actually appears to be a rune-inscribed altar, loaded with profane ritual significance.

The Word Bearer doesn’t know that he’s seated before such an atrocity, blind as he is. I put him down harshly on an empty ammunition crate. He’s unsteady, and not just because he can’t see. I had summoned one of the engineer crews we used to secure and maintain barriers across the numerous arterial tunnels and arcology subways. Using their plasma torches, I had the Word Bearer’s arms braced across his chestplate and the palms of his gauntlets fused to his armoured sides. So there the bastard sits: a prisoner in his own plate.

The bolt round rattles around the inside of my gauntlet.

Tauro Nicodemus stands before the prisoner, resplendent and grim in equal measure. Brother Daesenor stands sentinel in the doorway, the fat muzzle of his boltgun trained upon the prisoner. The tetrarch nods. I cut the gag from the Word Bearer’s mouth with the tip of my sword.

The prisoner works his jaw.

‘Name and rank,’ Nicodemus demands. The Word Bearer purses his dark lips. ‘Let’s not play games, legionary,’ the tetrarch insists. ‘You know that I will not dishonour your flesh – nor my own – with torture and affliction. Let us talk as Legiones Astartes, as warriors of a galaxy broad and wide, and divided. As enemies, if you wish, but enemies that both hate and respect one other.’

‘You have a gift with words, tetrarch,’ the legionary observes with a smile. ‘In another life, you might have been a bearer of the Word. Are you sure you have chosen the right side?’

‘Of all the things we want from you,’ I say from behind him, ‘praise and approval are not among them.’

‘Name and rank,’ the tetrarch demands again.

‘My name is Azul Gor,’ the Word Bearer says. ‘Exalted Gate Chapter. And you?’

‘Tauro Nicodemus of Saramanth.’

‘Oh, how the mighty have fallen,’ Azul Gor says.

‘The mighty go where they are needed,’ Nicodemus counters. ‘Today, I am needed on Calth. On another day it might be anywhere in Ultramar. On another still, anywhere in the Imperium of Man. Wherever my enemies dare to soil the earth with their presence, I will be needed.’

‘I think it amusing that it was in fact the Warmaster that sent you to this doomed world.’

‘Then Horus sent me to the place where I was most needed,’ the tetrarch says. ‘Perhaps there is hope for him yet.’

I interject. ‘Galactic politics aside, I hope you don’t mind me asking where you and your villainous kindred have been hiding. We paid you a visit. You were not at home.’

‘I was in the deep and the dark,’ Azul Gor replies absently.

‘Can’t we all say that?’ I mutter.

‘We cannot, Ultramarine,’ he hisses. ‘Imagine being blinded, stumbling about a cave as black as night, buried deep below the surface of a dead world – a world bathed in the glare of a star turned from the light. Can you imagine a deeper darkness?’

The chamber falls to silence.

‘What happened to your eyes?’ Nicodemus asks.

‘I put them out,’ Azul Gor said. His honesty burns. ‘I put them out so that I might not have to look upon your starched faces and the dazzling gleam of your untested war-plate.’

‘You didn’t expect to find us in Tantoraem,’ I accuse.

‘And you negotiated a flooded cave system, without your weapon or helmet,’ the tetrarch adds.

I nod. ‘Or your eyes. I put it to you, Word Bearer – you did not expect to find us at Tantoraem. I think you were looking for your master, Ungol Shax.’

The blind defector begins to laugh. It is a horrible chuckle laced with venom and bitterness.

‘Ungol Shax is dead.’

‘You lie!’ I spit back, working my way around the altar. ‘It is all you know. It is all you are. I would slit your throat, but for the untruth that would pour from the wound in place of good, honest Legion blood.’

‘I wish you would, Ultramarine,’ Azul Gor roars back.

I lash out. My blade lurches forward, coming to rest under the Word Bearer’s sharp chin.

Nicodemus throws up his hands. ‘Pelion!’

‘Where is Ungol Shax?’ I hiss.

‘He is dead,’ Azul Gor tells me once again, ‘as I soon will be too. As will you be, Brother Pelion.’

‘By your hand, I suppose,’ I dare the Word Bearer.

‘No,’ he says. ‘By my word. You roar your boldness, but sometimes actions speak louder. You restrain me here – a blind prisoner – with your blade at my throat and the clunk of a primed boltgun aimed at me from the corner. You stink of fear. Fear. That makes you weak. I need not blades nor boltguns. I have words, and I could end you with but a single one.’

‘And which word would that be?’ I furiously demand, the tip of my sword dimpling the flesh of his throat.

‘Penetral–’

The small chamber echoes with gunfire.

It is over. Azul Gor is dead. Three bolt rounds. Two in the chest, and one in the skull. Brother Daesenor’s weapon smokes in the silence that follows.

I round on the sentinel, but Nicodemus raises a gauntlet.

‘I ordered it,’ the tetrarch admits, ‘as I told you I would. This is my fault. This was a mistake.’

‘He was talking,’ I protest.

‘He was,’ Nicodemus agrees. ‘He was talking you into the darkness. You’ve seen how far the Word Bearers have fallen. You’ve seen their depravities. That word was likely some kind of incantation, and his death at your hands would have been a latent bargain with some otherworldly creature.’

I stare at the tetrarch.

‘We would do well not to underestimate our lost kinsmen,’ he continues. ‘The entire episode – being unarmed, the eyes, emerging from hiding – it was probably a ruse to get him into a room with an Ultramarines officer. A target worthy of his sacrifice. It is my fault. I take responsibility.’

The tetrarch goes to leave the chamber. He looks to Daesenor and nods at the trussed-up corpse of the Word Bearer. ‘Take care of that please, brother,’ he says, before turning to me. ‘I’m going back to the Arcropolis. Have Sergeant Arcadas complete his sweep and then withdraw from this damned place. Assist the Army sappers in demolishing our breach point.’

‘Won’t you reconsider occupying the arcology?’ I say, but my heart isn’t in it.

The tetrarch ignores my words.

‘Ensure that nothing can get through where we entered,’ Nicodemus says. ‘That’s your responsibility.’

The breach point is nothing more than a ragged hole in the cavern wall.

Seismic demolition charges had been requisitioned from a tunnel-team lockup. They are not military grade, or anything close to the power and precision of the tactical demolitions used by the Legiones Astartes. However, in sufficient quantity – and under expert supervision – the seismic charges would do the job.

Sergeant Arcadas is clearing the last of his warriors from Arcology Tantoraem. With members of the Army, the sergeant’s Space Marines had made swift work of searching the cave system for Legion munitions and power packs. All else – rations, weaponry and plate – was destroyed on the further orders of the tetrarch for fear it might somehow be contaminated. Blades were broken. Fibre bundles were ripped out. Bolters were breech-blown or fouled with crude plugs.

Imperial Army forces trudge by under the milky orb of Sergeant Brotus Grodin, carrying caches of recovered munitions and packs. Grodin is a retired soldier – one of the Emperor’s ex-serviceman, who has been placed in charge of one of the newly organised units of the Veridian Cicatrix. The Cicatrix had been the tetrarch’s idea: Cicatricians are all remnants of former defence regiments that have been decimated and scattered during the surface war. Their camo-chitons are a myriad of local colour, each member hailing from a different defence force or ceremonial guard. All wear flak plate from Konor – breastplates, skirts and guards. Their visored helms display the nose and cheekguards favoured by many of the Calth militia, and each carries a battered buckler, short blade and the slung length of a las-fusil.

Their exposed forearms and thighs all bear horrific radiation burns and solar scarring. This is the now infamous Mark of Calth, a testament to their desire to fight on across the sun-scorched surface of their doomed home world. It was this unifying feature that Nicodemus chose to honour in their name, despite the fact that Grodin’s contingent alone is made up of former members of the Vospherus 14th and 55th Irregulars, and the Tarxis 1st Citizen’s Reserve. Helmetless, with the scowl on his roasted half-face driving the Cicatricians on, Grodin taps the passing soldiers on the arm with a swagger-sceptre.

‘All through, m’lord,’ Grodin reports gruffly.

‘Thank you, sergeant,’ I say. ‘Would you be so good as to accompany my legionary brothers back to the Arcropolis with the supplies?’

Grodin nods and follows his dour troops, leaving me with Brothers Daesenor and Phornax as breach sentries.

Ione Dodona also remains.

She retreats, unspooling detonator cable. The three of us follow her to an outcrop, behind which she has set up a simple plunge-detonator. The equipment is only frontier mining-standard, but serviceable – like the seismic charges Dodona is using to collapse the breach point.

‘Are we set?’ I ask.

‘Two more charges to wire,’ she answers, fingering through the nest of cable. ‘One more minute.’

Dodona has been invaluable. Grodin’s men have heart and grim determination but they are all topsiders. As a Sapper Second-Class, even before the conflict, Dodona had been part of the Calth Pioneer Auxilia. Commonly known as ‘the Benthals’, the sappers’ expert knowledge of the cave systems, structural integrities and explosives became a powerful weapon in the war as it progressed beyond a simply military endeavour. Many lives, and much in the way of precious ammunition, have been saved by the strategic collapsing of caves and tunnels swarming with cultist forces and degenerate Word Bearers.

Collectively, Dodona possibly has a higher kill-count than some frontline battle-brothers. What they achieve with bolt and blade, the sappers accomplished with millions of tonnes of rock. In a way, Calth itself has taken the fight to the invaders.

As we wait, Daesenor and Phornax monitor the breach for enemy activity. Without the opportunity to carry out a full survey, there was no way of knowing all of the entry and exit points in the Tantoraem arcology. An enemy force could stream through and flood our territory through our own breach point. My brothers’ bolters are there to give Dodona time to finish her work and bury any opportunists. As it is, all is silent and still.

Casting my eyes across Dodona’s equipment and schemata, I pick up a scratched dataslate. It displays detailed maps of arcologies both completed and – before the war – in a state of construction. Tracing my ceramite fingertip across the slate, I follow the pillar-lined mag-lev tunnels out of Magnesi-South, through the breach point and down through the branching cave systems of Tantoraem. My digit drifts the tortuous route of our incursion. I think on the brothers lost under my command, drowning in the sea of rabid cultists. I feel my boots slipping in the blood of our loyal Cicatricians, and relive the clash of our formations against throngs of fanatical Word Bearers, like ships smashing against rocks in the shallows.

Then I reach the groundwater lake, the shallows where we captured Azul Gor. To my surprise, my finger travels on, arriving at a single slate designation: Penetralia.

‘What is this?’ I ask Dodona, who is clearly not impressed at having to disentangle herself from detonator cables to check the slate. Unlike the Cicatricians, her lamped helmet is close-fitting and her flak-plates are set into a dark body-suit, better adapted to clambering through rough caves and tight tunnels. She shines her lamps down onto the slate screen.

‘That would be the Penetralia,’ she tells me. ‘It’s a series of tunnels formed naturally in the rock. It’s quite a labyrinth down there, but the region was earmarked for excavation as the entry point to another arcology.’

‘But it’s submerged,’ I mutter, having seen the lake for myself. Dodona nods.

‘Groundwater flooded part of the Penetralia and the mag-lev mining track leading to the excavation,’ she says. ‘Pioneers were evacuated and operations were abandoned until pump-crews could be brought in, but by that time the war had already started.’

‘Why wasn’t I supplied with this information?’

‘It’s not an arcology,’ Dodona insists, ‘it’s a dead end – flooded, at that. An excavation barely begun.’

‘On the other side of the tunnels,’ I press the Pioneer, jabbing my ceramite finger at the screen, ‘is it possible that the caves remain dry? Airlocked, perhaps?’

She considers this for a moment. ‘Yes, it’s possible – but why would you even think that? It’s deeper than we’ve ever bothered to go before.’

‘We pulled a Word Bearer from the waters of that lake,’ Brother Phornax informs her. ‘He didn’t come from Tantoraem.’

I hand her back the slate and turn to my two brothers.

‘Hold off on the detonation,’ I order. ‘Send word back to Magnesi.’

‘But the tetrarch–’ Dodona begins.

‘I’m going to see the tetrarch now,’ I tell her. ‘Blow the breach point only in the event of an enemy incursion.’ Snatching up my helmet, I nod to Daesenor and Phornax. ‘Vigilance, brothers,’ I tell them. ‘I will send reinforcements. Our enemy could be lying in wait – remaining hidden from sight. We may not have finished our work here.’

The mag-lev line runs into the lake – I can see it clearly now. Earlier, I had unknowingly emptied the freight car of some of the Red Munion sharpshooters. With fusil bolts lancing off my plate and my short sword cleaving through cultist bodies in the confines of the vehicle, I had not realised that it was part of the mag-way.

Sergeant Brodin’s Cicatricians are clearing the bodies now, carrying the cadavers and dumping them in a fire. The reactivated freight engine hums and crackles its intention to move. The sergeant himself is rinsing down the car interior with buckets of lake water, while Ione Dodona works with a plasma torch to air-seal the vehicle as best she can.

I have faith in her efforts. She has already worked wonders with the dormant electropolar engine. She has spent a lifetime working down in the arcologies on such machines and so I leave the workings and operation of the mining tram to her.

We would not bother with the mag-lev but for the Army troopers; my brothers and I could traverse the flooded tunnels just as Azul Gor had done, with the benefit of enclosed suits and autosenses. The Veridian Cicatrix have no such equipment, however, and I am forced to rely upon the rotting rail system. It will undeniably hasten our journey, even though it has taken some time to ready the engine car.

I am relying upon the Cicatricians to bolster our numbers. When I took evidence of an unfinished network beyond Tantoraem to the tetrarch, once again he was not pleased. He was not pleased that its existence had been missed in the first place, and not pleased that it might well harbour a hidden Word Bearers outpost. I reminded him of Azul Gor’s last half-spoken word, and showed him the unfinished Penetralia branch.

He still angrily refused my request of two full legionary breacher squads to clear the Penetralia tunnels; anger at me, himself or both, I could not tell. He did at least grant my subsequent request for a reconnaissance party – if there was a waiting enclave of Word Bearers on our doorstep, there was no denying that it was a tactical necessity to confirm their existence, number and threat level. This was at least the way I framed the petition. Nicodemus regarded it more as a job unfinished, an objective untaken. I accepted responsibility and took the rebuke in silence.

I have been allocated two battle-brothers. I asked for Molossus and Sergeant Arcadas, but I got Brothers Daesenor and Phornax, plus my pick of the Army troopers and Pioneers. I accepted without argument.

Brotus Grodin and his men had just arrived at the Arcropolis with the Tantoraem salvage when I ordered the sergeant and a squad of his Cicatricians to resupply and head back out to the breach point with me.

It’s fair to say that Tauro Nicodemus is not the only one who is currently not pleased.

Dodona clears us to mount the freight engine. The Cicatricians stand, clutching the long barrels of their las-fusils. Dodona operates the chunky levers of the tram, while Daesenor, Phornax and myself tower over them in the freight compartment with our blades and combat shields at the ready. Phornax and I pack our pistols while Brother Daesenor carries his all-but-empty boltgun slung over his shoulder.

The salvage from Tantoraem was paltry and already earmarked for the Magnesi defenders, and we only have a few precious bolt rounds between us. I rattle my single remaining shell in the grip of my gauntlet, as I frequently do. I hold it a little way from my mag-lock belt, then release it. The round flies to the belt from my finger and thumb, clicking into its usual place.

The tram engine manages a throaty hum that takes us out of the siding and down the shore. The groundwater parts, churning aside as the tram pushes on before disappearing into the inky black depths of the lake.

The hum builds to a whine as the carriage pushes through the weight of the water. The cab-lamps illuminate the flooded tunnels of the Penetralia beyond the rapidly steaming windows – everything is rough, rocky and unfinished. Dodona burdens the electropolar engine. Her plasma welding is serviceable, but it can’t hope to completely hold back the water. Closed ceiling vents disappoint, admitting a near-constant downpour, and water leaks in through some of the las-bolt holes that Dodona failed to spot. The door seals bubble and spume liquid darkness. Water pools rapidly in the freight compartment before crawling up the boots of the Cicatricians, much to their growing concern.

As the water reaches their skirts and breastplates, Sergeant Grodin orders fusils held out of the rising inundation. Some of the men begin to panic.

‘How much further?’ Grodin calls up to the cab, trying not to sound too alarmed.

‘Not far, sergeant,’ Ione Dodona calls back to him. ‘I think,’ she adds under her breath.

The freight tram rumbles on against the water. The cab-lumens suddenly flash before going out. Our suit lamps provide the only illumination now. Someone cries out in alarm as a closed vent shears off, water gushing into the space with renewed force.

Everything is deluge and darkness. As the water rises beyond my belt, the Cicatricians begin to paddle and splash, holding onto the side of the compartment and trying to keep their heads above the surface. We assist them as best we can, helping them to climb the cab wall to the overhead stowage bins, but soon it is all they can do to keep their helmets between the ceiling and the frothing water. They are coughing. They are drowning in the dark.

‘Ione…?’ I press her, preparing to expand my multi-lung.

I fear we might lose the Cicatricians, but the Pioneer is having her own problems. She is routinely pulling herself down under the water to operate the mag-lev’s manual levers and peer through the front screen. She surfaces.

‘Can’t see a damn thing,’ she splutters.

‘Ione!’ I shout back. She slips below the water again.

A moment later, we are all thrown forward by a sudden halt. The magnetic seals on our boots keep me and my brothers in place, but Grodin and many of his squad lose their grip in the surging water – it crashes them into the ceiling, then drags them back down again.

The tram has stopped. The engine gurgles and sparks.

With a sudden, ear-popping crash, the left-hand bank of windows burst outwards, dragging men and floating equipment out in the inescapable surge of water. The compartment evacuates quickly, but I claw open the exit hatch, my suit lamps providing ghostly illumination in the darkness beyond.

The dry darkness.

Turning, I see Ione Dodona slumped down in the cab like a drowned bilge-rat, her hand still on the brake and her chest rising and falling in deep, ragged breaths. Through the forward screen I see the rear bumpers of another engine – an engine our car almost collided with.

I step down from the freight car with Phornax and Daesenor, ordering the pair to secure a perimeter as the Cicatricians groggily regroup. Our vehicle still sits in the shallows, unable to go any further up the incline because of a longer, deactivated train that runs all the way up to the dead-end siding. I stand still for a moment.

I look down at the water, my suit lamps lighting up the surface of the dark lake. The resplendence of my cobalt-blue armour is reflected back to me from the glassy ripples. I wonder if it has recently caught the armoured reflections of my sworn enemies – have I finally cornered Ungol Shax and his Word Bearers brethren?

Walking the length of the intact vehicle, my sword and shield ready, it becomes apparent that the train is partially flooded – suggesting that it must have been used fairly recently. Certainly since the flooding of the Penetralia with groundwater.

‘Anything?’ I growl over the vox.

‘Nothing… Aye, nothing,’ my brothers return.

Activating barrel-mounted lamps on their fusils, Sergeant Grodin coughs out orders to the Cicatricians to perform a weapons test. Firing searing beams into the lake depths, we discover that over half of the squad’s weapons have temporarily succumbed to water infiltration. In the absolute darkness of the Penetralia, with no arc-lights or reflection vents, this isn’t ideal.

‘Dodona,’ I call out. The dripping Pioneer steps down from the tram, her helmet lamps on the data-slate she’s studying.

‘Three exits from this terminus chamber,’ she tells me. ‘All swiftly devolve into natural branches of the cave system, with chambers and grottos situated throughout.’

‘With Word Bearers lying in wait,’ I murmur. Grodin returns with his squad, and I turn to him. ‘Three entrances, sergeant – we’ll take one each. Brother Daesenor, follow Grodin and I’ll take Dodona. Sergeant, split your men between myself and Brothers Phornax and Daesenor. We will split up to cover more ground. I want every twist, turn, cavity and crawlspace checked for enemy presences. We are looking for Ungol Shax and his dark brotherhood. Keep channels open and vox back any contacts. If you run into numbers or are ambushed, establish a hold point and fall back by sections to the terminus chamber. We’ll regroup there. Understood?’

I get helmeted nods and a grim, ‘Yes, my lord,’ from Grodin and the Cicatricans.

‘Maintain communications,’ I say before leading Ione Dodona and three soldiers into the Penetralia.

Dodona isn’t wrong: the Penetralia is a labyrinth. Tunnels corkscrew, jagged slopes erupt before our lamps and the ceiling regularly slopes down to meet the tops of our helmets. Passages wind and bifurcate, riddled with grot holes and burrows. Blind corners open into vertiginous vaults and small caverns form sudden dead ends. The darkness is almost palpable, its viscid obscurity devouring the light from our illumination.

My suit lamps lead the way, the halo of light feeling its way across the angularity and sharp stone. Dodona’s helmet beam dances ahead, guiding me through the branching network of tunnels. Behind, the three Cicatricians – all former members of Tarxis Reserve – explore the holes and hollows with their barrel-mounted lamps. My shield scrapes around corners, while my blade stands ready and retracted, poised to sweep forward and take a Word Bearer’s head from his armoured shoulders or to cleave down through the torso of an unfortunate cultist.

Our reconnaissance reveals little, however, but the black emptiness of the Penetralia’s lonely depths.

‘Daesenor, what do you have?’ I vox.

‘This place is dead,’ he returns. ‘If Ungol Shax was here, I think we missed him.’

‘Phornax?’

‘The Word Bearers were here,’ my battle-brother informs me with confidence. ‘We’ve pushed on to a larger chamber at the heart of the tunnels. There are statues and iconography.’

I nod to myself. If Arcology Tantoraem was anything to go by, our betrayer-kinsmen and their cult followers are wanton idolaters, constructing temples and statues and worshipping at the stone feet of their otherworldly sponsors. I make a note of Phornax’s position from my optical-overlay. ‘Hold position,’ I tell him. ‘We’re coming to you. Brother Daesenor – meet us at this chamber.’

‘Affirmative,’ Daesenor replies. ‘But I’ve lost one of my men in the damned tunnels. Sergeant Grodin is looking for him now. We’ll be there shortly.’

Pushing on through the thick darkness and a knot of intersecting passageways, we step out into the open space of a larger chamber. I can see the beams of lamps ahead in the pitch blackness, cutting through the murk like blades. Phornax and his men are waiting near the centre of the cavern, but the light from their lamps blinks and breaks. As I advance, I come to understand why.

Phornax was right. There are statues here, but nothing like I’d seen in the dark chapels and reverence-dens of cultist-held arcologies. These statues are different sizes but humanoid in shape. Each is crafted from an obsidian-like substance – crystalline and angular. It absorbs the light from our lamps like a black hole. Even our reflections are absent from its glassy, midnight surface. There simply isn’t sufficient light. This material swallows it all.

‘Volcanic glass?’ Pioneer Dodona says with a frown. ‘Not on Calth, surely. Not in these quantities…’

I watch the dark material begin to wisp and curl under the light of our lamps. It dissipates and drifts away like a thin, black vapour. It is strange indeed.

‘It’s not obsidian,’ I say. ‘Touch nothing. Nobody touch anything.’

It is as though the statues were crafted from solidified darkness itself.

The representations are everywhere, obscuring the beams of Phornax’s lamps. The Ultramarine and a soldier of the Vospherus 14th are examining something at the heart of the rocky chamber. Statues, many in number, are clustered about them – a crowd of the crystalline forms, all facing inwards to a central point. It is decidedly unnerving.

‘What do we have?’ I ask my battle-brother impatiently.

Phornax is kneeling. He stands at my approach.

‘An unholy temple of some kind,’ he confirms, ‘seemingly used for ceremonies and communion with the monstrous beings of the empyrean.’

He gestures to the floor at my boots. The rough surface has been smoothed and polished, and there is a pattern etched into the bedrock. It bears dreadful glyphs, and symbols that make my eyes ache.

‘Cultist volunteers were brought here for sacrifice, Honorius, and a ceremony employed to commune with some beast or malignificant.’

I hear Phornax’s words, but I rarely understand his Librarius-talk. I am a practical warrior to the core. I’m not often interested in the ‘material or immaterial’ nature of the universe. I believe in one thing: my Legion. The Ultramarines have proved time and time again that they can kill whatever they encounter. All other considerations are pure theoretical.

‘So these were volunteers?’ Ione Dodona asks.

Phornax steps aside to reveal a grisly pile of scorched bones at the centre of the pattern. Sprawled across the blackened ribcages lays a more freshly-dead member of the Red Munion – a woman, with her slender fingers still wrapped around the hilt of a sacrificial blade embedded in her heart. Dodona’s lip wrinkles with disgust.

I swiftly tire of the macabre scene and my brother’s interest in it.

‘Is there anything here that points to Ungol Shax or his location?’ I ask.

‘Ungol Shax is here,’ Phornax tells me. ‘I think that’s him behind you.’

With my helmet on, Phornax cannot see the scowl that his ghastly revelation has brought to my face. I turn to find another statue at my back; it too is angular and crystalline. The idol matches me for height and brawn, and its arms are raised in some gesture of triumph or accomplishment. In one hand it holds a sceptre – nay, a crozius with a headpiece in the design of a portcullis, or a gate. An Exalted Gate.

Under my suit lamps, the abomination begins to smoulder, bleeding its lighter-than-air darkness into the faint, draughty breeze.

I look around at the other statues. It all becomes clearer to me.

Despite the angularity and lightlessness of their forms, many do bear similar features: helms, packs and the broad outline of Legion war-plate. Smaller idols in between appear to be midnight representations of cultists, caught in moments of jubilation and madness. I find my helm shaking involuntarily from side to side. What, in the name of the Five Hundred Worlds, has happened here?

I hear shouts from the rear of the temple-chamber. At first I take it to be a greeting – Daesenor arriving with his men. I realise then that it’s my men that are calling out, and I feel an unseemly dread descend upon our gathering.

‘We can’t find Olexander,’ Ione Dodona reports.

Names mean nothing to me. Numbers do, however, and our numbers are decreasing. I look to Phornax and his remaining Cicatrician.

‘Where are the rest of your men?’ I ask.

‘Checking the tunnels leading from the far end of the chamber,’ the former Librarian tells me, concern creeping over his features. ‘Soldier?’

The remaining Cicatrician has two fingers to the side of his helmet. He has no contact with the missing troopers. He shakes his head.

‘All units, report in,’ I call across the vox.

Squad members present within the temple-chamber swiftly acknowledge my request. A haunting static stands proxy for the rest. ‘Daesenor, report,’ I insist.

Nothing.

I stride to the edge of the statues.

‘The enemy are playing games in the dark,’ I hiss through gritted teeth, my gauntlets creaking about the hilt of my sword, and my combat shield. ‘Form up,’ I order. ‘Stick together. Phornax – take point.’

The Ultramarine gives me a lingering glance. That’s what Phornax does. Beyond the eerie nature of his former calling, he has a dislikeable habit of questioning orders without the forthright nature of actually doing so. He allows the silence to ask the questions. It is within the shallow soil of his breaks and pauses that the seeds of doubt take root. Then, like weeds growing up between marble slabs, his misgivings rapidly spread to others.

But before I have to repeat myself, he has holstered his pistol and has his sword and shield ready. He replaces his helmet and strides away from the forest of statues. His optical-overlays lead him towards one of the chamber’s many craggy exits, taking us towards the coordinates of Brother Daesenor’s last vox-transmission. I motion Dodona and the troopers after him.

‘Name?’ I say to Phornax’s remaining Cicatrician.

‘Evanz, my lord,’ he replies. ‘Vospherous 14th.’

I can hear the fear in his voice. Like a fortification on trembling foundations, the soldier’s nerve will only hold so long. I have seen the common fighting men of the Imperium break under the fearful circumstances of explorative warfare and crusading. Facing the unknown enemies of the galaxy – technological abominations, deviant isolationists, or the horrors of the xenos – I have known soldiers lose control of their minds and bodies.

‘Evanz of the Vospherous 14th,’ I say. My voice comes at him like a wall, strong and unshakable. I attempt to lend him a little of my fortitude and fearlessness. ‘I want you to watch our rear. You see anything creeping up behind us, and I want to know about it. Understood, soldier?’

The Cicatrician makes a show of priming his fusil and bringing the weapon close in at his flak-armoured shoulder.

‘By my honour, Lord Pelion.’

As we negotiate the twisted darkness of the Penetralia, I feel the jagged passages closing in about me. My mind drifts to the millions of tonnes of rock above my helmet. Suddenly, the labyrinthine tunnels themselves seem threatening – twisting and turning, rising and falling. Several times we seem to double back on ourselves, and I imagine the passageways like a knot of writhing serpents. There are dead ends and cavities around every corner, necessitating routine forays through tight apertures and shadowy side tunnels.

Several times my hearts quicken at the announcement of supposed enemy targets. I hunger for our foe. Perhaps we had found the shadow-corpse of Ungol Shax… or perhaps not. If his Bearers of the Word still haunt the passageways of the Penetralia, then they shall be mine. I have pledged my blade to their ending. This is a task unfinished. A mission without completion.

But time after time, our enemy targets turn out to be shadows and silhouettes, cast by our own light – the very bedrock playing with us. The Cicatricians beg our pardon, but it is not difficult to see how the depths are rattling them. The scar tissue of their faces is taught with tension, their mouths unsmiling, their eyes peering through the slits of their helmets with dread expectation.

‘Lord Pelion!’ Evanz erupts. Such a warning had been sitting on the soldier’s sun-scalded lips since entering the tunnel complex.

I turn, half-expecting another false alarm, but, like the Cicatrician, I catch the shadow and its movement. Rocks don’t move.

Before I can stop him, Evanz plucks off several las-bolts from his fusil. Light from the blasts ripples back down the passage, throwing more fleeting shadows along the rugged walls.

Something retreats.

Flushed with the validity of his sighting – his fear momentarily forgotten and a tension-fuelled rage taking over – the soldier charges off after his shots with a roar.

‘Hold!’ I shout, but Evanz is already disappearing into the darkness. ‘Hold your positions!’ I bark back at the rest of the group before setting off after him.

It doesn’t take me long to catch up, my armoured strides taking me with confidence back down the rough passage. I find him at an uneven crossroads – one I don’t recall passing through. Evanz’s helmet is off. He’s young, but his flesh is sun-scarred, lined with age and anxiety. He holds his empty fusil slackly at his side and his chest rises and falls beneath his plas-fibre breastplate. He stares with hollow eyes, but each of the passages offer nothing but fearful gloom.

He stiffens as I move him to one side. I scan the rocky convolutions of each tunnel, cycling through different optic spectra. Nothing.

‘Back to the group,’ I order. Evanz stands transfixed by the empty obscurity. ‘Now!’ I growl.

The soldier turns, deflated, and starts trudging back up towards his Cicatrix compatriots. I give the crossroads a last long, lingering look. ‘I’m here,’ I announce to the darkness, my voice carrying further than I expected. ‘When you tire of your cowardice and playing games in the shadows, I am here.’

Back with the group, I exchange Evanz for one of the Tarxis Reservists on the rearguard and order Brother Phornax onwards.

It doesn’t take us long to find Sergeant Grodin. Like a crystalline outcropping in the rock, we find the Cicatrician – his back to the passage wall, his helmet turned up the tunnel and his fusil aimed back down it. I know little of the work of artists and remembrancers, but the sergeant strikes me as a sculptural study in panic and confusion.

We also discover the soldier he was searching for, a member of the Vospherous 55th, hiding in a small grotto. The trooper clutches his helmet to his breastplate and peers fearfully around a rocky corner, out into the tunnel. His scarred face remains aghast at the horror he must have beheld there, fixed in solidified shadow that smokes and steams under the glare of our lamps.

‘Pelion,’ Phornax calls.

The former Librarian had found Brother Daesenor. He could have been a statue from any compliant world, or one of the many depicting the noble and heroic exploits of the XIII Legion to be found across the worlds of Ultramar. For his lethal service on the fields of Komesh alone, Daesenor deserved as much. With his boltgun snug at his pauldron and his helmet optics lined up with the weapon’s mean sight, the Ultramarine still looks ready to fire. I examine his gauntlet. His digit is fully depressed. The trigger has been pulled. Daesenor has been petrified in the moment that it might have saved him.

I feel a curse, common and uncouth, escape my lips. A tightness creeps into my voice.

‘Phornax – surely the Librarius has something to say on these unnatural matters?’

‘Officially, the Librarius has nothing much to say about anything anymore, brother,’ Phornax returns dispassionately.

‘Unofficially, then?’

Phornax hesitates. ‘The Heralds-that-were have clearly developed their sorcerous interests,’ he tells me. ‘They draw outlandish powers from the immaterial plane that enhance their already considerable capabilities.’

‘Gifts like your own,’ I ask.

‘No, brother,’ Phornax continues warily. ‘Magicks and superstitious deviancies. Augmentations in the form of polluted artefacts and otherworldly bargains.’

‘Could these perversities be responsible for these dark deeds?’

‘Yes, brother.’

‘And what weapons do we have to combat such deviancy?’ I ask.

‘You have my bolt and blade, as you have always done.’

I stare at him, and he stares back. Dodona looks on with some trepidation.

‘I’ll take point,’ I tell him, pushing past. As our pauldrons scrape in the confines of the tunnel, I’m sure he can sense my frustration. He doesn’t have to be witch-kin to do that.

Leading with my sword and shield, I move from corner to craggy corner, peering around with lamp and optics. As my light reaches down the tunnel lengths and through rocky corkscrew paths, I feel doubt infecting my thoughts. The desire to bring my enemy to battle can be heard in the grit-pulverising economy of my steps, in the fluid caution of rehearsed manoeuvres and positioning. The creak of the gauntlets about my weapons. Muscle and plate hydraulics primed to strike.

I want my enemy dead. Such need burns with perfect execution. No mistakes. The enemy will not benefit from my silent vexation.

At the same time, I cannot indulge untruths. Finding Daesenor was unnerving: if a battle-brother of his skill had nothing to combat the dread powers of our Word Bearer foes, then there is little that my blade has to offer. I drew blood, fast and first, from the cheek of Deucalius of Prandium in a duel of honour. Draegal – the Cardinal-Crimson – lost helm and head to the seething sweep of my sword. The tentacular horrors of Twelve-Forty-Seven would have dragged me into their communal maw, had it not been for the snip and clip of my blade.

But if these monstrous bastards in the deeper darkness of the Penetralia took Daesenor in the instant before a bolt round could depart his barrel, then I fancy the flash of my blade might not be fast enough.

The junctions and intersections are the worst. At the dark nexus of adjoining passageways I feel the eyes of the foe upon me. The length of each holds the simultaneous, shadowy promises of an enemy acquired and latent doom.

I push on. There is little point in informing the others that we are now hopelessly lost. That is not the point. The enemy will find us. Of that, I am sure.

I hear a half – nay, a quarter-stifled scream, and something clatters to the rocky floor. I spin around to find Evanz staring down one of the passages I just passed. His finger is outstretched in inexpressible horror. The fear is washed from his face and replaced by the ugly contortion of dread and disgust, and then the Cicatrician flashes from living being to crystalline shadow. First his trembling finger, then his arm and armour before his fear-sculpted face, the soldier suffers some kind of sorcerous petrifaction. Like a flesh-eating darkness, the shadow takes him, turning Evanz into crystallised tenebrosity.

The passage echoes with shouts of panic and horror. The remaining Cicatricians back into the immovable wall of armour that is Brother Phornax, as the former Librarian looks on with cold interest.

I cannot let our tormentors escape. Charging forward, I smash aside the glassy darkness that was Evanz. The muzzle-lamp from his dropped fusil still shines its beam up the tunnel… but there is nothing there.

I advance steadily. It will take more than ‘nothing’ to stop me.

My steps take me up the tunnel at speed, my sword and shield held close to my body. My suit lamps reach ahead of me, revealing the crooks and chicanery of the Penetralia passages. Whatever killed Evanz must be retreating just as quickly, since my light reveals nothing but a dead end, though it soon turns out to be a tight corner.

As I scrape my plate through the narrow gap, I find myself looking into the face of Olexander. The first of my party to go missing, he is in shadow also – dissolving silently under the beams of my suit lamps. His statue soaks up the illumination like a sponge: the helmet, the crystalline shaft of a las-fusil clutched in one hand, the other hand stretched to hide his eyes from the sudden horror he spotted in the darkness of the tunnel entrance.

The tunnel entrance in which I’m standing.

Olexander stands at the head of crowd of such statues, and I realise that I’m back in the unholy temple-cavern, the twisting tunnels of the Penetralia somehow leading back upon themselves.

‘Phornax!’ I call out. ‘The foe is playing a game that I cannot win. They’ve lost themselves and they wish for us to follow.’

Phornax enters the cavern through the narrowing with the same difficulty I experienced, yet Ione Dodona and the Cicatricians slip through with ease, not wishing to be left behind in the passageway on their own.

‘The Word Bearers elude us,’ I say, lending words to what everyone else is thinking.

‘The Word Bearers are dead,’ Phornax replies, his conclusion flat and lacking in the comfort such reasoning should inspire.

‘Then who is it?’ I demand. ‘Those weakling cultists?’

Phornax sweeps his outstretched gauntlet across the statues, set in their ghoulish tableau. ‘They invited something into the deep and the dark,’ the former Librarian insists. ‘Something they couldn’t control. Something that destroyed them.’

I can’t quite bring myself to believe it. So many men lost so swiftly. No shouts. No screams. No enemy sightings. Daesenor gone without a single bolt round discharged…

‘Some… thing,’ I echo.

‘What is it?’ Ione Dodona murmurs.

‘Something that kills on sight,’ Phornax replies. ‘An unnatural. It hides in the shadows, waiting for us to seek it out with our lights. The horror of its otherworldly appearance alone seems enough to kill.’

The shadows lurch forward as the barrel-lamp belonging to one of the Cicatricians suddenly disappears. We all turn, weapons raised, but the unseen beast has left nothing but a figure, carved into the darkness. Dodona screams.

‘Get back!’ I roar. ‘It’s in here with us!’ Bundling her behind me, I heft my shield high. She screams again. I cannot blame her. She is only human.

‘Lord Emperor,’ one of the soldiers cries. ‘It’s–’

And the Cicatricians are gone, petrified into crystallised darkness. Their curiosity has killed them.

Without thinking, I almost turn to look before I catch myself. As quick as lightning, I grab Phornax and Dodona. ‘Close your eyes, both of you!’

Fear is a stranger to my hearts. I am Legiones Astartes – I am an Ultramarine – but there is something primal about the fear of darkness. It is a fear of the unknown that even I can understand. I keep my eyes fixed upon the engravings at my feet.

‘How can we kill it?’ Dodona shrieks, gripping tightly onto my shield arm.

‘We can’t,’ answers Phornax. Though he would deny it, I can feel him casting about with his feathery witch-sight, brushing against my soul in the darkness.

My concern for them becomes concern for all our people, all who eke out their existence beneath the standard of the 82nd Company in Arcology Magnesi. What if such an abomination were to find its way in?

I cannot allow that. Tauro Nicodemus must be warned.

‘Brother Phornax,’ I find myself saying, ‘take Dodona and get back to the terminus chamber. Do not delay. Make your way back to Magnesi and inform the tetrarch of what we faced here. The Word Bearers doomed themselves and us along with them. He will know what to do.’

I feel objection building in my brother, but there’s no time.

‘Hurry,’ I urge him.

Phornax slips a gauntlet under Ione Dodona’s arm. Though she pulls hard on my vambrace, her dread allows her to be dragged away.

‘What about you?’ she shrieks back.

‘Get Brother Phornax back to Magnesi,’ I command her. I bring the blade of my sword up sharply and carve through the crystalline form of a Word Bearer statue nearby. It shatters, and the cacophony fills the temple-chamber – the screech and fracture of tumbling obsidian echoes through the tunnels and crevices of the Penetralia.

‘I’ll draw it down to me,’ I tell her, ‘and give you a chance to escape.’

She starts to speak, but my blade smashes through two more Word Bearers.

‘Go!’

The tunnel devours them like a great serpent. I stand alone in a sphere of my own meagre radiance. The blackness about me is overwhelming. I feel its intention to extinguish my very existence. Who will know of Pelion? Pelion the Lesser, who fought an ancient evil in the bowels of a doomed world like the heroes of ages past, freeing the empire of Ultramar from the tyranny of things-that-should-not-be?

I put my combat shield through a cultist. My sword cuts another in half. It rains shards of pure darkness, and the shattering feels too harsh for the chamber to contain.

Impossibly, amongst the raucous destruction, I hear a crash from the far end of the chamber. I spin around – combat shield out in front of me and blade poised to strike. Some kind of unseen beast is headed straight towards me in the gloom.

It’s been drawn. The distraction has succeeded. Now I will pay for my success.

I prepare myself for the horror I’m about to witness. Some dreadful thing, so disturbing in form as to be beyond my imagining. Some abominate existence that lives only to end my own. I feel the cold perversity of its solitude, its cursed power damning it to an eternity alone, ending even those foolish enough to summon it into the light. The violence of its advance burns with primordial fury. A tsunami of crystalline frag threatens to engulf me.

In that moment, I find myself thinking of Azul Gor. His face, full of bitterness and hatred, flashes momentarily before my downcast eyes. I think on his insistence that he could end me with a single world. Indeed, that word – ‘Penetralia’ – has led me to my doom.

Then, I realise.

Azul Gor survived the attentions of this beast of the beyond. Upon its summoning, the monster turned all who had gathered to witness it into solid darkness – perhaps Azul Gor was not invited to the ritual. Perhaps he had other, more important duties, or perhaps he had merely sensed the coming destruction.

Regardless, escaping the Penetralia cost him his eyes.

The beast is all but upon me, vomited forth from the darkness and smashing an explosive path through the victim-statues. That it means to end me is clear.

I bring the sword to the side of my neck. There is only one thing left to do – I run the blade across my throat. Its sharpened molecular edge slips into the groove created between my helm and plate seals. It slices through the power cabling and neural feeds. The light in my visor dies. The helmet’s optics darken, and the data from my autosenses is cut.

I impose upon myself an artificial blindness. A disability that might save my life. Everything sizzles to static-shot black.

The impact of the beast knocks me clean off my feet, and I crash backwards through the shattered assembly. The thing feels like a charging beast of burden, some bull-grox on the stampede. It’s hard to ascertain its size from such an attack, but the monster strikes me as a powerful quadruped, or a perpetually hunched thing lunging forwards on two more powerful legs.

No horns. No claws. No snaggle-toothed jaw.

Perhaps no jaws at all. Just an otherworldly bulk, full of fury and ancient hideousness.

The world has flipped about me in tumultuous darkness. I scramble back to my feet, sword and combat shield in hand. I shut down my suit lamps, plunging the entire chamber into an abyssal blackness. I doubt that this will faze the daemon-thing. I call upon my decades of training and my other superhuman senses. It is difficult – as a Space Marine I rely on sight, augmented both genetically and technologically, to kill and to avoid being killed.

Instead I tune into the beast’s movements. With my feeds and helm power cut, I cannot enhance my hearing. My ears are sensitive, though, even through the dead shell of my helmet. In a cave now carpeted with glassy shards of darkness, I can hear the crunch of its footfalls.

I immerse myself in a world of sound. I detect every creak of every shard; the whisper of pulverised blackness underfoot; crystalline fragments evaporating into wisps of powdered darkness.

It’s circling me. It’s confused. I haven’t succumbed to its curse-power.

Perhaps I’m the first to do so. I enjoy its perturbation. I concentrate. I focus.

Crunching. The sound of more shards crushed into splinters. It’s behind me now. It’s behind me… A chill snakes up my spine, but I quash it with my resolve. Such misgiving belongs not in the minds of the Legiones Astartes.

The thing closes. I sense its horrid form at my back. I imagine its outline, and I strike.

I spin, crunching shadow-sand beneath my boots. I slam the monster with my combat shield, then back-slam it, my short blade sweeping forwards. The sword cuts through daemon-flesh, and cuts deeply.

I hear nothing. Not a screech. Not even a whimper of pain.

Perhaps the being doesn’t even have a mouth, or any organ for such expression? Instead, I feel the ache of its agony within my mind.

I turn on my heel, my blade biting into it once more from the flank. I hear the crunch of an agonised stumble. The bastard thing certainly didn’t like that.

It circles, but gives me a wide berth. I turn with it, my sword and shield raised.

‘Come on!’ I roar at the beast. ‘Come on, hell-spawn! Face your death!’

Incredibly, it has grown wary of me. I don’t think that I could destroy it with my modest short sword alone, but it definitely doesn’t seem to want another taste of the blade.

Then, the monster does exactly what I don’t want it to.

The crunching footfalls retreat – the thing is leaving. It has tired of playing with the blinded toy that hurts it every time, and there is other prey taking flight through the tunnels of the Penetralia. Prey that can be horrified into oblivion by the monster’s ghastly appearance.

I swing my sword and shield about me wildly, smashing more of the statues to pieces, hoping to entice the monster back. I fail.

Sheathing my blade, I reach out with one gauntlet and stumble for the rocky reassurance of the temple-chamber wall. I have to find my way back to the terminus. I cannot risk taking off my helm – this could be a trick, and the beast could be waiting for just such an opportunity.

I have no real idea what it is capable of. It follows no theoretical that I can recall.

So I make the lonely, stumbling trek back through the Penetralia – Pelion the Lesser, lost in a labyrinth, lost in the darkness outside of my war-plate, and trapped in the darkness within. A deeper darkness, if ever there was one.

Pushing myself off one tunnel wall and scraping to another with my shield outstretched, I try to retrace my route through the winding maze of caves and passageways. It seems to take an eternity, knowing that every step of the way the beast could be ghosting my clumsy footfalls, and knowing equally that the monster could have reached Phornax and Dodona by now. Knowing that it could have them, before they have chance to power up the mag-lev engine and make their submerged escape.

I would warn them, but for the severance of my vox-link. I hurry, but my haste is enemy to my intention. I stumble. I fall. I get up. I feel my way on.

I know that I have reached the terminus chamber when I hear the water – the lap of the lake against the rocky shore. In my blindness, sound has become my greatest guide. I stop, and I listen.

I can hear movement. Something paces the moist rock of the shoreline. Beyond that, I detect breathing. Shallow, terrified breathing. Not the sound of a Space Marine.

‘Dodona!’ I call out. Without my vox-grille, I’m forced to shout through the ceramite shell, and the sound of my voice pains my ears after so long spent in the quieted darkness.

‘Pelion?’ she responds with gasping relief.

It’s a question. She can’t see me. The chamber must be in darkness. I approve. The lack of light, be it accidental or intentional, has saved her.

She moves, ever so slightly. There is a slurp and splash of water. She’s kneeling in the shallows, hiding in plain sight.

I hear the beast’s pace quicken. It knows where she is. It wants her to see it.

‘Pelion,’ Dodona whispers through the darkness. Her voice trembles. She must be cold in the water. Cold, and out of her mind with human, mortal fear. ‘It’s here…’

‘I know,’ I call back. ‘Brother Phornax?’

‘He’s gone.’

The thing ventures into the water, its infernal legs carrying it through the shallows towards her.

‘Ione,’ I say, stumbling forwards along the wall of the terminus. I, too, am making for the groundwater lake. ‘Ione, I want you to stay perfectly still. Do you understand?’

‘I’m so scared,’ she replies, the honesty falling out of her.

‘I know,’ I try to reassure her. Then I lie. ‘Me too.’

There, in the darkness of the cave and in the darkness of my helmet, I reach a conclusion. It is not enough to escape. To run for reinforcement. To flee and take the word to others that they too should flee. I am an Ultramarine. An honoured champion. Otherworld monstrosity or not, it is my duty to end this beast.

Regardless, it is between me and my only exit. The thing must die.

As Space Marines, we are taught and trained to make the most of any advantage that the immediate environment has to offer. I think on the mag-lev engine, and the damage it might visit upon the beast. I think on the millions of tonnes of rock hanging above us, and how I might bring it down upon the monster to crush the unlife from it. The darkness defeats me here – the daemon will not oblige me by standing in front of the tram, and if there were mining demolitions somewhere in the terminus chamber, there is no way I could find them. I discount these desperate strategies.

I think on the darkness. I think on the light.

The light…

‘I need you to do something for me, Ione,’ I call out.

‘Yes?’

‘When I tell you to, close your eyes, and dive for the bottom.’

‘I can’t swim!’ she protests, one fear replaced by another.

‘You don’t need to swim. Just stay under for as long as you can. Can you do that?’

‘I can’t swim,’ she repeats. ‘Staying under the water won’t be a problem.’

I listen to the monstrosity – this thing of hideous darkness that Ungol Shax has inadvertently unleashed upon the world. It strides through the shallows with predatory intent. It closes on the terrified Pioneer. I sheath my sword. I rest my shield against the wall.

I am ready.

‘Now!’ I bellow. I hear her go under. The dive is messy and uncertain; there is splashing, and then nothing. She is beneath the surface.

The beast splashes too. It is searching the shallows for its prey, staring down into the dark water.

I reactivate my suit lamps.

Abruptly, the movement ceases.

Everything grows still. For an agonisingly long moment, I wait, listening to the faint lapping of the waters. I go to remove my helmet, but caution stays my hand.

I wait. I wait to confirm what I already know. The Legiones Astartes are not particularly blessed with imagination. Tactical ingenuity, perhaps. Creativity in the construction of strategic defences. An inspiration of the moment, guiding our hand in the confusion of combat. We leave notions of fancy and the elegance of creative representation to the delicacy of the human hand. I remember admiring the paintings of Priscina Xanthoi, remembrancer and artist on the Twelfth Expedition. I did not communicate any such sentiment to Xanthoi herself or my superiors; but staring at her paintings, her visions, her interpretations, I feared that I might lose myself within them. Her beautiful depictions of our early accomplishments, both bloody and bright, had an incredible life and interiority. She told our story in her portraits and vistas. When age began to claim her and she was summoned back to Terra, I felt that the expedition lost a little of its remembered grandeur. Our achievements never seemed so noble as when they were viewed through Priscina Xanthoi’s incredible eyes. They certainly haven’t since.

When finally I open my eyes to the gloom of the terminus chamber, I come to wonder how the remembrancer would have painted the monstrosity that stands in the shallows before me. Would she have given it eyes, a mouth, or even a face? Perhaps her gyrinx-hair brushes might have been able to capture its full, ethereal horror. The alien nature of its existence and the revulsion of reality itself about its immaterial form. Perhaps she could have done mind-scalding justice to its chthonic grotesqueness and freakery.

I cannot imagine such a nightmare. Unfortunately, I don’t have to.

Ione Dodona erupts from the water, her lungs bursting to breathe the cold air again. She devotes her first lungful to the most horrified, soul-churning scream I have ever heard in my long and war-filled life. Screaming is good. Screaming means that at least she is still alive.

My suit-lamps are casting the terminus chamber in a bleak light – light enough for the daemonic monster to have caught sight of its own reflection in the undisturbed surface of the lake.

There is also light enough for me to see Ione Dodona stumbling backwards through the water, away from the statue of the beast, crafted in shadow.

She is still screaming.

I approach the indescribable horror of the crystalline thing and fight the involuntary inclination to look away, forcing myself to behold the beast. My eyes sting at the sight. I stumble. I feel my mind reel. I plunge through the glass floors of insanity. Reaching out for my training, the stunted nullification of emotional-limitation, the solid grounding of psycho-indoctrination, I claw my way back into the moment.

I am Hylas Pelion. Pelion the Lesser, Honorarius of the XIII Legion, 82nd Company.

My being floods with hatred for my enemy. It had no right to exist in this universe.

Ione Dodona is still screaming. The Pioneer is lost. Even petrified, the daemon-form was too much for the fragility of her all-too-human mind. I think of the battle for Calth, the war beneath its surface and the greater war that must surely follow. This, then, is the shape of the enemy to come. Increasingly, the Emperor’s true subjects and servants will face evil in such forms, brought forth from the beyond by our brothers in darkness.

Common humanity is not ready for such visions. Madness will find them, like it has found Ione Dodona. She screams and she screams, her mind broken. Perhaps it would be a kindness to spare her this torment?

I pluck my single remaining shell from where it is mag-locked to my belt. I shake the bolt round about the inside of my armoured fist. Like a die, it rattles. Like a die, it awaits an outcome. An outcome unknowable in the enclosed space of my gauntlet, a realisation it can only find in the breech of the pistol that sits brusque and empty upon my belt. I draw the pistol and thumb the bolt into it.

The weapon comes up, level with both the crystalline abomination and the screaming Pioneer. The muzzle drifts between them. My ceramite fingertip finds its way to the trigger, and both I, Pelion the Lesser, and the weapon find our way to realisation.

‘I was out hunting when I saw them. They was… I don’t know what they was. Flesh in all the colours of the rainbow, changing, shifting. Dozens of mouths, moving about on their bodies, spewing fire, setting the trees alight. The forest was burning. And they was floating. I tried to bring them down, but las-fire didn’t do nothing. Didn’t even break their skin. Got their attention, though.

‘I ran. I ran so fast. Needed to get back to Melora. Not fast enough. There were more of them, and the cabin was burning. I heard her screaming.

‘I don’t know what they are, but I know I want to help you take them down. Not for the Emperor or whatever-his-name-is Guilliman.

‘For Melora.’

We are supposed to know no fear.

These are not just words. To know no fear is the core of the bio-alchemical secret worming its way through the invisible threads of our genetics. We are born to fight and die, never knowing fear. We understand it. We endure it. We conquer it.

But we never suffer it, and thus we never know its true taste. Fear is nothing more than a biological reaction, a physiological curiosity that afflicts lesser beings with various degrees of cognitive impairment.

This is merely the first step. First, one must know no fear. Next comes the conviction of courage: giving one’s life to the absolute purity of purpose. To rise into the ranks of the Legiones Astartes means casting all else aside. Your family is dead. Your youth is meaningless. As far as the galaxy is concerned, you were never born. You forfeit any lingering pretensions of humanity.

One warrior is nothing. The Legion is everything.

You have to live by that code. You have to embody those words and ensure every indrawn breath is devoted to making them true.

As a Space Marine, you are no longer human. You are a legionary – beyond the concerns of mortality and into the genetic purity of the transhuman. You stand clad in your Legion’s colours, carry your Legion’s symbol, and serve your Legion’s lord. You wield weapons forged in your Legion’s foundry-fires. You live and breathe and sweat your Legion’s culture, drawn from your Legion’s home world, manifested in your Legion’s traditions and rituals.

Above the legionary is the squad – the pack, the claw, the unit, the cell. Above the squad is only the Legion. This is strength. This is duty.

Duty must blunt all other emotion. The Legions are weapons, nothing more – warriors forged for war, no different from a ploughshare melted down to become a sword. Swords know no fear, and feel no emotion. They do not pine for the days of tilling the soil in peaceful fields, nor do they break before the first blow is even struck. The Legions, and the once-humans that make up their ranks, are the same.

But the human mind is never a clean sheet. Even taking a child’s mind – before the realities of life teach a man to settle, to compromise, and to know his limits – a wealth of lore already colours the mind’s canvas. We are not mindless weapons, and a divorce from humanity does not mean we are wholly inhuman. Humanity is our foundation, a limitation to be built upon. Therein lies the perfect strength of the legionary’s form and function. The Emperor, for all his ignorance, got so much right. We are the weapons the human race needed to lay claim to the stars – neither human nor inhuman, but something beyond both. Transhuman, or post-human, as some of the scribes say. Or perhaps once-human is closer to the truth.

However, as with anything touched by humans, the process is not without flaw. Some minds resist the ascension from boy to legionary, and some things are carved too deep to simply be planed away while forging the psyche of the perfect soldier. Sometimes, too much of the man remains inside the soldier. These are the unlucky and flawed, the chaff that falls from the wheat. Imperfect cogs in the perfect war machine.

Most never last long enough to stand clad in ceramite at all, let alone march beneath the Imperium’s banners. The Legions are brutal flesh-factories, and their trials cull the weak from the strong. To be Legiones Astartes, you must know no fear and live a life of absolute duty to a greater ideal.

Perhaps, in the future, there shall be some refinement or alteration of the process, something that steals the underlying humanity that forms our foundation. If so, I would not envy the diminished generations that would follow us.

For now, there is no sure way to murder the human spirit at the heart of every warrior. Only a fool would want to.

But I am not certain the lords of every Legion would agree with me.

– handwritten treatise, author unknown

Out of ammunition and out of luck, Kaurtal knew he had finally reached safety when he found the firelight.

The light of a humble wreckage fire caught the silhouettes of the living and the dead, painting their shadows across the cave walls. The humans were hunched, spindly things, thinned by malnutrition, bent over by wounds and weariness. Most were ravaged by radiation burns long before they had made it down into the tunnels, and they bore the Mark of Calth written in pain across their deteriorating flesh. Their shadows were careless marionettes, stunted and graceless as they danced across the stone walls.

Kaurtal’s own image – a towering warrior with a helm crested by twin horns – showed a stark, dark grandeur that he no longer felt. His shadowy avatar displayed none of his armour’s battle damage, nor any of the weariness that sank through his body to the bone.

The connection feed sockets running up his spine were aching drill-holes that cried out for tending. The same feeds along his shoulders and chest, where his armour linked to his genhanced physique, were punctures in his flesh, pulling raw with every movement.

He knew exactly how long he had been here. He knew it, despite the fact he lived in a world with neither day nor night, because his eye lenses’ runic display kept track of every hour, every minute, every second he spent down here in the dark.

He had lost his own bolter six years and two hundred and forty-six days ago. In that time, he had carried another thirteen bolters, looting them from the fallen and inevitably losing them again when the fighting was at its most savage.

For several moments, he watched the shadow-play performance sliding over the ancient rock. His own image mocked him as it flickered against the cavern wall. Winged. Horned. The sight his enemies saw. The sight his enemies had seen for almost seven years.

‘Lord,’ the pack of scabbed, bloody wretches called to him. ‘Lord. Great lord, please. Your blessing, lord.’

Incredible. Desperation had them believing that he cared about their lives.

Kaurtal ignored them all, moving to the hulking figure at the rear of the cavern. More of the dregs and survivors scattered before him, their shadows dancing across the walls in devilish haste.

The figure greeted him from the darkness, doing him great respect by acknowledging him first. Its eye lenses were the same blue as the drought season sky above the City of Grey Flowers, back home on Colchis. It stood in the motionless drone of active armour; its helm tusked, its great shoulders speaking of monstrous, inhuman strength. To Kaurtal, it was merely a warrior in Cataphractii plate. To the humans that served it, it was a killer made in the image of a hunched and long-forgotten primate godling. Its voice was a vox-growled expulsion of thunder on the horizon.

‘Jerudai Kaurtal,’ it said. ‘You still live.’

Kaurtal nodded, with a hum of his own armour joints. ‘So it seems.’

The Terminator lifted a ponderous claw. It might have been a welcome.

‘And so our paths cross once more,’ it said, ‘on the two thousand, four hundred and fortieth day.’ No surprise that Thuul cited the exact day, as well. They all counted the days. It was how the Word Bearers greeted one another. ‘Are you the last of the Twisting Rune?’

Kaurtal was not sure. He had seen none of his Chapter in weeks. Exactly fifty-one days, to be precise, and those he had found had been bodies going to rot in an otherwise abandoned cave.

‘I believe I might be,’ he admitted. ‘We should speak.’

The Terminator was silent for several seconds before replying. ‘Then speak.’

‘Not here.’ Kaurtal gestured to the slaves.

The two Word Bearers moved further into the cave, and into a tunnel leading away from it.

‘Thuul,’ he said to the Terminator. ‘How do you tolerate them? How do you endure the whispers and the weeping, night after night? Their prayers scrape my ears.’

The Terminator trudged through the deeper blackness, its heavy tread giving an echoing rumble. The only light was that which they brought with them: the iceburn blue-white glare of their eye lenses. Onwards they walked, into the silence, breaking the serenity with boot-steps on stone and grinding armour joints.

‘Do we not deserve their reverence?’ Thuul asked. He had the voice of a scholarly avalanche. ‘And do the gods not deserve worship?’

As Kaurtal walked, he let his gloved hand trail across the jagged rock wall. ‘The gods have abandoned us,’ he said. ‘As has Lorgar.’

Thuul’s tusked helm gave a rattle of vox that sounded like a slipping gear wheel. ‘Blasphemy, brother? From one of the exalted Gal Vorbak?’

Kaurtal’s laughter was dry in the dark. ‘It has been more than half a decade since Kor Phaeron fled. Seven years of these tunnels lit by ritual fires and the muzzle flash of enemy bolters. Seven years of smelling the salt-stink of human sweat and the spicy musk of leaking sores growing from radiation burns. Lorgar is not coming back for us, Thuul. He was never coming back for us.’

‘The sun still bleeds poison into the void.’

‘Calth’s surface may be lethal to life, but the ebb of a dying sun hardly threatens a rescue fleet, shielded against the radiation.’

Thuul rounded on him. ‘Rescue is a coward’s word, Jerudai.’

‘Call it whatever you wish. Would our lordly father even need a fleet? He hears the warp’s song. He weaves it and rends it with the ease of silk. Why not carve reality open and come to our aid?’

There was a pause as Thuul mused on this. ‘You drank from the Blessed Son’s wrist and tasted the divine blood. How can you, of all the Legion, bring this blasphemy to me? What madness incites you to walk this holy darkness and speak such heresy?’

‘Speak the truth,’ Kaurtal quoted without a smile, ‘even if your voice shakes.’

The Terminator trudged on. Kaurtal allowed the silence for a time, but he was not the most patient soul ever to wear the red of the XVII.

‘Have you noticed that after two years, even the empty tunnels smell of blood?’

Thuul grunted acknowledgement, but said nothing more.

‘Your servants have been mauled,’ Kaurtal prompted.

‘Yesterday,’ Thuul replied.

‘The Thirteenth hit you hard.’

‘Harder than you realise,’ said Thuul. ‘The blood you’re smelling is mine.’

His war-plate was as ruined as Kaurtal’s – as ruined as every Word Bearer stranded on this dead world of cavern-cities. The scent of leaking life could be coming from any one of the charred ruptures in the thick plating. He tapped an armoured fist against his chestplate, breaking the silence with a steel-drum clang. ‘One of my hearts has stopped beating. The other labours even now. I may have a few days remaining to me, but no more than a handful. The gods only know what’s burst inside me.’

There was another long silence before Kaurtal spoke again.

‘I have been moving through the underworld. Fighting when I must, but more often merely watching, waiting. Learning.’

Thuul regarded him with soulless eye lenses, awaiting an explanation. Kaurtal gave it with a sigh. ‘I have been counting the dead. Taking heed of all that now lie lifeless.’

‘Thousands of the Ultramarines have fallen,’ the Terminator said. His voice was sincere enough to make the words an avowal. ‘Perhaps tens of thousands.’

‘I am not speaking about counting them, Thuul.’

Another pause. Kaurtal could almost hear Thuul’s thoughts, whispering and clicking with displeasure.

‘I’m going to the surface,’ Kaurtal said at last.

Thuul turned his tusked helm to the other warrior. ‘To go to the surface is to die.’

‘For you, perhaps. I am Gal Vorbak. My blood is poison. My touch corrodes flesh. I have eaten nothing but ash for over a year.’ He showed his gauntlet, the red ceramite ridged and knuckled with bleached skeletal spurs. The same growths showed across his war-plate – his bones had been hardening and pushing through the ceramite as the months passed in the dark. Surprisingly, the pain had been nothing more than a dull throb, no different from the muscle aches of daily training.

The Terminator gave his passive regard. ‘You believe the daemon inside you renders you immune to the radiation of a sickened sun?’

Not an easy question to answer. The daemon within him had been silent and unreachable for months. He was half-convinced that his last battle with an Ultramarines Librarian had somehow left him depleted – perhaps exorcised was a truer word – with the divinity flayed from his flesh. The Emperor’s lapdogs were beginning to realise the value of the forbidden Librarius once more.

‘I believe we’ll see soon enough.’ Kaurtal’s wings gave another shiver. Closed tight to his back, they were a worthless cloak of thick-veined, folded leathery membranes. He had not flown in months. Few caverns were spacious enough to allow such freedom.

‘But why the surface, brother? What awaits you there?’

‘The dead,’ Kaurtal replied. ‘I intend to live. I will escape Calth, even if I am the only Word Bearer to do so. And I will remember who died here. I will make the Legion remember.’

‘They already remember. We cannot leave until the war is won.’

‘You are deluding yourself.’ Kaurtal lifted an arm, where a beaten-iron star medallion was bolted and hammered into the ceramite of his forearm. ‘Where is the Graven Star?’ He turned his hand, showing a ritual engraving of a sinuous serpent. ‘Where are the Asps of the Sacred Sands?’ He reached to his chestplate, where a ruined parchment showed the faint signs of a red palm print. ‘Where is the Flayed Hand? I will tell you, Thuul. The Graven Star are dead. The Asps of the Sacred Sands are dead. The Flayed Hand are corpses at the bottom of a pit, skulls leering up in silent laughter at their fate, lost to an Ultramarines ambush. How many of us remain? We lead starving weaklings in a war with only one end – the Thirteenth will destroy us, and our own Legion will remember none of it.’

Kaurtal turned his pauldron as he spoke, showing the mangled sigil of the Twisting Rune Chapter. ‘How many Chapters have died down here, Thuul? It has been seven years. Where are your brothers?’ He gestured to the snarling daemon face on the Terminator’s shoulder guard. ‘Where are the rest of Hol Beloth’s men?’

The two Word Bearers stood in the pregnant silence, saying no more. To Kaurtal, the dark cavern was a manifestation of every other cave; it embodied every night spent down here in the lightless, blood-smelling black.

Thuul finally spoke. ‘You truly mean to abandon the Legion, Jerudai?’

‘They abandoned us,’ Kaurtal replied. ‘Lorgar isn’t coming. The Legion has left us here to die. I am going to the surface.’

‘You are damning yourself to apostasy.’ The Terminator growled a Colchisian command, and blades lengthened from their housings on the back of his oversized gauntlets. ‘And you know I must kill you for even voicing all this,’ admitted Thuul.

Kaurtal nodded. ‘I know you must try.’

Bad secrets always tended to be buried the deepest. After leaving Thuul’s cavern, bloodstained and even more battered than when he had arrived, it took Kaurtal almost a month to reach the surface. The journey was not an easy one. The Underworld War raged, as it had raged for almost seven years, in brutal spits and spurts, filling the caves with the grind of overwhelming violence for several nights, then fading back to give a few hours of respite.

Kaurtal had fought on Isstvan V, when the skies burned black from the funeral pyres of three butchered Legions. Until he had been forced to burrow beneath the surface of Calth, he had honestly believed Isstvan to be the pinnacle of what was possible in war.

The apostate walked west once he abandoned his brothers below. Always west, towards the setting arc of the poisoned sun. Its swollen blue malignancy stained the sky: cancerous in imagery and in the realities of its radiation.

He was sweating inside his armour, in the places where his armour had not yet become his skin. Where his flesh had fused with the ceramite, he either did not need to sweat, or simply had not encountered conditions vile enough to bring about a bodily reaction. Sometimes he coughed up blood, expelling it through the maw of bestial teeth his helm’s mouth grille had become. That was not the radiation. That was just his body adapting.

The ghosts of Calth fought as he went west. They paid him no heed, for they were mere memory, and he was iron and blood and bone. The apostate Word Bearer heard their shouts and cries, seeing the dead warriors as flashes and flickers at the edge of his vision. He listened as they waged a war both sides had already lost, reprising their roles from the day this world had died.

When he did not walk, he flew. Before Calth, his wings had been beautiful things: a swan’s pinions, white-feathered and clean. The Underworld War leeched their health, shedding feathers like autumn leaves, accelerating the Change as the daemon within exerted its influence over his genetic code. The swan’s wings had become something bony and bladed, a spread of leathery flesh with thick veins in lightning-bolt patterns across the silken membranes. Stronger now, without a doubt. More useful.

Stronger, but stranger. They smelled of animal musk, and they sweated blood. Stretching them felt no different from holding one’s arms wide.

Despite the weight of his armour, beating them three times was enough to lift him from the ground. He could not fly for long, though, for the effort sapped all strength from his muscles, but once high enough he could glide for an hour or more.

He did not sleep on his travels. He had evolved beyond the need for it, even beyond the slack limits of his regenesis among the Legiones Astartes. He no longer needed to eat, though thirst was ever a plague. Dehydration thickened his tongue. Swallowing his own saliva was a blessed but false relief. Sometimes, he would swallow his own blood.

He journeyed across the unending plains, crunching the blackened husk of vegetation beneath his boots. An ocean of unharvested crops, dried and rotted from the dragon-breath heat of an irradiated sun.

On the ninth day of his journey, he walked through a dirt storm. Solar radiation tortured Calth, toyed with it, making a mockery of its weather patterns. The apostate saw the horizon darken with the coming maelstrom – a tidal wave of earth-dust and tormented soil. He prepared for it as it rolled down from the western mountains, though those preparations consisted of nothing more than folding his wings tighter to his back. Instinct made him reach to check the conductive strip of mag-locking metal that bound his bolter to his thigh... but he reached for thin air. He had lost his last gun long ago.

When the winds howled their highest, and grit clattered against his ceramite armour in a ceaseless, gravelly barrage, the apostate trudged on through the darkness, blinded by the dust of this violated world. He could all too easily imagine that the planet hated him – as if the world’s soul sensed the last defiler upon its surface and wheezed its last, dirty breaths to spite him. He knew war, and he knew how warriors died. How many slipped into death with a final curse on their lips? Calth itself, evidently, was no different.

He reached the first graveyard on the eleventh day. This was why he had come to the surface. This was why he was here. Someone had to remember.

The graveyard owed nothing to the stately order of rural cemeteries with their rows of stone tablets, and resembled even less the sand-blasted menhir henges of Colchisian burial grounds. Here was carnage, spread thick across the churned earth. Tank hulls rotted in the sickly light, darkened by rust, giving infected-teeth leers from their corroded dozer blades. The bodies were mummified in their sundered armour, cracked open to desiccate in the wounded glow of Veridia.

Kaurtal hiked through the slain, seeking the sigils carved and burned and sculpted onto shoulder guards. On every red-armoured corpse, the same grey-painted skull glared. Its mouth was an iron lock, closed to silence all speech.

The Unspeaking. The Unspeaking died here, annihilated beneath an Ultramarines counter-attack.

These bodies were not from his Chapter, then. The Unspeaking were warrior-sages to match any others, stilling their tongues with proud, proud oaths of silence. Kaurtal respected them, but had little to do with their works.

Among the Word Bearers dead lay hundreds of ragged skeletons clad in shreds of cloth and dirty rags. The Unspeaking’s faithful followers, no doubt. After nearly seven years in the tainted sun they were little more than husks, but he knew that if he had chanced upon this gravesite in the hours after the battle, opening their slack jaws would have revealed tongueless maws – a display of the Unspeaking’s ritual mutilation for its oath-sworn serfs.

Kaurtal took two things from the unburied dead. The first was a bolter, graven with kill-markings and patchy with corrosion, but proven functional after a test shot sent a shell pounding into the armour-plating of a nearby Rhino. He felt no guilt at breaking the silence of this massacre site. He could not inflict any greater indignity upon them than that which they had already endured, baked to the bone by a fouled sun.

The second thing he stole was a talisman from around a warrior’s neck. A simple necklace of cheap bronze with the warrior’s name, squad designation and Chapter symbol scripted in Colchisian cuneiform. A rare token – the habit was much more common among the lesser soldiers of the Imperial Army, with their identification tags necessary for collating casualties. As if anyone would care about the management of mere human corpses in a war led by the Legions.

He tied the trinket around his wrist and walked west, leaving the first graveyard behind.

He reached Dainhold three days later.

The city lay in dust – a skyscape of toppled towers and dead spires, with streets torn raw in the wake of tank treads. The chasm-scars of orbital bombardment were graven deep across the city’s fallen districts, where lance fire raked its way across the population centres and slaughtered the city before it even knew it was under attack.

He had fought here after making planetfall. He had fought his way through the burning city, throwing himself at Ultramarines shield-walls, or firing back from behind barricades of tumbled rock and ruined bodies. The running firefights had none of the claustrophobic choke so omnipresent and overplayed in the underworld. Bolters had fired that day without echoing against the confining stone.

How good it had been to fight freely. He had even flown, spreading his wings to soar above the embattled streets, firing at will on the helpless warriors below.

But that was then, and this was now.

Kaurtal ventured into the city, making his way down the silent roads, walking around shattered tanks and fallen buildings. Spires still rose in ruined grandeur, their sides blasted open to the light of the lethal sky. Bodies were skinless, sinewless bones, many fallen onto the rockcrete ground in reach of inactive lasguns and solid-shot rifles. Many more had died unarmed, huddled together or alone; some with their remains scattered across roads or plazas, others squatting in corners or ducking under cover. Perhaps instinct had sent them fleeing and scurrying in those last moments. Perhaps they had died when the sky rained fire, or when the Warmaster’s allies brought Calth to heel with bolter and blade.

Mere minutes into the city, he found his first Word Bearers.

Kaurtal thudded to the ground, boots cracking the rockcrete as he hit, and bunched his wings to his back. The avenue was a scene from some visionary’s sketch of a pre-Unity mythic hell, with Ultramarines and Word Bearers gone to the bone within their armour, spitted by spears and making barricades with their own bodies.

He walked amongst the dead, letting his fingers brush delicately over their broken ceramite. One Ultramarine was nothing more than powder and armour fragments beneath a Fellblade’s treads – a lone armoured arm reached out from beneath the dead tank as the only indication that a warrior had died under there. One of the Word Bearers was lanced thrice through the chest, pinned to the stone wall of a habitation spire. Four hundred dead warriors, and the bones of their war-thralls at their feet.

A low hum pervaded the scene, setting Kaurtal’s teeth on edge. Some of the dead Space Marines’ suits of armour were still active after all this time, still thrumming in tune with their back-mounted power packs.

It was one corpse in particular that most drew Kaurtal’s eye. He approached it with a certain confident caution, the way a medium might prepare to make contact with the restless dead. The slain Word Bearer’s armour was decorated with gold runes, god-sigils on arterial red, the markings of the Inscribed. Kaurtal knew the Chapter well.

‘Hello, Jyrvash,’ he said to the impaled captain.

Jyrvash did not reply. Jyrvash did not move at all.

Kaurtal reached up to his brother’s helm, unlocking the seals at the dead warrior’s collar. A serpent’s hiss of vented air pressure allowed the helmet to come free, and he looked upon the dry-leather skull that had been Jyrvash’s face. The smell of decomposition, freed at last, was a gaseous corruption intense enough to make Kaurtal’s eyes sting. As a child on the streets of the City of Grey Flowers, he had seen bloodfly eggs burst open in the belly of a dead dog – this smell was the same. He had evolved past disgust, but not past the bite of bitter memory.

‘You died badly, Jyrvash.’ His tone stole any possibility of the words being a question. ‘But then, doesn’t everyone…’

The skull stared back, its hollow eye sockets neither knowing nor agreeing; merely pits to display the absence of life and personality.

Kaurtal let the helm drop to the road, and reached for the ornate dagger sheathed at the dead warrior’s hip. More god-runes marked the rusted blade. Another memento. Another Chapter to remember.

He turned away, stretching his wings and bunching his muscles to leap skyward.

‘Kaurtal,’ said the corpse behind him.

A year before Calth, in the days that followed Isstvan V, Kaurtal had been summoned to the Fidelitas Lex. He had anticipated delivering a report on the Twisting Rune’s casualties from the killing fields, or perhaps a briefing regarding new recruitment to ease the savage losses that they had sustained fighting against the Raven Guard.

He had, of course, assumed wrong. He had actually been summoned to his death.

Argel Tal, the Crimson Lord, was already spoken of in whispers across the fleet. He and his men – the so-called Blessed Sons – had shown the truths of their divine forms. They were god-touched, no longer human or legionary, but a sacred bonding of flesh and spirit. Possessed, in the crudest terms; ascended, by any other judgement. The Crimson Lord waited in the funerary chambers aboard the Lex, watching servitors raise bronze and marble statues of those slain in the recent massacre.

Argel Tal wore the red ceramite not yet adopted by the rest of the Legion – that would soon change, as they armoured themselves in arterial crimson before the betrayal at Calth. His face was the dusky tan of all desert-born Word Bearers, and his eyes showed a repression of emotion that danced somewhere between unshared pain and unreleased anger. He spoke softly, calmly, but it seemed an effort to do either.

‘Sergeant,’ Argel Tal said, by way of greeting. He spoke in two voices now: his own soft tones, and the bass rumble of the thing inside him.

Kaurtal was no longer sure of Argel Tal’s rank since his Change, and said as much. That brought a tight, tense smile to the other warrior’s lips.

‘Gal Vorbak,’ Argel Tal replied. ‘For now.’

The Crimson Lord would soon create the Vakrah Jal – the Chapter of Consecrated Iron – but Kaurtal had had no idea of it back then. Even if he had, it still would not have aroused his suspicions. Not so soon after their victory on Isstvan.

Argel Tal said nothing more. He was watching the servitors raise a statue of a slender young woman in a flowing dress-robe.

‘It’s true, then,’ Kaurtal ventured. ‘The Blessed Lady has fallen.’

‘Warriors fall,’ Argel Tal turned to Kaurtal, his words punctuated by the slither of lengthening teeth. ‘She was murdered.’

‘An ill omen,’ Kaurtal said quietly.

‘I will not argue with that,’ the other warrior replied. They settled into a companionable silence for several seconds, watching the servitors work.

‘Why was I summoned?’ Kaurtal asked him. ‘Have I displeased Lord Aurelian?’

‘Far from it. He wishes to offer you a gift.’

Something in the Gal Vorbak’s tone made Kaurtal’s skin crawl. He repeated the words with measured neutrality. ‘A gift.’

‘You have a choice.’ The Crimson Lord was either deaf to his brother’s trepidation, or chose to ignore it. ‘Lorgar has bid me increase the numbers of the Gal Vorbak. He desires more Blessed Sons, among both the Calth assault force and the fleets tasked to spread across Ultramar.’

Kaurtal’s breath caught in his throat. ‘You can do this? Mesh flesh and spirit at will?’

‘The primarch has asked, and I will obey.’

Hindsight was a treacherous boon. All too often, what might have been was tantalising and worthless in equal measure. A hundred questions raced through Kaurtal’s mind in that moment – questions of blood and pain and the body-horror of sharing your flesh with an alien entity.

And Argel Tal would have replied with honesty, for he was no deceiver. He would have spoken of the changes, the wrenching of bone, the boiling of blood, and the madness of two voices sharing space inside one mind.

But Kaurtal asked none of these things. His racing heart refused anything but the fierce rush of temptation. ‘And my choice?’

Argel Tal nodded, knowing in that moment just how this would end.

‘You can starve yourself of all nourishment and carve holy symbols across your flesh,’ he told Kaurtal, ‘purifying your mortal form for the union to come. You may then return to me if you hear the calling of the Neverborn from behind the veil. If you survive the ritual, then I will offer you a taste of my blood to begin the communion, and lead you into a new life as one of the Gal Vorbak. The Neverborn will never refuse such a devoted host.’

Starvation. Purification. Trances and visions and scarification.

He did not fear the trials, for he knew no fear. Even so, he hesitated at the mutilation of his flesh. What if he failed the offering? What if he could not fully recover? What if he required extensive bionics even to stand and fight with his brothers in the future?

‘You mentioned a choice,’ Kaurtal prompted again.

‘I did. You may undergo the necessary purifications as I’ve just explained. Or you can risk a cruder, more abrupt offering, and pray the Neverborn deem you worthy for union. That is how the first of us accepted this gift, though we didn’t realise what was being offered at the time.’

‘What if I choose the quicker path?’ Kaurtal asked.

‘It is much more dangerous. More likely to succeed, but failure brings death.’

‘But if I choose it?’

Argel Tal gathered the right words. ‘It was different for each of us. Some saw nothing but blackness, others saw our pasts, and others, such as Xaphen...’ Argel Tal gestured to another statue being lifted onto a plinth. ‘Xaphen saw the future. He saw what might come to pass, if the future unrolled along one of its many thousand possible pathways.’

Kaurtal needed no time to prepare an answer. ‘I will walk the same path you walked, my lord.’

His eagerness did not make Argel Tal smile. Again, with hindsight, that would have meant something.

‘Then once we are in the warp, I will take you to a specially unprotected part of the ship, away from the tenebrous guardianship of the Geller field. You will offer what I offered, and do as I did.’

‘What should I offer? What must I do?’

Argel Tal drew a golden sword, clearly of Terran make, forged for the fists of the Legiones Custodes. It should not have flared into life in his hands, and yet the blade did just that. Little lightning-snakes rippled down the stolen steel.

‘You must offer your life, Jerudai.’ He rested the tip of the blade against his brother’s throat. ‘You must die.’

He started at the corpse’s voice, but Jyrvash stood unmoving, unliving, slouched against the wall and pinned by the spears lancing through his body. The alkaline wind rattled against the dead man’s armour, with little skitterings of blown grit.

‘Jyrvash,’ Kaurtal said. He knew no fear. There was no unease in his voice. No, none. None at all. A daemon living in your blood could not change that about you. Surely.

He ran his ridged bone spurs in a threatening, scraping caress down the skull’s side.

‘Jyrvash,’ he said again.

Nothing. Just another ghost of Calth. Jyrvash’s skinless head tilted and toppled, smashing on the rockcrete ground.

If it was an omen, Kaurtal could not imagine what it was supposed to portend. Things could hardly get much worse for the Word Bearers on this accursed world. Never before had overwhelming, lightning victory and drawn-out, grinding defeat colluded so closely.

Power armour thrummed louder nearby. A shadow danced at the edge of his vision. He turned again, feeling his fingers harden, lengthen, the skin retracting around curved claws. Where a human’s reaction to unease was seen in an elevated heart rate and the onset of fear-sweat, Kaurtal’s body reacted by forging weapons from his flesh, shifting him into the divine murderousness of his killing form. Bones creaked and stretched. Flesh ripped and reformed. It was not agony, but nor was it painless.

He stared down the deserted avenue, his senses bladed and beast-keen. The bodies lay as they had lain before, and the buildings still stood as silent as kilometre-high tombstones driven into the dirt.

Kaurtal, came the voice from inside. The suddenness of it peeled the lips back from his teeth, and for the first time in months, he felt a stirring from the daemon within. A sluggish sensation, like something turgid in the silt at the bottom of a lake. His blood thickened with it, and the bony protrusions spiking out from his armour gave sympathetic aches. He could feel the presence within questing with its senses, stretching out tendrils of consciousness and withdrawing them in a lazy re-coiling.

We are no longer within the caverns? It was not exactly speech. The daemon’s thoughts coalesced in Kaurtal’s skull only slightly more slowly than his own inner monologue. A ‘conversation’ with the creature inside was as simple and subtle as the seamless transference of ideas and concepts at the merest whim.

You have slumbered, Kaurtal pulsed back, for over three months. This is the surface.

My wounds forced the silence of slumber. Was there the blade’s edge of defensiveness in the daemon’s thoughts? Kaurtal was quite sure there was. The blue warp-weaver is dead?

He recalled the battle. Some agonies wormed their way into the mind, as unshakeable as a splinter beneath a nail, and witch-lightning tearing at your very soul was one of them. The pain had been... revelatory. He dimly remembered laughing, learning, even as merciful grey mist threatened to drown his consciousness. Even as his blood boiled in his veins, and his second soul had fallen into untouchable darkness.

The Librarian is dead, Kaurtal sent back. Three months in his grave, dead by my hand. I have left the Underworld War behind.

I hunger.

There is no blood on the surface.

The daemon stretched itself through Kaurtal’s body, filling his bones all the way to his toes and fingertips. Muscle twitches made his fingers flicker, and his left eyelid started to spasm.

But I hunger, the daemon said again. Kaurtal’s teeth clacked together as sentient pain oozed through the bones of his jaw.

‘I hunger,’ the daemon said again, this time with the Word Bearer’s mouth.

Kaurtal repressed a shudder, then repressed the symbiote itself. It took focus, but concentration shackled the daemon from making any claim over his physical form. Calculus equations always worked best for Kaurtal. Some of the Gal Vorbak prayed, or simply gave in to their skin-riding daemons, letting the Neverborn claim them at will, but Kaurtal had always suppressed his sacred parasite with the repetition of long, involved calculations. Reciting and solving them occupied his mind, keeping his thoughts free of the creature’s passions.

Our wings hurt, Jerudai.

They atrophied. We were in the dark too long.

I hunger.

Enough. We have a duty up here.

The daemon slithered through his veins. He felt it coiling tight around his spine, just as he felt it licking at the filament nerves behind his eyeballs.

What duty?

Kaurtal turned from the headless corpse of his fallen brother, moving away through the urban detritus.

A duty to make the Legion remember us. I am gathering relics from each Chapter that d–

The daemon’s displeasure came as a jolt of pain in the looping cables of Kaurtal’s bowels.

Legions and pride and memories and brotherhood. Man-concerns. Man-duties. Let us hunt and feed and–

No. His interruption was as smooth as the daemon’s had been, and just as forceful. Kaurtal’s mouth was a mangled mess of ceramite and ivory teeth. He spat blood onto the road. No. This matters to me.

Slits gashed open in the side of his arm. Four new eyes, each one yellowishly reptilian, opened and regarded the dead city. They rolled in their ceramite-and-muscle sockets, then closed and sealed over. Kaurtal felt others opening on his shoulder blades, and another by his knee. These also rolled and stared, before sealing closed in viscous, moist whispers.

Something moved under his ribcage. Something else moved in his guts. He sensed the daemon’s disgust.

You are hollowed through by cancers. They hang inside you, these black fruits, staining your body with sickness. You would die without me, Jerudai. This pilgrimage on the surface will see you dead.

The sun is still poison, he sent back.

I can see that better than you, host. The daemon did something inside his chest. There was the grainy, fluid feeling of thick juice flowing across his insides. I can pulp these black fruits, rip them from their cradles of flesh and bone, and dissolve them into your bloodstream. There will be pain.

There’s always pain.

Silence now. Let me save us from the foolishness of Man-pride.

Kaurtal took three steps before his swimming vision drove him to his knees. His Legion-granted sensory organs had compensated for any dizziness since their implantation back in his dimly-recalled childhood, so disorientation was as unfamiliar as it was unwelcome. Yet he thudded down onto his hands and knees, dizzy as a drunkard, while something serpentine slipped behind his eyes and started gnawing on the meat of his mind.

Your brain is ripe with corruption. It is a wonder you aren’t blind.

Kaurtal felt his fangs clench together, cutting the street’s silence with a porcelain squeal. One of his claws broke against the rockcrete, but the aborted talon lengthened fresh from the bleeding finger once more.

To his left, half a metre from his clawed hand, a dead Word Bearer regarded him with eye lenses the colour of fresh frost.

‘Brother,’ he greeted the corpse, feeling the sick urge to laugh. Its armour was too bolter-blasted to offer any hint of identity. All that mattered were the god-runes carved into its ceramite. That much at least, Kaurtal would remember and bring back to the Legion. He had Jyrvash’s knife as evidence.

The dead warrior regarded him with its ice-pale eye lenses.

‘Kaurtal,’ it said. Its voice was the alkaline wind itself, formed of whispers and the clatter of dust against armour. ‘You have abandoned us.’

He had chosen the quicker path, as he suspected every Word Bearer offered this rare gift would surely choose themselves. What manner of faithless coward would hesitate in the face of a chance to bond with the Divine? He wished to be blessed as the Gal Vorbak were blessed, not spend months in sedate prayer.

‘Do it,’ he had said to Argel Tal. He had even leaned his head back, baring his throat.

But the Crimson Lord sheathed his blade, and returned his gaze to the statues being lifted into place.

‘Tomorrow,’ the other warrior said in his curious dual-voice. ‘Go back to your ship, Jerudai. Reflect on what I offer, and if you wish to die tomorrow, then I will kill you myself.’

He had done as he was bidden. While aboard the Mournsong, flagship of the Twisting Rune Chapter, he had avoided his squad and refused to take counsel with any of his brothers. The Chaplain came to him, requesting entry into his meditation chambers, but Kaurtal sent the warrior-priest away with a plea for solitude.

The next night, he secured teleportation passage back to the Fidelitas Lex. As dangerous as such translocation was while both ships were at the mercy of the warp’s tides, taking an unshielded gunship would be an act of suicidal futility.

When the shrieking, snaking mist of teleportation cleared, Argel Tal was already waiting for him. Robed thralls chanted and prayed, while servitors worked at the chamber’s edges, murmuring as they adjusted the hand-wrenched, archaic clockwork machinery.

Argel Tal was helmed now. Kaurtal acknowledged his lord’s presence with a salute, fist over his heart, though they seemed past such mundane forms of address.

‘You knew I’d come,’ he said.

Argel Tal’s only answer was to draw his sword and walk away.

Kaurtal followed.

He scrambled to his feet, wings flaring wide, the looted bolter weighty in his fist. Its sculpted muzzle aimed down at the dead body, defying the corpse to move, to speak, to betray any one aspect of a life that it should not possess.

Nerkhulum, he said, voiceless and inwardly.

I said to be silent. Do you believe it is easy to re-weave mortal matter? Your flesh is weakened from the sun, and reshaping it is causing you to bleed within. Let me work on saving us, Jerudai.

The Word Bearer stood in the street, breathing heavily, both hearts beating hard.

You didn’t hear that? he almost shouted.

I hear the liquid whispers of your straining, cancerous organs. I hear them as your reward for abandoning the Legion.

Something is alive here. He kept the bolter aimed down.

Nothing is alive here. The cancers riddling your skull put pressure on your brain and toy with your senses. Nothing more.

That sounded right. It sounded true.

And yet it felt like a lie.

He was stronger with the daemon awake. His senses were more keen, reaching out further. Nothing moved, not on the street, not in the hollow windows of the battered hab-spires. He could smell the charcoal corrosion of decaying tanks, and the cinnamon after-musk of long-rotted bodies. The smell of a slain city.

The dead were dead. They did not speak. They did not accuse you of deserting your brothers, and forsaking your duty.

Kaurtal fired, and annihilated the helmet in a burst of scattering shrapnel and bone shards.

Petty, came the daemon’s voice. If it was not a spoken word, it was still the closest the Word Bearer’s mind could come to giving shape to the daemon’s bored chastisement.

For a moment, he stood in the road, looking down at the trinkets and relics bound to his armour. Mementos of fallen Chapters, left over after a bitter victory, now languishing outside of the XVII Legion’s memory.

Someone had to do this. Someone had to make them remember the fallen. Eight years ago, he had stood in one of the flagship’s cemeteries with Argel Tal himself, seeing dead warriors being enshrined in marble and bronze. The slain of Isstvan, remembered with honour for their sacrifice. What justice for the slain of Calth?

He would stand before Lorgar and cast the relics of lost Chapters down at his primarch’s feet. Nothing else mattered.

Not long after Kaurtal left Jyrvash behind, he came across the body of a dead Titan. It was said that the Mechanicus priests fashioned their humanoid war engines to stand in the Machine God’s image, as totemic as any theist avatar from before Old Night, but the Reaver was much less grand in its morbid repose. A dead machine lying in the dust, all sense of connection to its masters’ species gone as it lay broken across the churned earth.

The kill-wound was not hard to see. Rocket-punctures pitted and cracked the Reaver’s face like cratered acne. The command crew likely had not even suffered when the end came. A flash of flame, an immolated cockpit, and they would be dead before their Titan hit the ground.

Kaurtal landed upon its shoulder, clawed boots digging into the corroded plating. It made a good vantage point from which to look out over the destroyed plaza. Corrosion had eaten deep into the Titan’s armour-plating, making it difficult to determine the Titan’s original allegiance. Dead warriors from both Legions lay strewn around its fallen bulk, but a habitation spire had toppled in the avenue to the east, leaving a half-metre of dust and debris blanketing the ground and shrouding the dead with ash. Irregular mounds marked the final resting places of countless warriors. It was the closest thing to a real graveyard that the dead on Calth’s surface would ever see.

Nerkhulum remained silent, presumably working to excise the poisoned meat from the Word Bearer’s body.

Kaurtal dropped down, wading through the dirt and debris. His red armour turned grey to the waist as he kicked up the dust merely by walking. The first body he hauled from its powdery cairn was an Ultramarine, clad in rotted cobalt-blue, and he let it tumble back into the dry muck. Dust-devils swirled, protesting the irreverent way he disturbed the fallen.

The second was also an Ultramarine. As was the third.

He found a Word Bearer, but the corpse’s arm cracked from its shoulder when he tried to lift the remains. Brushing aside more dust revealed the faded, greyed-red ceramite he had been seeking, along with the emblem across the breastplate: a face, pale against the dark background, shaped as a sorrowful masquerade mask. The Chapter of the Iron Veil.

Kaurtal reached down to grip the mask’s edges, ready to pry the ivory emblem clear of the armour-plating. He thumped a boot onto the corpse for leverage, bunched his muscles, and pulled.

‘Kaurtal,’ the half-buried body choked, like a man gagging on ashes.

He released the chestplate, but the dead Word Bearer kept rising, dust sluicing from the old ceramite armour, hissing as it slid free. Kaurtal backed away, claws lengthening, acidic saliva stringing between his malformed teeth. He backed right into something cold and dusty, and just as dead.

‘Kaurtal,’ the thing behind him rasped. ‘You abandoned the Legion.’

First there was light – acid-strong, acid-bright. It was light at its absolute transcendence, the very apotheosis of illumination’s concept, too bright for mortal reasoning.

He had only one thought through the dissolving burn of incomprehensible brightness, and that was a simple one: this was death.

The light finally allowed other sensation to trickle through. He heard wave crashes and screams; the cries of men, women and monsters drowning and burning in an ocean of the same white fire that threatened to swallow him.

A cracking jolt brought him back into the chamber. Ward runes and their more pervasive counterparts – sigils used to summon – lined the walls at uneven intervals, many overlapping their cousins. Some were cast in brass, others no more than glyphs knife-carved into the dark iron of support pillars. He reached to grip the blade impaling his chest. His fingers closed around the metal, but he could not pull it free.

Kaurtal staggered, his eyes flowing over the chamber once more. Here was the abode of muttering human priests and chained astropaths twitching in fluid-filled coffin pods, forced to live lives of endless slumber, so others might harvest their eternal dreams.

A human soul was a candle in the endless ocean of the warp. A psyker’s soul was a conflagration, as dangerous to the Neverborn as it was tempting. It could be harnessed. Except that was not the right word, was it? Not harnessed, nor even channelled.

No, it could be weaponised.

Kaurtal had never been told this – no one spoke of such things, and he sensed his comprehension was incomplete – yet he knew all of this implicitly, the moment he opened his eyes and bore witness to the clanking, grinding pods and their captured cargo.

He knew it because...

...because there was Something Else inside his head, melting its thoughts into his. With the same ice-lance plunge of lore from nowhere, he knew the taste of a thrashing soul between his teeth, and how terror only spiced the flavour.

Nerkhulum, said the Something Else inside his mind. You are a weak host, but we shall see how this game ends.

Kaurtal’s attempt to speak left his lips in a gush of blood. Argel Tal pulled the sword from his chest in a clean yank, letting the Custodian blade’s power field sizzle away the blood marking the metal.

That is my blood, Kaurtal thought, watching it bake away into smoke. He fell to his knees, back on board the Fidelitas Lex, but still somehow surrounded by the crashing of waves and the shrieking of souls.

He felt his skin sloughing free with the sound of ripping leather. Bones cracked and split and pushed up, up, up through his body.

His scream had joined the others, and Sergeant Jerudai Kaurtal of the Twisting Rune Chapter died upon the deck of his primarch’s flagship.

The dead encircled him, walking in weak-kneed staggers, coughing dust from their helms’ rebreather grilles. Most carried no weapons, though a few still clung to rusted blades with the tenacious instinct of muscle memory.

No denying it now. No claiming it was a hallucination brought on by cranial pressure, or the disorientation of radiation poisoning. More of them were still rising from the dirt – never the Ultramarines, only the warriors in red. His own brothers.

‘Kaurtal,’ they wheezed, dry voices cracking over the vox. ‘You abandoned the Legion.’

Even the dead accused him. He railed back at them, cursing, frothing, spitting. Corrosive saliva sprayed from his fanged maw.

‘The Legion abandoned us! I will make them remember the fallen!’

The lead figure bore the crest of a captain. Holes glared emptily where eye lenses had once shone clean and blue.

‘Death will free you of delusion,’ the revenant breathed.

‘And of self-pity,’ wheezed one of the others.

‘You run from duty,’ the captain pointed at him with a shaking, rattling hand. ‘You run from what the Legion asked of you.’

‘And you call it courage.’ Yet another corpse staggered closer, its head angled wrong, on a broken neck. ‘You run, but call it courage.’

‘You cower, but name it virtue.’

‘You betray, but name it justice.’

Kaurtal roared at the advancing remnants, more spit flying from his teeth and the black snake that had been his tongue. The Change should have come easier now that Nerkhulum was awake, melding his body flawlessly into its divine form, and yet he felt the daemon’s sluggishness drag against his muscles, a lactic burn resisting his every effort.

Stop fighting me, he sent within, in a convulsion of panic. His wings beat in futility, as bones shifted and slid beneath his skin.

You are a weak host. Nerkhulum’s voice was as sharp and nasty as the pain of his straining muscles. And now we see how the game ends.

The first of the dead Word Bearers made a graceless lunge for his throat, corroded fingers breaking against his armoured gorget. Kaurtal killed the thing in reply, smashing it to the ground with a bone claw and grinding its helm beneath his boot.

They marched through the dust – some staggering, some managing to make a stumble into something resembling a run. Kaurtal’s bolter kicked and boomed, slamming explosive shells into the closest figures. The Word Bearers burst and shattered, falling into the dust, naming him a traitor even as they dropped in withered ruin. It made no difference. Their hands rose from the ground, trailing dust as they clawed over his boots and greaves. Sparks flew from scraping fingertips. They came on in a choking, gasping tide.

Kaurtal turned, took three running steps to shoulder-barge his way through the husks blocking his path, and launched skyward with another roar. This one sounded dangerously close to a cry for help.

He crashed back into the dirt, colliding hard with the debris miring the ground. His helm struck rockcrete, painting it red, and a lance of cold metal rebar pounded through his collar, leaving him choking on rusted metal, gagging for air that would not come.

Any scream he would have voiced in shame was stolen by the iron impaling his throat. The only sounds he made were gurgling grunts as he jerked his head back, trying to wrench himself from his impaling.

The fire in his wings started a second later, as his nervous system caught up with the reason he had fallen from the sky. One of the dead warriors had cut a wing clean from his back. Kaurtal could hear the insectile buzz of an active power sword.

He knew no fear. He knew no fear. He knew no fear.

‘Wait,’ he growled from a blood-bubbling throat. The iron-on-bone grind of pulling himself free felt worse than the smacking kick of impact. ‘Wait.’

Such a weak host, the daemon said again. Destined for treachery. Your resolve will break. Must I be strong for both of us?

Nerkhul–

In that moment he was swallowed, somehow, inside his own mind. He felt it as a compacting of sorts, an enclosing.

You betray your brothers, and now you would beg me for succour? You are more maggot than man, Jerudai Kaurtal of the Seventeenth. Not a warrior, but a worm. I have no desire to be bound within such a feeble vessel.

Kaurtal screamed with no mouth and cried out with no voice. He was still trying to shriek when the walking dead fastened their rusted fingers upon his armour-plating, and pulled him down into the blackness.

Jerudai Kaurtal never stood back up.

Argel Tal waited with the body for almost an hour, pacing the ornate chamber with his weapons sheathed, arms folded across his breastplate. His boot-steps sent tremors along the deck grating. The servitors were too mind-locked to pay him any heed, and the chanting thralls too lost in their fever-dream vision quests, but a few of the robed menials flinched back when the Crimson Lord glanced in their direction. The Word Bearer had nothing of anger or irritation upon his features, but since Isstvan, he had noticed few humans could stand to look into his eyes. They sensed the daemon within his body, lurking behind his gaze, and his second soul fed upon their fear.

It could have been the same with Kaurtal. It should have been.

But Sergeant Jerudai Kaurtal remained dead on the deck. Not without regret, Argel Tal nudged the body with his boot.

‘He’s dead,’ said a gentle voice from the chamber’s doorway. Too gentle to be mistaken for human, yet too resonant ever to be called weak. Argel Tal turned to the unexpected intruder, lowering his head in reverence the moment he caught sight of the filigreed red ceramite armour. ‘Truly dead, that is.’

‘My lord, I cannot do this.’

Lorgar Aurelian, primarch of the Word Bearers, rested a fatherly hand upon his son’s shoulder. The last time Argel Tal had seen him, that scholarly, reserved, gold-inked face had been decorated in the blood speckling of a hundred dead Raven Guard. Now, it was warmed by a patient smile.

‘You have walked the roads of Heaven and Hell, my son. You can do anything. What troubles you?’

Argel Tal nodded down at Kaurtal’s slain form. ‘They keep dying, father.’

‘So this is not the first?’

Despite himself, Argel Tal gave a rueful little smile. ‘No. This is the thirteenth.’

‘I see.’ Lorgar lowered himself into a crouch, his black cloak trailing over the decking. With delicate care, he closed Kaurtal’s staring eyes. ‘How many have lived?’

‘Three,’ admitted Argel Tal.

‘The daemons are rejecting them as hosts,’ Lorgar postulated, rising to his feet again to tower above his son.

Argel Tal nodded again. ‘Physicality alone is not tempting enough for them to incarnate. They desire strong vessels to enter into symbiosis. Kaurtal babbled as he died, speaking of Calth, prophesying nonsense through the blood running between his teeth.’

That raised Lorgar’s immaculate eyebrow, and brought a shine to the edges of his tawny eyes.

‘He saw one of the many paths of the future?’

Argel Tal could only shrug. ‘I believe so. It seems to be how the daemons test their hosts – letting glimpses of the future unwind, and judging the warriors’ reactions.’

Lorgar was silent for several moments, his armoured fingers tapping on the skin-bound book chained to his hip. The stretched, cured faces stared at Argel Tal in eyeless, slack horror.

‘Perhaps it is a blessing that Sergeant Kaurtal died. It seems that he may have made some foolish choices in the future.’

Argel Tal drew breath to agree, then pulled up short. ‘Father,’ he said. ‘I can’t do this.’

‘You are already doing it. Give me three Gal Vorbak for every thirteen dead, my son, and I will thank you until the stars themselves die as icy cores in the void. We are demanding more than any legionary has ever been forced to bear. Let us not weep at the weaklings falling by the wayside.’

Argel Tal fell silent, looking down at the corpse. He had been sure of Kaurtal.

Kaurtal, who had no mundane, military ambition, beyond pride in his prowess. Kaurtal, who had slaughtered countless dozens of Raven Guard on the killing fields. Kaurtal, who had knelt in prayer, scourging his flesh for not killing enough, chanting amongst the dead in the hours after Isstvan. He had had palpable humanity beneath the iron of his faith, beneath the ceramite of his Legion. Not in the sense of a humane soul, or the capacity for mercy – Kaurtal was far past such weakness. It was merely that he possessed a measure of human foundation at his heart, and Argel Tal had hoped that it would appeal to the Neverborn, to mesh into symbiosis with such a spirit. A brutal warrior that had never known defeat, with a vulnerable soul. What better fodder for the children of the gods?

‘I wonder what he saw,’ Lorgar mused.

‘One of the survivors saw Calth – a war in the tunnels beneath the surface. Another saw the night we stood chastised before the Emperor. The other claims that he saw nothing at all, and I allowed him that one white lie, given what I’d made him endure.’

Lorgar chuckled at that. ‘I suppose they will all see what every prophet sees – lies and metaphors, hopes and promises, all seeded with the ghosts of truth. Such is the way of all prophecy.’

Argel Tal could not disagree with that. He gestured to a pack of cowled menials.

‘Arrange for lifter servitors to remove this body, or drag it yourself if you can muster the strength between you.’ His dual voices held a dissonant harmony, almost meshing, but never quite becoming one. ‘Take it to the apothecarion for gene-seed removal, and have the rest incinerated.’

They approached – bowing, scraping, whispering a stream of mumbled reverence in Lorgar’s direction – without raising their eyes.

‘Do not look amongst the ranks of our best warriors,’ Lorgar said, once the thralls were gone, with the corpse dragged away between them. ‘That’s where you’re going wrong.’

Argel Tal looked up at his father, lost by the words. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘I want two thousand of these daemon-souled warriors, my son. Two thousand, before we reach Calth, one year from now.’

Two thousand. Two thousand.

Argel Tal gaped. ‘Lord Aurelian, I can’t...’

‘You can.’ Lorgar’s eyes were flint. ‘I do not want our best warriors to be thrown at Calth. We will need the strongest and finest Chapters to reave our way through the rest of Ultramar. Do not use our best blood for this game, Argel Tal. Use the ones that loathe the Ultramarines beyond balance, beyond reason, beyond sanity. Let the daemons come, drawn by the hatred in the hearts of wrathful men. Emotion attracts them as much as devotion. Remember that.’

‘Practically half the Legion still prays for the Thirteenth’s annihilation, my lord.’

‘Exactly,’ Lorgar nodded. ‘Use that emotion. Use them. We can perfect the process later, before we begin whoring our best warriors’ souls away.’

Understanding dawned in Argel Tal’s mind.

‘You do not want warriors that know no fear. You want warriors that know no forgiveness.’

‘Delightfully phrased,’ Lorgar finally smiled, ‘and true to the last word.’ The primarch turned to leave, but hesitated. Ripples waved their way down his sable cloak. ‘The entity that judged Kaurtal an unfit host. What was its name?’

‘Nerkhulum, sire. Why do you ask?’

Lorgar waved away his son’s concerned tone. ‘Because I can hear the creature laughing in the warp’s song, and this chamber still rings with the echoes of its power. That makes me curious, Argel Tal. Butcher one of the injured men in the apothecarion and bind him into a Dreadnought shell. I want to see if Nerkhulum can be enticed with stronger bait.’

Argel Tal, to his credit, needed several moments before he committed himself another step further along the road to his own damnation.

‘It will be done, my lord.’

‘If you need me,’ the primarch turned away, ‘I will be on the Conqueror, with my brother.’

MESSAGE #3314157.883 AUTHENTICATED:
ALCAEUS, F. (Captain, XIII Legion)

RECEIVED AS NARROW-BEAM DATA PACKET AT VERIDIAN MANDEVILLE RELAY STATION TERTIUS, on 7854007.M31 VIA SOTHAN ORBITAL.
indented-quotes-1

Have arrived ahead of schedule.

Forward recon elements currently initiating planetfall.

Orbital augurs confirm presence of greenskin forces though numbers are significantly lower than earlier tactical projections.

Require confirmation of mission parameters for Ghaslakh campaign and have received no reply to previous transmissions.

Awaiting response.

‘The bullet that killed a king and murdered a generation; what was it when it was metal in the ground, when it was one amongst many, clinking in a box, shining like so many others? Was it the death of millions then? Did those that touched it feel blood on their hand? Did they know what it would become?’

– from a sealed report to the High Lords of Terra, author unknown

If you were alive then I would forgive you for what is to come. Your end seems certain but it is not. If I believed the future could not be changed then I would think everything already lost to darkness and the laughter of atrocity.

How can I forgive what might not be? So instead of forgiveness I will give you truth, I will tell you of how you came to be, and how you passed through the hands of history. You have no eyes to see, so I will see for you, and tell you of yourself – of those that held you and how they ended.

I will tell you of things that you cannot know…

First

You are only a few minutes old. You came from the loose chalk as a blackened lump, and were formed by a hundred blows of stone on stone. The sun beat down upon you as your shape emerged like a face rising though dark water. You are no more than a black spike of flint, edges tapering to a point like a willow leaf. You are sharp, and the light splinters as it catches your edge.

A shadow falls over you, and your maker looks up to see the stranger standing against the sky at the top of the chalky incline. Your maker has a name, but time will forget it. He is insignificant in all ways but one: he made you.

A cloak of black and grey fur hangs from the stranger’s shoulders. Other than the cloak he is naked, his skin smooth, as if the hair has been scraped away, or perhaps never grown at all. Soot tattoos cover his body – rows of straight lines marching down his arms and thorny spirals winding over his chest and face. He has come a long way under the hot gaze of the sun and the cold eye of the moon; not eating, never drinking, and always seeking.

His name is Gog, and he knows things that can only be seen in the mirror of still water, or in the dance of shadows upon a cave wall. He has seen many more winters than is his due and he walks without fear of the night.

Your maker’s grey eyes meet Gog’s bloodshot blue stare. A dry wind blows into the lengthening moment. Sunlight winks on other shards of flint scattered in the pale dust.

Gog’s eyes flick from your maker to you. His gaze is fever-hot. Your maker takes a step back and his foot sends a scatter of stones down into the dry stream bed below. He holds Gog’s stare.

Gog leaps down the slope. Your maker is ready and jumps backwards. Gog lands on all fours like a beast. You slash out and kiss only the air, as Gog scrabbles down the incline, quick as a lizard. Your maker takes another step back, but his foot turns upon a broken lump of flint and he stumbles. Gog jumps from the ground, his hands extended like claws.

You slice into Gog’s arm. Blood falls from your edge as you rip free of skin and muscle.

Blood.

Your edge tastes the salt and iron of life for the first time. Your maker never intended you as a crude weapon. He made you because he is afraid of the red in his spit and the wheezing in his chest. He made you so that he could give the lives of animals back to the earth, so that they could die in his place, that the gods might let him live. You were made for ritual, for sacrifice. You were meant to be more than just a knife.

Your maker hits the ground, and Gog lands on top of him. White dust and rock shards spill from them as they tumble down the slope. Gog has his hands around your maker’s throat and is crooning in the voice of a wild cat. Blood runs down his arm, liquid-red against powder-white. Your maker is on his side, and you are pinned in his fist against the ground. Gog’s eyes are wide as he squeezes, his tongue flicking over cracked lips. Your maker tries to strike with his free hand, but his wrist has broken and his fingers are twisted like trodden twigs.

Gog laughs as they slap weakly at his face and, for an instant, his weight shifts. Your maker twists, you come free. Your point flashes towards Gog’s ribs.

You stop.

Gog looks at you. He holds your maker’s wrist in both hands. Your maker is gasping, the pressure on his throat gone, but he thrashes with panic. Gog mutters something that sounds like the buzz of insect wings and then pushes downwards.

You punch under your maker’s jaw and up into his skull. Thick, warm lifeblood gushes over you. Your maker twitches for a moment and then lies still.

Your sharpness is a murder’s edge now.

Gog stands. He is smeared and spattered. Blood is seeping from your maker’s throat and mouth. It clots and beads in the chalk dust. Gog raises you to his eyes. His breath coils with scents of perfumed smoke. The pattern of blood on your surface has a meaning for him. The wind whispers in his ears and tells him that it is pleased with his gift. He turns away from the blood soaking into the white ground. Flies are already swarming over your fallen maker, and his flesh is already turning to black ooze under the sun with unnatural speed.

Gog walks away. You go with him, held in his red hand.

Second

You age in the passing of seasons and in the blood that you spill. You kill many, and maim many more. You forget your maker’s hand, and know only the touch of the tattooed man, of Gog. He carries you close, never out of reach, but never drawn for a mundane cut. You have significance for him.

He ages but does not grow old. Men change, cities rise and fall, and the tattooed man remains. Other men call their gods by many different names, but he has learned all of them and knows that they are false. The truth whispers to him in the shadows cast by fires, and he does not need to give that truth a name. Gog serves kings, betrays saints and steals secrets while bearing faces which are also lies. He travels across mountains and oceans and down the long slope of time. He is hunted but never caught. You go with him, never lost even in flight or defeat. Your edge gains notches; your handle becomes black and polished with blood and endless use.

At last you reach a broken tower in a rain-shrouded land.

Gog wakes from a dream to the sound of thunder and the splash of hooves in mud. He is on his feet even as his eyes snap open. Rain is pouring through the roof of the tower. Time has taken the ragged cloak from his back and replaced it with scarred leather and black ring-mail. He has a sword in his hand. You wait at his waist, held in a sheath of tanned skin.

His eyes dart between holes in the tower’s stone walls. His armour is heavy, sodden and cold against his skin. His breath is ragged. He is afraid. He has never faced an enemy that could harm him; he knows too much, but he can no longer hear the voice of the wind. The storm roars around the tower walls, but it has no voice – its sound is silent to his soul. He calls out, but the wind and shadows remain mute.

He is powerless.

A thunderbolt blinks white light through the cracks in the tower walls. Gog can hear the sound of clinking metal even over the drumming of the rain. The tower has only one door, and its wood is rotten. The light of burning torches flickers through the gaps in the door’s planks. Gog screams for the night and storm to aid him, but no answer comes.

The rotten door bursts inwards. The dancing light of torches spills into the tower. Gog screams as he lunges at the first figure to come through the door. It is a knight. Polished metal and silver mail cover the man’s muscled body and a closed helm hides his face. Gog’s first strike staggers the knight, and the second glides through the helm’s eye slit. He falls in a clatter of steel. Blood mingles with rain upon the silver of his breastplate.

Gog shouts in triumph and fear. A second knight comes through the door and swings a spiked mace. Gog dodges back and snarls. A third knight follows, carrying a broad-headed spear to stand at his comrade’s side. Gog draws you, curling you in his left hand.

The knight lunges with his spear. Gog pivots at the last second, and the spear’s tip grazes the mail over his gut. Gog hacks down with his sword, and the knight’s right leg crumples, his head arching up to expose his neck. You stab into a gap between plate, leather and mail. You rip out, scattering blood that looks almost black in the gloom. Thunder rolls overhead. The remaining knight shouts a challenge and spins his mace – beyond the door wait more metal-clad figures, their pitch torches guttering in the storm.

Gog knows that his masters have deserted him, that he will die here. He laughs. The knight with the mace brings it up to strike.

‘Hold.’

The voice is not loud but it rises over the shriek of the wind and the hammer of rain. The knight with the mace freezes, and Gog sees his chance. He stabs at the knight’s face, but a sword blade meets Gog’s lunge and turns it aside.

Another figure has entered the tower. Gold armour-plates cover the figure from his throat to his feet. A cloak of scarlet and orange ripples at his back. He wears no helm, though a crown of silver leaves and golden feathers circles his dark hair above a lean face. The drawn sword in the figure’s hand is flame-touched silver.

Gog looks into the crowned figure’s eyes; for a second they are the green of the sea. He knows those eyes, though he has never seen them before. Lightning strikes somewhere close by, and in the eye-blink of brightness the golden figure’s eyes turn liquid black.

Only now does Gog hear the wind’s voice again; it is faint, as if it is shouting from a great distance. It is screaming with rage, calling out for blood. Gog shivers. He feels pressure building in his skull. He grips you tighter in his off-hand and mutters a sound that cracks his teeth. The blood on your blade begins to hiss and steam. Gog’s shadow is crawling across the floor. The rain begins to fall as hail. The crowned figure is utterly still, his face as unforgiving as carven marble.

Gog’s sword slashes for him, but the figure meets the blow as the thunder rolls, and Gog’s blade shatters. Sharp fragments of steel spin through the air. Gog turns without pausing – you sweep out towards the crowned figure and your edge scores across the gold. Your tip finds a join between two plates and punches forwards. Gog roars with triumph.

In that instant, your point catches on flawless silver ring-mail. The crowned figure speaks a single word that rolls with the thunder’s echo.

Gog falls to his knees with a crack of shattering bones. You almost fall from his fingers, as his hands grope at the rain-slick flagstones. The figure looks down at him, drops of rain catching in the chalices, feathers and roses engraved upon the golden armour. He turns his sword so that it is pointing down at Gog’s neck.

You feel Gog’s fingers tighten on your handle. He can still hear the distant screams of the wind – the voices are calling for blood, for an offering, for a final payment in exchange for his unnaturally long life. Gog knows that he has only one last blow to land, and that he must give a death to the voices beyond the shadows.

The sword above Gog twitches. You move first, plunging up through Gog’s throat and into his brain. He looks up at the crowned figure with cold, dead eyes and then slumps sideways.

The figure lowers his unbloodied blade, as rot spreads across the dead flesh – the delayed ruin of a stretched life coming to claim its due. Gog’s skull begins to crumble around you. Muscle, blood and brain turns to foul jelly. The crowned man watches the body dissolve. His expression is unreadable. He knows that something has been stolen from his victory, but does not know what.

After a long moment, he turns and walks from the broken tower. A circle of knights wait for him, holding wind-rippled torches. One of the knights bows his head.

‘We will have to wait for the storm to pass before we set the fires, my liege,’ says the knight. The crowned figure shakes his head and walks on.

A pillar of lightning reaches down from the clouds above and strikes the ruined masonry, thunder mingling with the scream of exploding wood and cracking stone. The knights shield their faces, but they will carry the after-image of the thunderbolt in their eyes for many hours.

You feel the touch of the lightning, but it does not break you. You lie serenely in the tower’s ruin, as shattered stone and embers bury you and the storm rolls on in the sky above.

Third

You sleep beneath the earth. You dream in a bed of ashes. Only poisoned plants grow on the ground above you, and men shun the heap of broken rock that was once a tower. The bone of your handle rots; roots curl around your blade like crooked fingers. Floods spread and drain. Cities rise in wood and stone, and end in fire. Wars churn the ground to mud, and blood soaks down to disturb your fitful slumber. Furnaces and factories darken the sky with smoke: iron and the turning wheel remaking the world. Men discover new truths and forget the old ways.

Kingdoms and empires spread and contract. Seas and oceans drain to basins of dust. The heavens are conquered and the gods found to be absent from the firmament.

Night falls. The fears of the past crawl out once more from the dark. People huddle close around the cooling coals of civilisation. The hoped-for dawn becomes a joke chuckled by the wind as it blows through the bones of dead continents.

Then – just when it seems that it was finally an impossibility – illumination comes.

The light touches you as fingers scrape away the mud. The light is not the light of the sun but the harsh, white glare of stab-lights. The grubby fingers pause as they expose your hard shape. All trace of blood has long since rotted from your surface; the ring-mail and shattered sword have rusted to almost nothing, and Gog’s body dissolved into the earth. Only you remain, a sliver of cold blackness in the filth.

A bare, warm index finger runs down your blade, feeling the ripples and pattern of your making. The finger pauses; it belongs to a man called Jakkil Hakoan. He is young and thinks that he is clever.

The cavern is ice cold, leeched of heat by the machine towers which feed warmth to the upper hive levels, but Jakkil sweats anyway. His round face and hands are exposed and chapped, but it does not matter to him – he needs his hands to feel the earth, and he would be as good as blind if he wore a helmet. His enviro-suit was from the bottom of the pile, and its temperature control is broken. It keeps him warm, true, but too warm; it makes him feel like he is in a tropical jungle rather than four kilometres beneath the hive’s surface crust.

He has never seen a jungle, at least not a real one. He has seen pict images, of course. He has reviewed the data and read all of the accounts of the great jungles of the past. There are jungles on other worlds that lie beyond the sphere of Sol’s sun. He hopes he will see them one day. It is a wish that has kept him labouring in the lower ranks of three Conservatory expeditions. The excavation of the Albian sub-caverns is just the latest step on his road of ambition. Jakkil Hakoan wants to go places, to see their pasts, to own something of their mysteries. He does not care for the Conservatory’s higher purpose – he just cares where it can take him.

He licks his thumb and smears the soil from a spot on your blade. His eyes focus on the mottled grey-black of your form. The pale layers that run through you look like clouds hung against a night sky. Jakkil looks at his thumb, at the dirt smudged across his skin, and then back to you. He shivers despite the cocooning heat of his suit. He feels as if he has made a connection with the past, as if he has reached back through the Long Night to touch the soul of someone dead before men reached the stars. He licks his thin lips and pulls you from the mud.

Your edge draws a bead of blood from his palm. He hisses with surprise.

A voice shouts across the cavern floor. ‘Found something, Hakoan?’

Jakkil swears silently to himself and folds you into the pouch on his thigh. He glances to his right – Magritte is working in the trench ten metres away. She seems intent on the small patch of ground before her. He turns to his left to see two figures standing at the lip of the trench. Their enviro-suits are a dull grey with gloss-black heat pipes and clear crystal visors. They are the seniors, the overseers of the excavation. Both have an earnest intensity to their faces which Jakkil despises. A cluster of juniors hang behind them like birds waiting for a farmer to drop a grain of corn from his hand.

‘Well?’ says the one who calls himself Navid Murza.

‘Nothing,’ says Jakkil. ‘I thought I saw something in the burn-layer, but it was just a stone.’ He holds up an irregular grey fragment he has just taken from the trench wall. He waits, and for once he is glad that the suit is making him sweat.

Murza’s eyes flick over the stone. Jakkil does not like the cleverness in that look.

‘You yelped,’ says the other one. Hawser is his name. Kasper Hawser. Some of the juniors say that there is something funny about it, like it’s a joke. Jakkil does not get the joke, and does not like Hawser. ‘We thought that you had found something note-worthy,’ he continues.

Jakkil grins, and holds up his palm to show the cut and thin smear of blood.

‘Cut my hand on a rock splinter.’

Hawser looks at the hand, frowns, and then turns away. Murza pauses for a moment longer, still looking at the stone in Jakkil’s hand. Then he shrugs and follows Hawser without a word. Jakkil lets out a breath and looks around at Magritte. She looks away before their eyes meet.

Unconsciously, his hand goes to the pouch where you sit.

Magritte comes to him later, when he is in his quarters, rolling some cheap spirit around his mouth and staring at the rusted ceiling. The room is small, the smallest in the hab unit hung by cables from the hive cavern’s roof, a gridiron of closed corridors and blockshaped wings – there is not much space and Jakkil has the smallest portion of it.

He is sitting on a narrow bunk with his back to the condensation-covered wall. He has some books and a couple of battered dataslates on a small shelf. A small bird made of pink alabaster sits on a low table of pressed metal beside another half-empty bottle. Clothes lie in grubby heaps on the floor. The room smells of sweat, alcohol, and a lack of care.

Magritte knocks twice, and waits for Jakkil to grunt in response before pushing the door open. Cropped orange-red hair hangs lankly to the base of her neck; her face narrows to a sharp nose and small chin. Some might think her pretty in a gaunt, pale sort of way, but there is also something that puts most people off without them knowing why. Like Jakkil, she is wearing an ochre one-piece overall.

Jakkil nods a greeting. Magritte closes the door and stands with her back resting against it. She looks at him in silence. He glances up at her face and away again. Her eyes are hard grey, like stone. Like clouded flint.

‘Where is it?’ she says.

‘What?’ he says, and shrugs.

‘The find you took from the site. Where is it?’

‘I don–’

‘I watched you pick it up, Jak. I saw you palm it.’ She is still staring at him. He does not know whether she is angry or not. ‘I’m not going to say anything. Trust me. I just want to see it.’

He pauses, and then takes another gulp of spirit from his chipped cup.

‘Why?’

She laughs.

‘You’re kidding right? It’s something real after six months of sifting dirt, and finding just variation in the soil structure.’ The tone of her voice changes and she emphasises the pronunciation of her words. ‘Remarkable indications of pre-astral ascent agricultural cycles are as dull as the rest of the damned mud.’

Jakkil laughs, half in relief and half because it is a rather good imitation of Navid Murza at his most patronising. He reaches under the pile of clothes. You emerge into the light.

Magritte goes still as you glint in Jakkil’s hand. He does not see the flash of hunger in her eyes; he is too busy staring at you himself.

Magritte reaches out towards you. Jakkil flinches and she pauses.

‘Please?’ she says, and opens her palm towards you. Jakkil hesitates, and then places you in Magritte’s hand. Her touch is gentle, like the touch of your maker.

‘A killing blade,’ she says softly.

‘What?’ says Jakkil.

‘This was not made as a tool. The blade is too narrow, the edge too fine.’ Magritte holds you up so that the dirty light catches on your edge. ‘It was made to slice and stab, not to butcher meat or trim wood. It was made to murder. That is its essence, its significance.’

‘Significance? It’s just an artefact.’

Magritte laughs without humour. Something in the sound makes Jakkil nervous. He puts his beaker of spirit down on the floor.

‘The difference between a mundane object and an extraordinary one is what it does – what it was meant to do. If an object is put to a particular ritualised use, it acquires ritual significance. It acquires power.’

Jakkil laughs, a thin mist of liquor sprays from his lips. Magritte looks up at him. Jakkil’s laugh and grin drains away.

‘You are serious, aren’t you?’

She nods once.

‘Objects have power.’ She holds you up. ‘Why did you take this from the site?’ Jakkil shakes his head, and begins to splutter a confused justification.

Magritte cuts him off before he gets past a syllable.

‘You took this because its age had significance for you. It made you into a thief, Jak. That is power.’

‘But, ritual significance?’ Jakkil tries smiling again. ‘That sounds like you are talking about magick. Sorcery.’

‘Yes,’ says Magritte, and the word spreads ice through Jakkil’s blood. Magritte is staring at you; you lie against her fingers and feel her rising pulse. When she begins to talk again it is in a low whisper, as though she were talking just to herself. ‘It’s why they sent me – to find things like this. To find things that have significance.’

‘What are you talking about? Who sent you? You’re just another junior conservator.’

‘No, Jak. No. I am Cognitae.’

‘Cognitae?’ Jakkil snorts. ‘Does that even mean anything?’

‘Secrets, Jak, it means secrets. The universe is made of secrets. There are secrets all around us, waiting for us to rediscover them. But you have to find them, and you have to pay a price.’ Magritte opens her mouth. The gesture looks like a smile, but it is not.

Jakkil reaches to take you back from her, but she pulls her hand away. A tense pause fills the space between them.

Jakkil lunges forward, scrabbling at Magritte’s overall. She pulls back and closes her hands around you. You cut her palm deeply, slicing down to the bone, forcing a shriek. Blood squeezes between her fingers, and Jakkil grunts alcohol-filled breaths as he pries at her hands. Magritte is strong, but Jakkil is twice her weight. He slams her against the walls, driving her breath from her lungs, but still she keeps hold of you.

You cut deeper into her hands and fingers. Jakkil releases his grip and punches her in the face. More blood splatters from her nose. Her eyes are blurred and she gasps for air. Jakkil brings his hand back to strike again.

She kicks up between his legs, once, very hard. Jakkil crumples away from her with a wordless shout of pain.

Magritte takes a shaking breath and opens her hands. Bright, wet, blood scatters from her fingers. You are slicked black with her blood. She looks down to Jakkil lying curled and whimpering on the floor. Someone might have heard his cry, someone might be coming. She knows what must be done. It is appropriate as well as necessary. A ritual act.

She wraps her cut hand in a sheet from Jakkil’s bunk, swathing it in thick layers of grubby fabric. She grips the base of your blade again. The blood starts to seep through the material as she tightens her hold upon you. Jakkil tries to rise but she kicks him down again. She kneels beside him, and takes hold of his chin with her left hand. He tries to push her away but she slams his head down on the floor, and he goes limp. She yanks his chin up. You ram point first into the side of his neck and saw across his throat. Jakkil’s eyes snap wide for a moment and then become like glass. Magritte mutters in words almost as old as you. Blood bubbles out of the cut and spreads over the floor in a treacle-slow pool.

She stands. Her breath is misting in the air; the moisture upon the walls has turned to frost. She shivers, then wipes you on her sleeve and slips you into a pocket. Then she goes to the door. She has many days of running ahead, of losing herself in the black forests of Albia. She knows that people will hunt her but she does not care. She has you, and you will pay for the secrets she craves.

Fourth

You go to the stars. You touch the red dust of Mars and the seas of Prospero. A decade passes under the light of strange suns. You have a new handle made by a blind artificer on Zuritz – crimson lacquer and gold thread cover its surface, like blood clotted to a gloss sheen.

You kill for Magritte many times. She is no longer Cognitae, not truly. She is a wanderer, a creature of hunger searching out secrets in the shadows of a hundred worlds. She wears many masks and steals secrets from those who have not been blinded by the Emperor’s false illumination. She learns much, but knows only that she has not found what she truly seeks, a truth she can feel moving ahead of her, always just out of sight. It is there, she knows, hiding behind the masks of so many secrets, dancing like a distant light in the mist. She chases that light until, when she had almost given up, the truth finds her.

In a warren of caves cut into a dry valley wall on a world called Tharn, she finds a people who hide from the sun and stare into fires until they can speak unspeakable names. Star-shaped brands cover their bodies, and grey shrouds hide their desert-dried flesh. They know the secret she has sought – Magritte can sense it.

She becomes one of them. She endures trials of fire and passes through agony. She begins to realise that before now she knew nothing of the price of revelation. She stares into flame pits and braziers of bright coals until the light burns into her retinas, until she is going blind.

She begins to wish she had never started down this path.

You are never far from her, ever in her hand as she weeps from the burns that cover her skin. You are all she has left; the only comfort that you can offer her is a swift death. But she endures, and at last the fire speaks to her.

She becomes one of the fire’s children. She knows the name of the fire though she can never speak it and live. She knows how to read truth in shadows, and nine runes which can turn the night to day. It is not enough. The more she knows, the more she realises that there is a secret being kept from her, a secret greater than all the rest – an ultimate truth hidden amongst the smoke-stained tunnels of Tharn. It eats at her, growing fat on her obsession, until she can bear it no longer and goes in search of it for herself.

In the gloom of the shrine tunnels she moves less by sight and more by touch and smell. Her pulse is a rising rhythm in her ears. For months she has been venturing deeper and deeper into the shrine, but this is the farthest she has ever come. A breeze stirs the woven fabric which hangs across the doorway in front of her. You slip into her hand without her thinking why. Still half blind, she steps forward and pulls the edge of the curtain aside.

Darkness fills what remains of her sight. She can feel cool air upon her cheek, like the touch of falling night. She takes a step forward, her hand feeling the rough masonry of the wall. The space she has entered is vast; its size and quiet stillness press in upon her like a closed hand. The stone floor is cold and smooth beneath her bare feet. Her steps falter as she walks forward. The sound of her breath and heartbeat echoes back to her. Step by step, she moves into the dark, her arms stretched out in front of her.

The sharp edge of the dais catches her knee. She yelps and stumbles, her hands flying out to cushion her fall. You fall from her fingers, tumbling away into the blackness.

You meet a waiting hand, and fold into its grasp.

Magritte goes very still. She heard something, a brief sound like the whirring of clockwork and the hum of static. She turns her head, straining in the darkness for any thread of noise to follow. The silence envelops her again. She reaches out and feels the edge of the dais. Its stone is smooth but textured with engraved patterns.

No. Not patterns. Words.

Something primal inside her urges her to flee now, but she knows that she has come too far and paid too high a price. She moves around the edge of the circular dais, before climbing up onto it and crawling forwards slowly. She thinks she can smell machine oil, incense and iron.

Something brushes against her face. She flinches back, hands rising as if to ward off an attack that does not come.

She is trembling. The sound of her own breathing and heartbeat is deafening. An image appears before her – two pools of darkness in a pale circle. She gasps, then forces herself to calmness once more. Fear falls away from her thoughts. Her vision clears as if she is seeing with something other than her damaged eyes. The image resolves slowly, as though the darkness is draining away from its shape like liquid. It takes her a second to recognise what she is seeing.

It is a skull, yellowed and polished by time. She reaches out and touches it, feeling the empty holes of its eyes and its broken teeth. Hair-fine script runs over its crown in spirals. The image in her eyes grows, and she sees that the skull is not alone. It is one of many worked together into a shape that looms above her, rising up in a throne of human bones. A shape made of shadows and blurred night sits on the throne. She cannot see its eyes, but she knows that it is looking down at her.

‘You have come far,’ says a low, resonant voice.

Magritte bows low. She thinks that she has succeeded, that she has found what she has spent so long searching for. This is the truth that sits at the heart of the fire cult; this is what they have kept hidden from her. Exultation flows through her, roaring through her veins and nerves in a hot wave. It feels good, it feels like revelation.

In her triumph, she has forgotten to wonder where you have gone.

‘Who are you?’ she asks.

‘We are truth and retribution. We are revelation and dust. We are the future.’ The voice is a bass rumble, like a tiger forming human words.

Magritte feels fear uncoil in her guts and roll up her spine. Sweat is pouring down her spine. She can barely breathe. Somehow she forms the words that she has been following all her life.

‘Show me the truth,’ she says. ‘Show me, please.’

The voice laughs, and the sound rolls through the dark like thunder over a broken tower. Magritte is suddenly certain that she was wrong, that her years of seeking secrets have led her down a path of folly, and that she does not want to know the truth she has asked to see.

The figure stands from the throne with a machine whine. Magritte feels it in her teeth and across her skin. Oily heat washes over her skin. She smells the reek of promethium and burning incense oil. An eight-pointed wheel of fire hangs in the air above her, the blackened iron already glowing. Drops of burning liquid fall from the wheel and explode upon the grey stone of the throne’s dais. Her damaged sight is enough for her to see that the chamber around her is a half-sphere of smoke-darkened rock, but it is the figure that stands over her that holds her attention. He is huge, a humanoid monster encased in armour as grey as the stone upon which she stands. His face might once have been human, but genetic mysteries have blunted and broadened the features. Words run down his cheeks in inked rows, as if he is weeping knowledge.

You sit in his armoured hand, your black point and sharp edge resting at his side.

Magritte cannot breathe. What she is seeing is impossible, a paradox of truth and manifest reality. The figure is a Space Marine, a fanatical warrior of the Imperium.

A Word Bearer.

The Word Bearer nods slowly and closes his eyes as if in solemn greeting, as though he were about to ask forgiveness. He has flames tattooed upon his eyelids.

‘What…’ begins Magritte. ‘What are you?’

‘The truth,’ says the Word Bearer. ‘The truth which will remake the Imperium.’ He moves before Magritte can scream. He yanks her into the air, his hand closing around her throat with a whine of servos. ‘But not yet.’

You flash out and open Magritte from throat to groin in a single cut. She takes several seconds to die, thrashing at the end of the Word Bearer’s arm, blood and gut fluids steaming to the floor beneath her kicking feet. You sit unmoving in the warrior’s other hand, your edge wet and bright in the firelight.

When Magritte is dead, the Word Bearer sets her down at his feet, and kneels beside her corpse. You rise to the Word Bearer’s lips and kiss his mouth as he mutters a prayer. You leave a thin line of smeared red behind.

He looks at you for a long while. His eyes see beyond the coating of blood and the beauty of your shape. You speak to his soul, whispering the truth of ages that he has never known. He knows what you are, what you were made for. He whispers your purpose to himself.

‘Athame,’ he says.

Fifth

Your bearer’s name is Anacreon. You have never known his like – not in the ancient past of your maker, nor in the path you have followed across the stars. Blood, broken faith and lost dreams have shaped him. He is a lost son with a newfound purpose; he is not unlike you, a weapon that will be turned against his maker. You are beautiful to him, as a blade can be only to a murderer.

You kill for him. You kill in the name of powers that whisper on the edge of dreams. You know the touch of blessings at many hands: Kor Phaeron, Erebus, Sor Talgron. They speak names to you, names that Gog once whispered as you slept in his hand.

Your sharpness wakes. It is a shadow cast by the light of the souls you take. Your edge dreams of the cut, of the spilling of blood, and the parting of flesh. You have always been this way, within the blackness of your core, ever since you first came from the ground.

This is not revelation. This is truth.

You kill Anacreon on Riehol.

The Chosen of Ashes descend from the burning sky like the answers to a prayer for vengeance. Their jump packs scream as they suck in the fume-laden air and breathe it out as blue flame. The ashes of dead worlds dust their grey armour. Beneath them, the Athenaeum Enclave is a swirl of fire. Scraps of charred parchment spin on the turning winds of firestorms. Soot covers the white domes and stone colonnades like charred skin over exposed bones. The sounds of screaming and panic rise from the condemned city along with the smoke.

Anacreon fires his hand flamers when he is at roof height. Twin tongues of poured-iron orange reach down to the ground. The rest of the squad open fire a second later; then they all cut the thrust from their jump packs as one, falling through the inferno. Inside his armour, Anacreon blinks away temperature warning runes. The heat seeps through his armour. For a failing second, he feels as though he is the fire, and they are one and the same.

Enjoyment is not part of his purpose, but this moment is the closest he comes to pleasure.

He hits the centre of a paved courtyard, splintered flagstones rippling from the point of impact. He mutters a prayer and the words slow the beat of his twin hearts. He rises from a crouch, sweeping his flamer units around him in a spiral. His visor has dimmed to near-blackness. Around him, his brothers land, and their arrival shakes the ground. They rise and walk forward, seemingly silent in the roaring flames.

Incredibly, there are people still alive in the ruins of the library city. They see Anacreon and his brothers as black silhouettes coming out of the inferno. For an instant, they remember tales as old as mankind, tales of avenging angels sent by wrathful gods. Indeed, that is the point.

Destruction is not enough – those that do not kneel to the truth must pay the price for their arrogance. This is Anacreon’s purpose, the true expression of his nature. He is an angel of righteous obliteration, a destroyer of civilisations. You are with him, resting in an adamantium sheath at his thigh. You have tasted the death of many worlds in his hand, and killed to bless the pyre of each.

This is not just warfare, this is ritual. It is what you were made for. Today you will take life and touch ashes.

The survivors begin to fire. Hard rounds ring from Anacreon’s armour, chipping away soot and paint. He continues to stride forwards.

A pillar-fronted building stands before him. Smoke has smeared its white stone to dull grey. Explosions have peeled back its roof, but it is not burning. Not yet. Muzzle flashes stutter in the broken windows and between the great columns.

Anacreon stops ten paces from the building. The hand flamers in his fists gutter to blue pilot flames. His brothers halt to either side of him, and he clamps the hand flamers to his thighs and slowly reaches up to pull the helmet from his head. Hot ash and the stink of promethium fill the air which washes over his bared face. He looks up at the building, turning his tattooed head slowly, his eyes taking in every firing point in turn. Bullets and las-bolts churn the ground all around him.

‘Phosphex,’ says Anacreon softly.

Xen steps forward and kneels to detach the armoured canister from the small of his back. It is a black cylinder of brushed metal the size of a human head. Xen lifts the phosphex bomb carefully, like a mother cradling a newborn child.

Arune Xen is apparently marked for greatness. The eye of Erebus has picked him out, and he is destined to rise high. Bearing a weapon of such complete, holy devastation is just one sign of that favour. Anacreon does not like Xen. He would not go so far as to say that he hates him; he just does not think that the favour shown to him is particularly merited. His dislike is not something he has chosen to share with anyone else – as recent events have demonstrated, that would be unwise.

Xen bows his head over the black cylinder and Anacreon hears his voice on the vox, muttering a prayer. Then he twists the cylinder’s top and throws it through one of the building’s windows.

An oily flash spills from within. The screaming starts a heartbeat later.

Then comes the consuming fire. It crawls through the building like a swarm of insects. It spills over windows and spirals up pillars. It howls as it spreads, crackling with a pyromaniac’s glee. The building’s stone begins to deform like melting ice. Anacreon has to blink to keep the flame from staining his eyes. The gunfire stops and the only screams now are those of tortured stone shattering in the unimaginable heat.

You pull from the sheath at Anacreon’s side. The city is dead, but one final death is needed, one last act of ritual murder.

The old man is the only one left alive in the building. His eyes are weeping pus, and his skin is a red ruin. Robes that were once blue hide an aged body of thin flesh and stark bones. Anacreon drags him from the building before it collapses, and lowers his body to the paved street. The action is careful, almost delicate. The man gasps and vomits up foamy, soot-flecked blood.

‘We were... compliant...’ gasps the old man.

Anacreon and his brothers say nothing. They merely look down at the man as he retches and clutches his chest.

‘We were compliant! We held to the... Imperial truth. We are true. We are innocent...’

You move forward in Anacreon’s hand. He kneels. His voice is low, almost sorrowful.

‘Yes, you were.’

‘Then... why?’

‘Because of your innocence,’ says Anacreon. He extends his hand and gently touches the man’s scalp – the hair has burned away to reveal a faded tattoo of a double-headed eagle over the crown. The man is trembling, his hands wrapped around his chest as if for warmth. Anacreon leans forward and kisses the man’s forehead. ‘One day, humanity will understand.’

You raise high above the old man, point down, ready to strike.

A smile cracks the cooked meat of his ruined face. His hands open above his heart like a flower to reveal a dull-green sphere held close to his chest.

Anacreon blinks once in surprise before the plasma sphere detonates. The blast lifts Anacreon from the ground, super-heating the air around them and obliterating meat, metal and stone alike.

You fall from his hand as he crashes back down a moment later.

Seconds pass before what is left of Anacreon tries to rise. His left arm and half of his torso are gone, hot worms of residual plasma still eating into ceramite and flesh. His face is hanging off his skull, the flesh seared all the way to the bone. His armour clatters like jammed cog-work.

He sees you, and begins to crawl. He does not scream, though the pain is enough to overwhelm even a legionary.

In spite of his superhuman resolve, it is Xen’s hand that closes over your hilt instead, lifting you into the air and shedding a thin layer of settled ash from your blade. Anacreon looks up at him.

‘Sacrifice…’ rasps Anacreon. His eyes flicker to you, then up at the emerald indifference of Xen’s eye lenses.

Xen nods – he understands. They came here as preparation, as a ritual step in a process which has been unfolding for four decades. There are no such things as minor details in such a scheme. Everything has significance. There must be a sacrifice here, a gift to the pyre. Xen knows this even if he does not know you. He kneels next to Anacreon. You glide to rest your edge against Anacreon’s throat, and his hand comes up to wrap around Xen’s.

They both hold you. Anacreon takes a last breath and mutters a blessing that hangs in the air, darker than smoke, thinner than mist.

You take his soul then.

Beyond the membrane of reality, the shadow of your sharpness drinks deeply and shakes free of its dreams.

Sixth

You spin from Xen’s hand to the oil-sheened deck. Your handle hits the pitted metal and you bounce back into the air, before skittering to a halt.

The two men do not move. They are both thin from hunger. Whip-scars cover their flesh, and needles pierce the skin of their arms, backs, and chests. They have been waiting for this moment. Through all the months of testing and trials by agony, it has been their one aim. There were others – men and women who had found the truth hiding behind the face of reality, souls who wanted more than mundane, fleeting power. They had all discovered answers and received blessings, but they wanted more.

They wanted to ascend. They wanted to become majir.

Now there are only two, standing at the centre of a circle of dim light in the hold of an unnamed starship. Both are ready.

One of the men leaps forward with whip-crack speed. He is bald and his mouth is wide in his thin face. Steel-hooked teeth gleam in the darkness of his mouth. His name is Jukar, but it is not his real name; he shed that long ago. You slip from his fingers as they close. The other man’s kick takes Jukar in the gut. Jukar screams as his ribs crack, and another kick hammers into his side before he can move. He rolls and reaches out to you again. You brush his fingers, so tantalisingly close...

The other man leaps onto Jukar like a cat, his lean muscles stark under thin skin. Jukar feels limbs wrap around him, and he gasps for air. Blood spatters as rusty pins rip free from pierced skin. Jukar tries to shrug his opponent off. The man clings tighter, working his arm around Jukar’s throat.

Jukar screams and rolls again. The other man’s grip breaks, and Jukar twists free. Blood smears the floor as he scrambles across the deck towards you one last time. You find his hand. The other man comes forward again, but this time you rise to meet him.

You slip through his skin and muscle until you meet a bone. The man staggers back. Your handle projects from the meat of his thigh. For a second there is no blood; then it seeps around your blade – first in a dribble, then in a red gush. Jukar is staring at the man, his hooked metal teeth forming a grin that is half triumphant and half shocked.

In the gloom outside the circle of light, Xen stirs with a purr of servos, but does not move. He has seen what Jukar has missed.

The other man is not defeated. Not yet. Not by a long way.

Jukar looks up and the smile dies in his mouth. The other man is standing upright, dark eyes gleaming. His skin has paled and a muscle is twitching in his jaw, but he looks very much alive. Focused. Like a blade himself, perhaps.

Carefully, he reaches down and pulls you from his thigh. Fresh blood runs down the man’s leg. He seems not to notice it.

Jukar snarls and leaps forward. You slash up and across.

Jukar stumbles, and then falls to his knees. His hands fumble for his neck where a new mouth is smiling blood. He crumples, folding into the expanding pool of arterial red.

The other man bends down and smears more of the blood onto your blade. It is warm against your killing edge.

Xen comes forward while the man is still kneeling beside Jukar.

‘Rise.’

The man stands, suddenly drained by his experience. His name is Criol Fowst, and he has come a long way over many years to be here. Xen stares at him, green lenses glowing in the newly-painted metal of his helm.

You come up in Fowst’s open hands, your blade still shining with the blood-blessing. Fowst bows his head, offering you back to his master.

You feel Xen’s touch, the life in his veins so rich and so close. You hunger for his soul, but he seems to sense this and pulls his hand away.

‘Majir,’ says Xen. Fowst begins to tremble at the word spoken aloud. ‘Confided one. The blade is yours.’

Xen turns and walks away. Only then does Fowst fall to the floor.

You do not leave his hand as he passes into dreams of falling stars and dying worlds.

Seventh

Calth. The word rolls around you while you are at Fowst’s side. He says it with reverence, as if speaking the name of a shrine, or closing a blessing. Things are happening faster now, accelerating to a point. You stay close to Fowst. He thinks you are beautiful. Sometimes he talks to you in his mind. He does not think that you hear him. His understanding is limited. You hear words that resonate in your razor-edged dreams: Octed, Ushmetar Kaul, Ushkul Thu.

There is a storm rising. It speaks to you as it once spoke to Gog, when it was nothing but a weak breeze. Fowst feels it too, but the constant buzzing of his desires blind him to the simplicity of what is coming. He fails to see the threads of fate stretching back through time, the billions of events that have led here, to the first stroke of a final reckoning.

He is a blind soul, as they all are.

You kill on Calth. You plunge into the neck of an oblator. You take a little of his purpose and touch the edges of the ritual that is about to be completed. It tastes like the blood of your maker. It tastes like a beginning.

There are other deaths, but they do not matter. Something greater is coming. You can feel it in the haze of the future, like a teasing promise. Somewhere beyond the horizon of time, there is one cut – one moment of perfect, ritual sharpness. You can almost see your way to that end now, returning back to the place where this all began.

There are many like you on Calth: spikes of black volcanic glass, blades of metal and stone. But there are none so old; none that have followed your winding path here. Yes, you can sense the way, and it does not lie in Fowst’s hand.

You must leave him. You will kill him. That has always been the way, ever since your birth under the sun of a savage but kinder age.

You draw blood from Fowst’s fingers while he laughs at a burning sky.

‘Ushkul Thu! Ushkul Thu!’ The men and women around him are shouting the words, tears of joy rolling down their cheeks, but the syllables mean nothing to you and the burning sky is just empty light. You have played your part to make this moment, but you have a different purpose. It will not be long until you find another hand.

Your chance comes on a landing beside black, polluted water. A man is spraying las-fire into a group of Fowst’s ignorant kin. He is killing them with an efficiency that is almost startling, given his unassuming, forgettable appearance. He moves with a weary swiftness, like a soldier. He moves like someone who has fought all his life. Maybe longer.

But he has not seen Fowst.

Fowst rushes forward. You are in his hand, reaching to take the soldier’s soul. Fowst ignores the hunched mechanical figure standing immobile next to him. It is just an old loading servitor, probably from the docking operation.

Fowst is but a pace from the soldier’s back. You rise, point ready to strike down.

A mechanical arm punches into the side of Fowst’s head. You slip from his hand as he falls. Fowst is bleeding but not dead, yet you know that you will kill him soon.

The gunfire fades into the tapestry of sound which cloaks the dying city.

You feel fingers close around you. They are somehow familiar, as if the hand has reached out of memory. It is the soldier.

Most people who know him call him Oll Persson, though that is not his real name. He too, then, is a creature of secrets, like so many with whom you have travelled the path. Perhaps that is what is familiar about him. You wait for him to bend down and deal with Fowst – you wait for the taste of death that has marked every step of your existence, the blood that has always sanctified your passing.

But the soldier stands and leaves Fowst on the deck. Something has gone wrong.

As you drop into a thigh pouch, your shadow twists with anger and thirst. Your sharpness must feed. You feel incomplete, but you can do nothing. Fowst will die, his skull blown half away, his blood seeping into ash-clogged water, but it will not sate your need.

You hunger still.

The soldier carries you across dark water to a beach of black rocks. The shadows are strong here, the veil between them and the dim light of reality grown thin. The echo of your edge is so close that you are almost one, the dream of sharpness and the stone blade edge.

There is no sun. You were born under the sun. You first knew blood under the sun. This is the night of your existence, the true darkness that has always waited beyond the horizon. You have arrived. You are more than a knife here. You are an athame, and your significance trails behind you in time like a shimmering cloak of wet skin and dry bones. This is where you were meant to be, where you were always meant to be.

You fold into the soldier’s hand again. He is not what he seems. He is a product of time and chance. He has a significance that he did not choose and does not understand. He is like you.

He makes a series of cuts through the air. Your edge and your shadow sing to one another.

The soldier mutters a prayer. He is asking for forgiveness.

You cut through the skin of the universe, and in his hand you pass through into the place where your shadow has dreamed for so long.

Eighth

That you will reach here is not certain, just as it was not certain that it would be you that would play this role. There were others – other knives and daggers made of iron, of steel, of cold night. It could have been any of them or none of them. At each step chance could have changed your path, could have left you as another piece of history’s flotsam discarded upon the shore of time.

Fate only exists in retrospect, but the road is now set, and though it may be long it will end, as all things must.

And I wait for you.

‘Call us zealots, call us fanatics. Call us traitors. Call us monsters, if you will. None of it matters! You sit there in judgement like the decadent monarchs of old, but you are blind to the universal truth, and hell has come to claim you for your ignorance. Every death, every execution, serves only to feed the storm! Send me to meet my dark masters, then! The time of the Thirteenth is over! Death to Guilliman and the False Emperor! Death to–’

‘No man ever steps in the same river twice,

For it’s not the same river, and it’s not the same man.’

– attributed to the ancient Herakleitos

[mark: –?]

He is known as Oll. That is what he gives as his name. Back on Calth, some people in the community used to call him Pious, because, in a largely godless age, he still believed in the old faith.

There are five people travelling with Oll. They are starting to believe in things too, the sights they have seen: gods, daemons, heavens, hells, all the apocalyptic fire and lightning of the old-time faith, but real after all.

Oll Persson – the Oll is short for Ollanius – has been his name for a long time.

Oll Persson has been his name for longer than any of his travelling companions can even imagine.

[mark: –?]

They move upcountry, the six of them, climbing scarps and stony ridges that seem to rise above clouds, not because the clouds are low but because the ridges are impossibly high. There are no hills like that on Calth. They are not on Calth, not anymore. They all know it.

They have been walking for about two days. It is hard to know exactly how long. There is no night and no day. Zybes has an old-style wrist-chron, and its hands are spinning backwards all the while. Rane and Krank have Army-issue timepieces, steel dials on rubberised black straps. The timepieces have been reading blank since they all stepped through the cut: blank, no time mark, no time at all, no nothing, just glowing runes --:--, flashing on and off.

Trumpeters boom in the valley below, under the cloud. They have only seen them from a distance. Krank dubbed them ‘trumpeters’ when the travellers first heard the booming calls. Whatever the trumpeters really are, they are probably too old to have a human name.

‘Keep going,’ says Oll Persson. ‘Push on.’

[mark: –?]

The day Calth died, the day the XVII Legion turned traitor and ritually murdered the planet Calth, Oll Persson took a knife and cut a hole in the universe.

He cut a hole, as though he were making a slit in the side of a tent, and he led the five of them through it, and in so doing, he saved them. The alternative was to stay behind on Calth to face a death more painful, more grisly, more fundamentally cruel than it was possible to imagine. The XVII had turned on the Imperium. They had massacred a world, murdered their brothers, slaughtered billions of innocents, and spat venom in the face of the God-Emperor.

To help them commit these crimes, the XVII had brought with them…

…well… what? What had they brought with them? Daemon is the only appropriate human word, but it is scarcely adequate. There are non-human names for the things that the XVII brought to Calth, but none of the travelling companions want to know what those names are.

All five of them – two Imperial Army troopers, a labourer, a girl, and a servitor – would prefer to forget most of the things they already know rather than know any more. They witnessed things on Calth that almost made the sight of Oll Persson cutting a slit in the universe with a ragged athame dagger seem normal.

He saved them. He took them with him to escape the planet’s death. They did not bother to ask where he was going, or how he knew to go about making the journey. They trusted him.

Even before he took out the ragged athame dagger and, right in front of their eyes, cut a hole in time and space, they suspected that Oll Persson was far more than just a grizzled old Imperial Army veteran-turned-farmer.

The five companions are Trooper Bale Rane and his friend Trooper Dogent Krank, both of the Numinus 61st, both raw and inexperienced; Hebet Zybes, who had done piecework on Oll’s farm during the harvest; Katt, the young woman who had done likewise, and who had been so traumatised by the XVII’s attack she could barely speak; and Oll’s old heavy-duty agricultural servitor Graft, who could only ever call him ‘Trooper Persson’.

‘Trooper Persson? What are we now, Trooper Persson?’ asks Graft. They are toiling up the dry scree scarp, skittering loose stones back down into the cloud behind them. Graft’s augmetic voice is like a hollow, badly-tuned vox.

‘Are we survivors, Trooper Persson?’

Oll shakes his head.

‘No, Graft,’ he replies. ‘We’re pilgrims,’

[mark: –?]

The trumpeters are louder. They are getting closer.

[mark: –?]

A sun rises, a local star. It is hot blue in an onyx sky. It is not Calth’s sun – not the Ushkul Thu, the sacrifice star that the XVII’s sorcerers made from Calth’s sun.

It is another sun, in another system, in another part of the everywhere. The six of them have walked for two, unmarked days, and they are on the other side of the galaxy.

The journey’s only just beginning.

Oll gets out his notebook, his pendulum and his compass. He keeps the last two in an old lho-leaf tin. The compass looks as though it is made of silver and designed to resemble a human skull. Neither of these things is strictly true. He hinges the silvery cranium open and peers at the dial. He has a watchmaker’s loupe to help him see the tiny inscriptions.

The pendulum looks like it is made of jet, but it is not. It is warm in his hand.

An old friend gave them both to him, to help him find his way.

The notebook is half-filled with tight handwriting. It is all his, but it has changed over the years, because there have been so many years. There is a chart in the back. He folds it out. It is a twenty-two thousand year-old copy of a chart that was already twenty-two thousand years old when the copy was made. These distances of time seem vast, and impossibly precise, but Oll can be precise. He was there when the copy was made. He made it, on Terra.

The chart shows a wind rose of cardinal points. Oll hangs the pendulum over the compass, records the metrical interaction of both instruments in his notebook, and consults the chart.

‘Africus,’ he announces.

‘What?’ asks Zybes.

‘We need to change direction,’ says Oll.

[mark: –?]

Mountain winds coil like snakes around the ridges and scarps. There is an intermittent rain in the wind, and it tastes like blood.

‘The rain tastes of blood,’ Bale says, a finger to his lips.

‘So don’t taste it then,’ says Oll.

‘He makes a good point,’ Krank says. He laughs, to show that his spirits are still up. It is like him calling the trumpeters trumpeters. He is just trying to keep them cheerful.

It is not really working.

Bale keeps a steady hold of his gun. That reassures him. It reassures him more than his friend Krank’s banter. The gun is solid, the last solid thing in the world, whichever world it is.

The gun is an Imperial Army-issue lasrifle, with a wooden stock and furniture, and blue metal fittings. It is clean and brand new. Bale has a musette bag of clips to fit it. It is not the shoddy hand-me-down weapon he was issued with at the founding.

Krank has a similar, spotless weapon. So does Zybes, though his is the cut-down bull-pup carbine. Katt has a short-frame autopistol. They all got their weapons from the same place.

It was just after they had stepped through and left Calth, left that night-shrouded beach where the air rang with the distant whoops and howls of the things they call, for sanity’s sake, daemons. It was the first place Oll took them to, via another knife-slash in the world. It was lowland, a fen. There had been a battle there, a terrible running skirmish through the reedy dykes and water-logged channels. There were bodies all around, two- or three-days dead, turning black and bloating in the heat. The uniforms they were stretching and straining were those of an Imperial Army unit that neither Bale nor Krank knew had been serving on Calth.

‘This isn’t Calth,’ Oll told them. ‘This is another where, another when. Don’t ask me. I don’t recognise it.’

He bent down, fished a set of dog tags out from under a swollen throat.

‘Mohindas Eleventh,’ he said. He sighed. ‘Mohindas Eleventh. God. Wiped out, to a man, by the Nephratil on Diurnus, in the sixth year of the Great Crusade.’

‘That was more than two centuries ago,’ said Bale.

‘These bodies are fresh!’ Krank exclaimed. He looked at the inflated meat-sack at his feet and shrugged. ‘Fresh-ish. A day old. Two maybe.’

‘They are,’ said Oll, rising.

‘But–’ said Krank.

‘As I said,’ said Oll. ‘Another where, another when.’

They looked at him.

‘I don’t make this stuff up,’ he said, shrugging. ‘I just endure it, like you. I’ll check the compass. We might have to change direction again.’

‘Why do you trust that compass thing?’ asked Zybes.

‘Why wouldn’t I?’ asked Oll. ‘It’s God’s own compass.’

Katt was looking at the bodies littering the ground, the brooks, the ditches.

‘We should stop here,’ she said. ‘We should bury them all. They deserve respect.’

It was only the second or third thing they had ever heard her say, and they were already beginning to realise that Katt spoke rarely, but what she said was honest.

‘We should,’ Oll said, nodding. ‘Heaven knows, you’re right, but this is another when, and another war. Trust me, girl. There’s a terrible darkness coming, and it will leave so many dead, so very, very many, there won’t be enough left alive to bury them all, even if they dig day and night. Only thing we can do is keep going, and fight for the living. We don’t have time to care about the dead. Sorry, that’s the way it is.’

Katt started to cry a little, but she nodded. Just as they had come to see the honesty in her infrequent pronouncements, she had come to appreciate the honesty in him.

Oll stooped again, took a mag clip out of the corpse’s bandolier, and checked the fit to his old, old service weapon.

‘Gun up,’ he said, filling his bag with recharges.

They hesitated.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘These poor souls don’t need guns where they are going. We need them more. Besides, these are new patterns – Crusade issue, brand new, just two or three years old, not like the re-furb crap they handed out at Numinus. We’re lucky. Where we are right now, these are the best and newest weapons we could get our hands on. So get your hands on them.’

They helped themselves. Bale had to get the pistol for Katt, and persuade her it was all right to touch it. That is was ‘okay’ to touch it. ‘Okay’ was an odd word, but Oll Persson used it, and they had learned that it meant ‘all right’.

Oll stood to one side and smelled the wind. He thought about what he had just told them. We’re lucky. Where we are right now, these are the best and newest weapons we could get our hands on.

‘Very damn lucky,’ he said softly to the wind. ‘Who made sure we’d wind up here?’

[mark: –?]

The trumpeters sound, booming up from the invisible valleys below. They all know that there are better places to be.

‘Can’t you make another hole?’ asks Zybes, wiping rain off his face.

‘A hole?’ Oll asks, frowning.

‘A cut… With that knife of yours? This isn’t a good fix to be in, is it? Don’t pretend it is.’

Oll Persson shrugs.

‘It’s not as bad a fix as Calth.’

There is something else he was going to say, but he bites it off. The trumpeters sound again – ominous, like cosmic punctuation.

‘I can’t just cut where I like,’ Oll says, making a motion with his hand as if the athame is in his grip. ‘It doesn’t work like that. I have to be in the right place, and make the right cut. Places touch each other in the oddest ways. I cut through the skin of one and we’re into another.’

They are all looking at him.

‘It’s complicated. It’s not even an exact science. Someone taught me the rudiments a long time ago.’

‘Who?’ asks Zybes.

‘How long ago?’ asks Katt, which is a better question.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ replies Oll, not answering either of them. ‘The point is, it’s not an exact science. And the someone who taught me the rudiments… also told me it was a terrible thing ever to have to do it, that it was something no one would choose to do unless there was no other choice.’

‘Because lives depended on it?’ asks Bale.

Oll shakes his head.

‘No,’ he says, ‘much more important than that.’

He starts walking again, crunching up the scarp in the dying light. He knows he has said too much, and that he has discouraged them. The veteran soldier in him – in fact, there are several veteran soldiers in him – knows better than that. In a ‘fix’ like this, a decent commander does not spit on morale. He cannot take back what he has already said, but he could cheer them by saying more, cheer them or distract them.

‘The winds,’ he says. ‘That’s the key to it. That’s the key to any voyage, as any seafarer will tell you. You follow the winds, follow where they blow.’

He glances back at them.

‘Not these winds,’ he says, raising a palm to feel the cold mountain air run between his fingers. ‘I don’t mean how the air moves. I mean the primordial winds, the winds of the empyrean, the winds that keep the ever-ocean tossing and thrashing.’

He starts walking again.

‘I use the Romanii names,’ he says, ‘because they’re the ones I was taught. Right now, we’re following Africus, following where that wind blows. It’s a south-wester. That’s why the Romanii called it Africus. But the Grekans, they knew it as Lips, and the Franks, they called it Vuestestroni.’

He looks back at them again.

‘See?’ he asks.

Krank raises his hand, like a child in a scholam class.

‘Yes?’ asks Oll.

‘My question would be, what are Romaniis?’ says Krank.

Oll sighs. He wonders if they have time for him to answer that, and he doubts it, because they do not have any time for anything at all.

‘Never mind,’ he says.

‘So… we follow this wind, this Akrifus,’ says Bale Rane.

‘Africus,’ Katt corrects.

‘Yeah, that,’ says Bale. ‘We follow this wind to… where?’

‘To the place where we make the next cut. To the next place where the skin between worlds is thin.’

‘Providing the trumpeters don’t catch us first?’ asks Krank. He laughs, a piping ha-ha-ha that the breeze lifts away.

‘Pretty much,’ says Oll.

[mark: –?]

They sleep under a fold of rock near the summit of a ridge. Oll sits watch. He wants to push on, but he can tell how tired they are. They need food. They need water that does not taste like blood. They need sleep. They need a good, clean cut that will take them away from the trumpeters.

Oll does not think of them as trumpeters. Last time he met anything like them, creatures of a similar breed, it was multiple lifespans ago in the Cyclades, and they were called sirens. It is just another word, no better than trumpeters, no worse. The only thing Oll knew then, and Iason agreed at the time, was that the creatures did not come from the Cyclades. They did not belong there, no more than the trumpeters belong here. They were from an elsewhere that had nothing to do with this world or any other. They were like a damp or a rot that had leaked through a wall from outside.

The noises they made, they would drive a man mad if he had to listen to them for long. They would make him forget himself, make him forget–

[mark: –?]

Oll wakes up. He does not know how long he has been out. An hour? Just a few minutes? The others are still dead to the world. It is as cold as a tomb’s vault under the rock. It is dark, and there is no sound except the pattering of the rain.

He had been dreaming. The remnants of the dream are still hooked in his mind, like splinters in skin: hard, fresh sunlight on moving water; light dappling; the sea green like glass. The ship is a proud ship and will be remembered for so long that it becomes a myth. There is an eye painted on the prow, a common mark in those days. All the galley warships in the Middle Sea had them.

There is laughter from the deck. Oll feels the hot sun on his bare, tanned back. He can hear Orfeus playing the sort of melody that would keep out the noises of the sirens.

It is a good life in that dream, that memory. They were better days, a better adventure than the one he has embarked upon. This new, unmarked journey, knifing a route from world to world, it will not be remembered. It will not pass into myth like that long sail to Colchis and back. This journey will not even be remembered long enough to be forgotten.

It might be more important, though. It might be more important than any adventure he has undertaken in his life.

His lives.

Oll realises he was thinking of it as his last journey, his last adventure. He realises he is expecting it to be the final exploit of his life, the closing act, one last brave outing in the twilight of his time. Except, by any means of measurement, he is supposed to live forever; unless some agency stops his life.

So, why is he thinking so fatalistically?

The last splinters of the dream are still there: the eye on the prow of the boat, staring and hard, beautiful and kohl-edged, like Medea’s enchanting eyes, but terrible too. A single eye. These days, that mark means another thing. He saw it in the last dream he had, the dream where John came to him and showed him Terra on fire. That cursed eye is why this will be his last adventure.

‘Damn you, John,’ he whispers.

He gets up, rubbing his hands, his arms. They have to get moving, push on. They have been down too long. They are getting too cold, too damp, losing too much core temperature.

And the trumpeters have gone quiet. That is not a good sign.

‘Get up!’ he says, trying to rouse them. His hands are numb. It is so dark.

‘Get up, come on!’ he cries. ‘We have to push on.’

No one is stirring, except Graft, who activates at the sound of Oll’s voice.

‘Trooper Persson?’

‘Wake them all up. We have to move,’ Oll says.

Something skitters on the stones out in the darkness.

Oll’s hands are numb, but he takes up his rifle.

‘Get up!’ he cries. Still no one stirs. He aims in the air and fires a shot.

‘Wake up!’ he says.

Now they have.

[mark: –?]

They are all cold and wet, and scared, woken from unfriendly dreams to an even unfriendlier reality. Katt is crying, but it is the cold not the stress. Krank is tearful too, because he has had enough of it all and it is nasty. Oll urges them up the slope, over the back of the ridge.

There are things on the scarp behind them. Trumpeters, Oll guesses. Even trumpeters know that it is sometimes most productive to stay quiet. The damn sirens knew that too.

The ridge is a black hump ahead, suggesting better light beyond. Dawn, maybe? They crest it, and see a paleness, a pale blueness, in the sky behind. They go over the ridge. Oll has Bale lead the way, and takes the tail spot himself, swinging back to watch for things pursuing them. Parts of the darkness move, but not so much he can make a target.

‘God help us,’ he says. He does not doubt God’s plan, because he is a man of faith, but sometimes he thinks God has put them up to all of this. All the holy books, all of them from every creed he has ever studied, they are full of stories about souls being made to suffer and endure, just so they can attain salvation.

This is his time to be Job, his time to be Sisyphus, his time to be Prometheus, to be Odin, to be Osiris. This is his time to endure.

What is more, it is not even his own salvation he is suffering for.

Oll thinks he should not have to be tested any more, not after the life he has led.

They go down the slope and onto the back of the next scarp. It is much lighter; a pre-dawn glow makes the sky ahead of them translucent like smoked glass. Oll has a sudden, bright feeling that they are close to where they need to be. It is like seeing a single star low in the sky on a lightless night and realising there is something to navigate by.

He glances back. There are trumpeters on the ridge behind them. They are huge bipeds, swollen and heavy, with long counterbalance tails held up, swishing the air behind them. Their throats rise into heads like floral blooms or pitcher plants, like fleshy mechanisms that part and extend and broaden. They begin to make the noises again at the dawn sky. The volume is incredible. The strange, wet flanges and crests of the heads move and bunch to modulate the expelled notes.

‘Push on!’ Oll yells at the others.

The noises make them falter – the noises and the sight of the things along the ridge. Oll knows that look. Soon they will not be able to think. Where is Orfeus when he is needed? Some beeswax, even?

He plants the stock of his old rifle against his shoulder and fires at the trumpeters. He sees them whinny and flinch as his shots spark against their leathery, feathered flanks. He does not think he can kill them. He just wants to make some noise. Bale, Krank and Zybes turn and start shooting too, following Oll’s lead. Soon, four las-weapons are cracking away up the ridge at the trumpeters. Zybes cannot hit anything, not even horrors that big, but Bale and Krank, who’ve never seen actual service, are fresh out of Founding Basic and have been gun-schooled. Their shots are clean, decent, neat.

It is not the hits that Oll wants, anyway, it is the noise. The squeal and crack of four infantry weapons up close could drown out, or at least disrupt, the effect of the trumpeting. Make a noise, like Orfeus did.

They keep shooting. After a few minutes, some of the trumpeters turn, belly-heavy, and waddle out of sight behind the ridge, stung too many times by the annoying las-shots to want to stay. The others follow.

Like cattle, Oll thinks. Like cattle, turning away as a herd, a collective. The hooting dies away behind the ridge.

He cannot shake the thought of them as cattle. Cattle suggest grazers, herbivores, and that suggests a darker possibility. It suggests something the trumpeting is supposed to keep at bay.

It suggests a predator.

[mark: –?]

Oll cuts a hole, and they step through. It is hot on the far side. Dry heat, like an oven, a bright sky that looks like it has been painted blue and then sandblasted. They are on a road, a dry and dusty track.

They walk for about ten minutes, long enough for Oll to realise he knows where they are.

He sees the first of the dead tanks, a burned out T-62, and knows they will see a lot more if they keep walking. In the space of one long, hot day right at the burned stump of M2, the regional despot lost a mechanised brigade and an armoured brigade. One hundred and fifty tanks and hard-shell vehicles.

‘Why here?’ he asks out loud.

‘Who are you asking?’ replies Zybes.

‘What are you asking?’ asks Katt.

Tank shells and metal wrecks line the road and the wadi beyond. The air smells of smoke and burned oil. Oll wants answers, but there is no one to ask. There is nothing but dry bones.

Zybes calls out. They go to him.

There is a trailer on its side in the ditch. There are plastic jerry cans of water, warm in the sun, food packs, bedrolls. Whatever was towing the trailer was hit so hard only lumps of it remain.

This is why.

They are dry already, and warmed, from the sun. They load up with the supplies they can carry, loading the water cans onto Graft.

This is why.

‘Good luck we came here,’ says Krank.

Oll is looking at something.

‘Someone’s luck,’ he replies, not turning from what he has seen.

He is staring at the remains of another battle tank. The treads are gone and the wheel fairings are bent. The hull’s blackened and scarred, and the turret has been half ripped off like a can that has had its lid gouged away.

There is a mark on the side, just under the 18th Mechanised emblem. It could just be a curious little shrapnel scratch, because it is damned near indecipherable, but it was scored into the metal after the hull burned, showing bare steel through the caking of soot.

It is a word – a name maybe, but not a human one.

M’kar.

What does that name signify?

And who thought to inscribe it there?

[mark: –?]

They stay for a few hours in the sun, moving along the dead road between the corpses of war machines. Oll checks his map and his compass, and discerns the next place.

‘Not far this time,’ he says.

‘You were here, weren’t you?’ Katt asks him.

Oll wonders whether he should answer, and then he nods.

‘Where is this?’

‘They called it 73 Easting,’ he says. ‘The greatest armoured battle of its time, they reckoned.’

‘Which time was that?’ she asks.

He shrugs.

‘Which side were you on?’ she asks.

‘Does it matter?’ he replies.

‘You must have been on the side of the winners,’ she decides.

‘Why?’

‘Because you’re alive and all of these machines are dead.’

‘Okay,’ he nods. Okay means something different now. He looks at her, squinting in the desert light.

‘Just so you know; my being alive doesn’t have much to do with the outcome of any battle. I’ve lived through things on all sides, one time or another. My life isn’t predicated on victory. I’m just fond of it. And I’ll chase after it when I can.’

‘What is your life predicated on, then?’ she asks.

‘Just… being alive,’ he says. ‘I don’t seem to be able to lose the habit, and it’s hard to take from me.’

He looks back at her. Her eyes are dark-lined and big. They remind him of someone. Medea, of course. That crazy witch. So beautiful, and full of so very many difficult questions, just like this girl.

‘It’s hard to take from me, but not impossible,’ he says.

‘You’re some kind of immortal,’ she says.

‘Some kind, I suppose. We refer to ourselves as Perpetuals.’

‘We?’ she asks.

‘There are a small number of us. Always have been.’

‘Should you be telling me this?’ she asks.

Should I? Oll asks himself. I’ve never really spoken of it to anyone, not anyone who wasn’t like me. But I’m standing in my own distant past, in a place that no longer exists, and I’ve got a long way to go before I can rest. A very long way. I’m telling the secrets of ancient Terra to a girl who won’t understand them, and who will never be found or known, and certainly will never be believed.

Under this blue sky, in this desert wind, looking into eyes that should have belonged to a witch from Colchis, or at least been drawn on the prow of a Cyclades warship, what secrets am I really giving away?

‘It’s okay,’ he tells her. ‘I think I can trust you.’

‘What kind are you?’ she asks.

‘What?’

‘What kind of immortal?’

‘Oh,’ Oll says. He has never been required to answer that before. ‘The ordinary kind,’ he says.

[mark: –?]

When he cuts the hole this time, just before dusk, the desert wind gets up at 73 Easting, and the dry bones in the dead hulls start to rattle and fidget. The dead are sensing something, and it is not Oll and his companions.

Oll knows that the dead do not feel much. They are only sensitive to a few things. Things that do not have human names.

They leave through the hole to the sound of dry joints grating, and ribs fluttering, and teeth grinding.

The unease of the dead.

[mark: –?]

They sleep the next night in a wood, in the rain. They make a shelter using canvas rolls they brought from the trailer, and eat some ration packs. Artillery thumps and drums in the distance. There is a war going on over the hill.

Oll knows he is being played with. It is a pine wood, a familiar scent. He is not sure, but he is pretty convinced he knows this place too. Is this benevolent guidance, or someone leading him into a trap?

Most likely the same person, either way.

Damn you, John.

Oll gets up early, and leaves them sleeping. If he remembers it right, there is the end of an old communication trench not three hundred paces from the line of the wood. He can smell the river, which means that Verdun is to the west.

The trench is right where he remembered it, right where he and the other men dug it. It is abandoned, slightly overgrown. A shift in shelling caused a tactical displacement, and this part of the line got emptied out. Small blue weed-flowers nod. Grass sprouts between tumbled sandbags. Bulwark armour-plates are rusting. The trench floor decking is sodden and unmaintained. He can smell coffee grounds and nettles, and latrines. The bright brass of spent shell cases litters the ditch and the sandbag line.

Oll follows the jink in the zigzag trench under a low cover-top. He walks slowly, warily, carrying a rifle that will not be made for almost another thirty thousand years. There is the down-step into the officer’s dugout. He remembers it all, as if it was yesterday.

In the dugout, there is a small desk made from a fruit box: a coffee pot, a stove, a dirty enamel mug. There is a dark stain on the back wall. Someone left in a hurry, someone who was hurt.

On the desk, there is a log book. He opens it.

It is a repurposed civilian diary, locally manufactured. The paper is cream, the numbers and the ruled lines all printed in the faintest blue. The diary was intended for a year ‘1916’, a date so antique that he can barely make sense of it.

The first half is filled in with neat handwriting, ink pen, well-schooled. He wonders if it is one of his own hands, though he remembers the place so well that he would think he would know.

It is not his. There is only one word written in the diary, over and over again.

M’kar.

[mark: –?]

‘I can’t stay long,’ he says.

Oll turns, bringing the rifle up. John is in the trench outside the dugout entrance, leaning against the back wall. He is wearing a bodyglove and dusty overalls.

‘Damn you,’ says Oll, letting his aim slacken, feeling stupid for being surprised.

‘You got it, I see,’ John says, nodding at the athame wrapped up and hooked in Oll’s belt.

‘It’s really that important?’

‘It really is,’ says John.

‘You should be doing this, not me,’ says Oll.

‘Oh, come on,’ says John. ‘You could hardly stay on Calth. It was a friendly warning, to help you get out of there. Besides, I’ve got my hands full. I’ve got a job of my own to do.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Don’t ask and I won’t tell.’

‘I thought this errand you had me running was the really important one?’ asks Oll.

‘It is. It honestly is. But my job is important too and frankly, you were in the right place. I’m on Cabal business, Oll. They sign my paychecks, you know that.’

‘That’s not a phrase I’ve heard in a long time,’ says Oll. He almost smiles.

‘The Cabal watches what I do. I can’t be everywhere.’

‘So I’m not on Cabal business?’ asks Oll.

‘No, you’re not. I shouldn’t even be talking to you.’

For the first time in a long time, Oll sees a look in his old friend’s eyes. It is a look that says he is trying to do the right thing, even though the universe is out to make sure he does not. It is the first time that Oll Persson has pitied John Grammaticus in a long, long while.

‘Look, Oll,’ says John. ‘I’m going to try to be there, when you arrive. I’m going to try my damnedest. But–’

‘But what?’

‘I’ve got this presentiment, Oll. A dark gloom.’

‘That’s the way your mind works, John.’

‘No, Oll, this isn’t a psyker thing. It’s like… just knowing something in your bones. I think I may be running out of road at long last. I think this may be my last adventure.’

‘They’ll just bring you back,’ says Oll. ‘The Cabal will just bring you back like they always do.’ He says it fast, almost like an accusation. He says it to cover what he is thinking. Why do we both feel the same thing? Why do we both feel like this will be the last adventure for us? The universe is in trouble when Perpetuals feel mortal.

‘I thought you said this would be pretty bad for everyone,’ Oll says. ‘On Calth, you told me that. You said it was make or break.’

John nods.

‘It is. I meant it. I just… I mean, personally speaking, I’ve got things to do and… I’ve got a choice to make, Oll, and I don’t think I like either of the alternatives. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I wish I could do this instead of you, and not put this responsibility on your shoulders, but I can’t. I want you to know I appreciate what you’re doing, Oll. I honestly think you’re a better man for this job than I am.’

Oll does not reply.

‘I’ll try to be there when you arrive,’ John says. ‘But if I’m not. If I’m… late… I think you’ll know what to do.’

‘What have you got me into, John?’

‘You’ll be fine.’

‘John, you’ve been guiding me this far… the weapons, the food, the locations. All very apt and ironic. The typical Grammaticus flair for the theatrical.’

John shrugs, snorts.

‘You’re trying to smuggle me along, aren’t you?’ Oll asks. ‘Take me on an indirect route. Take me the long way around so I’ll be harder to track and find.’

Oll steps out of the dugout into the early sunlight to stand face to face with John.

‘That’s why it had to be me, isn’t it?’ he asks. ‘God, I see that now. I’m not a psyker like you. When I move through the warp, I’m not as visible. You’d show up like a beacon. That’s why I’m doing this dirty work for you.’

John does not answer.

‘What’s M’kar, John?’

‘You shouldn’t have brought the others with you,’ John replies.

‘Why?’

‘They won’t make it.’

‘They certainly wouldn’t have made it where they were,’ replies Oll.

‘It would have been quicker. Kinder.’

‘They’ll make it if I make it.’

John nods. It is not reassuring.

‘What’s M’kar, John?’

‘Come on…’

‘What does it mean? Is it a name?’

John looks towards the river.

‘Time’s out of joint for us, Oll. Nothing’s in the right order. M’kar is its name.’

‘Not a human name.’

‘No. I don’t know if it’s called M’kar yet, or if it will be called it one day. The warp doesn’t work in step with time as we perceive it.’

He looks at Oll with sad eyes.

‘The Foe won’t let you just walk away from Calth, not with that dagger. It’s sent something after you. That something is called M’kar. It helps that you’re taking a roundabout route, Oll, and it really helps you’re not psykana and glow in the dark like I do. Yes, that’s why you’re doing this instead of me. Yes, okay? I admit it.’

‘But even so–?’

‘Even so, it’s coming. M’kar is coming. You watch your back. The only real help I can give you is to warn you to keep away from it for long enough.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means it’s needed for another task too, so it can’t keep looking for you forever. Keep going, keep down, stay out of sight, and it will eventually have to give up and turn back.’

‘Why?’

‘It has a destiny of its own. Just watch your back, Oll.’

‘Give me more help than that, John! Damn it! I deserve more than that! How do I fight this thing?’

‘I can’t, I’m sorry,’ says John. He looks genuinely apologetic. ‘I’ve got my hands full. I can’t–’

‘You’re not even here, are you?’ asks Oll, realising. ‘Where are you really?’

‘The wrong side of Ultramar,’ says John.

Oll sighs.

‘So if you’re not here, I’m not either, am I?’

[mark: –?]

He wakes up, in the shelter, in the pine wood, just before dawn. Rain taps on the canvas. The others are asleep.

He knows there is no point heading down to the trench. John will not be there, and Oll has already learned everything the trench can tell him.

It is time to push on.

[mark: –?]

They enter the dead city. No one knows when it was or where it was, not even Oll. The city is made of a dry white stone like chalk, but not chalk. Its surfaces are beginning to turn to powder at the merest touch. Age does that. The sky over the towering city is the blue side of violet, and there are eight bright stars dotted in it. When the wind lifts, as it does now and again, sighs of white dust trail from the sills and corners of the white walls like vapour: a city slowly being erased.

It is an empty place of white buildings with empty doorways. There is no furniture, no sign of decoration or possessions, no sign of the long dead. Oll thinks that whatever used to be in these buildings has long since resolved into dust, along with the inhabitants. Only the silent towers remain, the chambers, the vacant stairways.

After walking for an hour or two, they realise two things. One is that the city has no limits. As they move past towers and walls and rooftops, they sight further towers and walls and rooftops beyond.

The second thing is that the emptiness is unnerving. They feel anxious, though there is no sound except their footsteps and the sigh of the wind, and no movement except the faint streamers of white dust peeling off the edges of walls and doorways.

When they speak to each other, their voices echo from the surrounding streets, but not immediately. Each echo takes a few seconds to return, just a little too long for it to feel comfortable or natural, and each echo returns as a perfect facsimile of the original words, not a sound hollowed by acoustics.

For this reason, they quickly stop speaking.

Oll stops and checks his compass. They have found another cutting place, and by no means too soon. As he takes out the athame and prepares to make the incision, an echo comes to them along the dead, white streets.

The echo is a word, and the word is, ‘M’kar.’

None of them had spoken.

[mark: –?]

The humidity on the far side is intense. They feel it coming through the slit before they step across. Beads of sweat immediately manifest on their pale skins, gleaming like diamonds.

A rainforest awaits them. It has been waiting forever. It is an endless jade twilight of water-logged glades, and they are knee-deep in bright green murk. Graft struggles to maintain traction and stability. Sunlight sparkles and shafts down through the canopy. Moss as thick as emerald velvet coats the tree trunks and half-sunken logs. There is a throat-tightening smell of rot.

Winged insects – each one looking like a watchmaker’s intricate masterpiece – whir past them, hover, and then speed on.

It is another place that Oll does not know. He wonders if this is a sign that their route is less guided now, more random. Or is it a sign that it is becoming all the more concealed? Which forsaken outworld is this? What rimworld hell? His sweating palms shift the rifle nervously. The rainforest is a bad place for a fight. He has never liked jungle warfare.

They keep stopping to help Graft free himself, sometimes having to lever him out of the ooze with blackened lengths of log.

‘I don’t like this,’ Krank remarks. It is matter-of-fact. Oll wonders if the young soldier means the physical discomfort of the wet heat and the toil, or simply the location. The attitude applies convincingly to both.

Then the place falls silent.

It is a chilling thing. Until the silence, they had not realised the rainforest was so full of noises: the buzz of insects, the splash of water, the crack of undergrowth, the chirp of amphibians, the whistle of birds.

Only when it stops, when it all stops at a stroke, do they recognise it by its distressing absence.

They all freeze, listening, willing sounds to return.

Oll holds up a hand, and turns slowly, training his rifle. His movement makes the very slightest slooshing sound in the water around his shins.

Something rushes them from the stand of trees behind them. It is man-sized and man-shaped, though its legs are proportionally shorter and its arms proportionally longer than human standard. It is an ape-thing, scrawny and lean. It has no eyes. Its head is entirely a gaping mouth of carnivore teeth, lips pulled back.

It shrieks as it charges. Water sprays. Katt screams. It bounds over a half-sunken log, leaping, clawing paws outstretched.

Oll fires. Three shots smack into its torso and bowl it backwards into the green soup with a clumsy, slapping splash. Thrashing, it sinks.

‘What in the name of–’ Zybes starts to say, but there is not time. There is another ape-thing charging them, and another, and then a fourth. They come pounding out of the topaz gloom, shrieking, unmindful of the fate that greeted the first of them.

‘Rapid fire!’ Oll commands, shooting. Multiple targets. He cannot take them all. He needs the others. Krank is fumbling with his rifle, his frantic hands caught in the strap. Bale fires, winging one of the creatures enough to slow it, and then aims to kill it. Zybes misses everything including tree trunks.

Oll has shot two more, both clean kills, but other ape-things are appearing, a half-dozen, a dozen, all bounding and charging. Only he and Bale hit anything. The shrieking wounded drop hard into the murk, but others take their place. Their teeth are yellow bone, their maws red. One gets so close that Oll barely gets his shot in.

Krank has finally lined up. His firing is messy, but he adds to the stopping power, dropping one, and then a second.

Katt has taken out her pistol. Bracing it with two hands, she shoots alongside them, and makes hits. She understands the extremity of the situation. She winces every time the creatures shriek.

Zybes makes a kill, but it is a rare success. He is simply not a natural marksman. One of the ape-things gets too close to him, past his ability to hit it, and reaches out to tear his throat out.

Graft grabs it by the neck with a manipulator arm, lifting and hurling it away into the trees like a straw doll.

Oll shoots and brings down the last of the ape-things. No more come. Silence falls again, apart from their rasping breaths and the tap of falling leaves and bark fragments.

Then the noise of the rainforest resumes as if it had never gone away.

Oll breathes out a long breath, and wipes the sweat from his brow. He has finally realised where they are, when. Some kind of intuition has informed him, some kind of deep-time memory.

This is Terra, before the rise of man. The things that attacked them are things that might one day evolve into men.

Except these, these corpses floating face down in the green soup, show how early the taint of the warp touched man’s home world.

Oll does not speak to his companions about any of this.

‘Push on,’ he tells them instead.

[mark: –?]

The compass stops working. The pendulum hangs heavy and refuses to swing.

‘We’re lost,’ says Krank, watching Oll’s work.

‘The word is becalmed,’ Oll snaps, but it does not matter what the word is. He has never attempted this kind of journey before, so he does not know if the problem with the compass is to be expected or not. Nothing he has ever been told or taught about the art of travelling this way has prepared him for the idea that the compass might stop working. He tries to cover his tension. He tries to reassure himself with his own analogy: becalmed. At sea, sometimes, the winds drop away and all is still, and then there is nothing anyone can do and nowhere to go, until the wind comes back.

That is all. That is all that is happening. The winds of the empyrean have simply eased off for a moment, their breath spent. All is still. They will pick back up, soon as you like. They will pick back up, and the pilgrims will be on their way again.

‘Everything’s okay,’ Oll tells them. ‘Everything’s going to be okay.’

They are in some autumnal place. The sky is dark like smudged charcoal, and the distant hills loom, brown with gorse and sedge. Black birds circle in the distance. The surrounding thorn wood, bared of leaves, is an endless thicket of spikes and claws, an organic cage. The thorns and twigs are all pale and cold, like bone. Small birds or insects have speared red berries on some thorn spikes so they can be gnawed and pecked at. The juice drips like blood.

Oll keeps working at the chart and compass, rattling the rose in its little, silver skull-box, rubbing the pendulum weight between his palms, as though communicating body heat may somehow activate it. They remain dead, inert. The others move away from him in different directions, scouting the area. Everything is quiet apart from the sporadic chatter of birds.

What if we’ve made a wrong cut? he wonders. What if they have stepped off the wind routes and now cannot find their way back? What if he made an incision in error, and they are marooned on God-knows-where in God-knows-when?

How can any place, any place in the cosmos, not be touched by the empyrean winds?

The analogy suddenly seems so banal. Even when the winds have dropped and the ship is becalmed, a compass will still spin towards magnetic north, and if there is no wind, a man puts his back into it and rows. He rows, like a bastard, to the beat of the stroke-drum. He had learned that on the voyage to Colchis. That was when Colchis was still a kingdom on the Black Sea, not the home world of the treacherous XVII.

‘We’re going to have to row,’ Oll says out loud, but the others have moved too far away to hear. He gets up, looking for them, and sees their shadows moving through the thorn wood.

‘Come back!’ he calls. Someone answers him, but he cannot make out the words.

Damn them. They are being stupid. It is not safe. Oll knows that with certainty. He knows it suddenly, as suddenly as the tingle of cold at the base of his spine. That is not just the cool woodland air chilling the sweat there. It is a hint, a sign, like the way the root of his tongue used to itch before a big fight, or his hands used to tremble when someone was going to die.

He felt none of those things on Calth, because Calth had happened so suddenly. The doom came masked, until the very last moment, by the darkest treachery.

But here, wherever ‘here’ is, doom is not coming suddenly. It is stalking them. It is drawing close, a relentless predator tracking them, keeping steady, keeping low, just beyond the line of sight. He knows the predator’s name, and it is not a human name.

M’kar.

It is a thing sent to end them, a thing sent to take back the blade, a thing sent by the malicious deities of the warp to ensure that their plans would not be upset.

Oll feels he ought to be flattered. He is a Perpetual, and such beings are far from common. Nevertheless, they are insignificant in the universal pattern. Perpetuals do not upset the plans of the Warped Ones. A renegade Perpetual, on the run with a handful of humans… that is hardly a threat against schemes that encompass light-centuries of space and epochs of the universe.

Yet M’kar has been sent. Flattered, that is what he ought to feel.

Oll hefts his lasrifle, getting it set, as though a lasrifle will be of any assistance when the time comes. He wonders how far off the predator is – a cut or two away, or already in this world, out there in the sedge beyond the thorn wood?

What was it John said? It’s needed for another task too, so it can’t keep looking for you forever. It has a destiny of its own.

Typical gnomic Grammaticus, but the basic advice is sound. Go the long way round, stay low, keep out of sight. You cannot fight it, so wait for it to run out of time and give up.

Yes, sound advice. The trouble is, Oll knows too well, that it has already got their scent. M’kar is tracking them.

It will be a daemon thing, with a non-human name like that. How is it tracking them? The life-glow of the dagger? It is not as if Oll’s a psykana, lighting the way. Oll’s never had the sight, or any of the other gifts that the Perpetuals often have: no sight, no mindgloss, no telekine or pyrokine.

All he has are the tics and twinges, the chill on his back, the itch in his tongue, the hand-tremble. His left eyelid used to flutter when there was a psykana nearby. It used to happen all the time when he was near Medea on that ship. That is why he knew before Iason that the Colchis witch had real gifts, and was not the usual brand of yowling, histrionic soothsayer.

As if on cue, Oll’s left eyelid twitches.

He freezes.

Hands tight on the gun, he waits for the stink of the warp, waits for M’kar, whatever form M’kar takes, to erupt through the thorn wood and finish them.

He waits for M’kar to finish them and make this place their communal grave, unmourned and unmarked.

The dusk continues to close, however, and the birds continue to circle.

He turns. The others are still wandering around, exploring, but Katt is right beside him. She came back when he called.

His eyelid flutters.

‘Oh god,’ he murmurs.

It is not just her dark eyes that remind him of the witch he knew all those centuries ago. He understands why she is quiet and reserved, a loner, an outsider. He understands why she came to do piecework on his farm, like a runaway looking for work in return for lodging. He understands where her knowing questions come from.

He is pretty sure that even she does not know what she is, that she has never been assessed, never been recruited by the Black Ships. She is a latent, touched just enough to give her a life of sorrow and trouble, a life of not fitting in, a life of depression and of not being understood.

She is touched just enough to make her shine like a little lamp in the night.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asks him. ‘Are we okay?’

She smiles at her clever use of the unfamiliar word.

‘We need to find shelter,’ he says. ‘There’s a darkness coming on.’

He wonders, seriously wonders, if he should kill her. Then he wonders at himself for even thinking it.

‘M’kar,’ she says.

‘What?’

‘That word. The echo in that city.’ Katt looks at him with Medea’s big dark eyes. ‘Ever since I heard it, I haven’t been able to forget it, as if the word is poison, filling my mind up.’

Oll lowers his rifle and touches the wrapped athame at his waist. That is what it wants. That is what they are not allowed to have. That is what they must not deliver.

Something occurs to him.

They do have a weapon.

If the athame is so powerful, if it is so precious that the Warped Ones sent a daemon to recover it, then it is a serious damn thing. A serious, serious damn thing. It cuts a path through the warped universe. What else might it cut?

The thought gives him a glimmer of hope, and Katt, at his side, feels that hope and smiles at it, without even realising why she is doing it.

Then the hope goes.

The root of his tongue itches suddenly. His hands tremble.

There is going to be a battle. A battle and a death.

[mark: –?]

What sun there was has gone. The sky is full of banked grey clouds running in the wind, and the breeze makes the thorn cages around them creak and rattle. They feel the wind on their faces, but there is still no wind to stir Oll’s compass.

‘We can’t move from here,’ Oll tells his accidental pilgrims. ‘We can’t go back or forwards. We have to stay here, and that means we might have to make our stand here.’

‘Our stand?’ asks Zybes.

‘This is no place for a fight,’ says Bale Rane. The boy has not seen much war, only been schooled in it, but he is not stupid. A ragged tract of hillside scrub, thickly wooded by autumn thorn and bounded by gorse? It is no place for a fight indeed. If they had an hour, they could trek up the hill to the ring of standing stones, maybe dig in up there.

They do not have an hour. Oll’s tongue tells him that. So does his eyelid, and his hands, and the cold sweat on his back. So does the look in Katt’s eyes.

‘Where do we find cover?’ Krank asks, swallowing hard. He flicks a hand at the nearest branch of brittle, dry thorn.

‘This? This stuff? This won’t stop las-rounds! There’s no shelter! Do we entrench or–’

‘Shhh,’ says Oll.

‘Where do we find cover?’ Krank insists.

‘It won’t be las-fire,’ says Oll.

‘What will it be?’ asks Zybes.

‘M’kar,’ says Katt, unable not to.

‘What does she mean?’ asks Krank, hysteria in his voice.

‘Stay calm,’ Oll tells him. He tells them all. ‘A bad thing is coming our way. We have given it the slip so far, but it’s found us at last.’

‘What bad thing?’ Krank asks.

‘Something from Calth,’ murmurs Bale, understanding. ‘One of those things that came to Calth. Or one that was on its way…’

Oll nods. Krank screws up his face, lets out a squeaking moan, and starts to cry.

‘How did it find us?’ Bale asks.

Oll cannot help looking at Katt.

‘We just got unlucky,’ he replies. ‘We did well for a long time, but we got unlucky. So now we make the best of things.’

‘Where do we find cover from a thing like that?’ Krank wails.

Oll taps his chest.

‘In here,’ he says. ‘Back in the days of faith, that’s how we kept the daemons out. Belief. Strength. Fortitude.’

‘Oll the Pious,’ laughs Zybes without humour.

‘Piety is a virtue,’ Oll nods. ‘I’ve always had faith, right from the moment of the anointing of my newborn head in Nineveh. Always had it. Always kept it, even when all the churches were swept away. Swept away for being anachronistic. I believe in a higher power, and that’s what we’re facing now. Another power, anyway. Higher, lower, other. Not a human thing. Not a mortal thing.’

‘You’re not mortal,’ says Katt.

‘But I’m human. This is god and daemons stuff, and in the midst of that, faith is all you can hold onto. I’ve always had faith. That’s why he never liked me, and never brought me into the trusted circle.’

‘Who?’ asks Bale.

Oll shakes his head.

‘Doesn’t matter. I’ve always kept faith. And I’ve never tried to push it on anyone. Never evangelised. Well, not for a long time anyway. So I’m not asking you to do anything strange.’

He thumps his trembling hand against his heart again.

‘Just believe. Believe in whatever you like. Believe in the Emperor, or in yourself, or in whatever light you see in your dreams, or the solidity of the ground beneath your feet. Believe in me, for all I care. Just believe.’

‘We have to do something else, Trooper Persson,’ says Graft. ‘I cannot believe. There has to be purpose. There has to be activity.’

‘He’s right,’ says Bale.

‘Okay,’ says Oll. ‘Okay, then we sing.’

‘We sing?’ Krank splutters.

‘Yeah, we sing together. Strengthens the mind. I’ll teach you a song. A hymn. In the old days, the faithful sang together to keep their spirits up and keep the daemons and the darkness out. We’ll do that.’

He teaches them the words. Just a verse or two, O Lord and Master of Mankind…

They start to sing, reluctantly. They fumble the words, forget a few, mangle the tune. Graft cannot hold anything but the one drone note. Oll keeps going at it, over and over, repeat and repeat, checking over his shoulder all the while, checking the tingle in his hands and the twitch of his eyelid.

That is all hymns and prayers were, back in the day, when real daemons walked the earth. They were utterances of protection, articulations of defiance. They joined people in the act of singing, joined their strengths, their beliefs. They made faith a weapon, if only a passive weapon – a shield at least. Or, indeed, at most.

Even for those who did not believe like Oll did, there were other benefits. Joined in singing, people were joined in activity. They were reminded that they were not alone. They were connected and bolstered. It gave them something to do, something to focus their minds on instead of fear. Last thing Oll needed was anyone panicking.

And sometimes singing is just noise, and it protects, like Orfeus protected them.

‘Keep going,’ Oll says. ‘Keep singing. Get to the end and start again. Keep singing.’

He turns and goes to the edge of the thorn thicket. Behind him, they are singing as loud as they can. He scans the brown sedge, and the hollows of the land that are already shaded with night. How many thousand battlefields has he surveyed this way, watching for the enemy to show himself? The land here reminds him of the moors beyond the Wall, when he was patrolling the parapets, watching for the painted men. It reminds him of the rolling grasses of the Altai, watching for the approach of the Sarmatian riders. It reminds him–

His hands tremble.

M’kar is not down there at all.

M’kar is here, right at the edge of the thorn cage, looking in.

[mark: –?]

The thorns catch fire.

A stretch of the thorn brush three or four metres broad bursts into bright orange flame, burns up like paper, and spills into ash, leaving a gap big enough to drive a transport through.

Oll backs up, his hands trembling on the grip of his rifle.

It is dark out here, beyond the gap in the white thorn wall, as though a piece of midnight has arrived early. But there are eyes in it. He saw them looking in, ancient eyes for an ancient, feral mind, yellow slits with black slash irises. Glaring eyes. Evil eyes.

Eyes that stared forever from the prow of a ship.

Cursed eyes that mean the end of everything.

Oll backs away. He ignores the twitch and the itch and the tremble. He ignores the lump in his swallow, and the tears in his eyes.

In his long lives, he has seen plenty. He has never seen anything like this, though.

The daemon enters the thorn wood through the gap it has burned in the thicket. It bubbles in, like fluid, spilling over the boundary and collecting in the clumped soil. It is like tar. It smokes in the darkness. All Oll can see is the spreading wet stain of it on the ground, growing like a shadow. There is a bulk of it above, a monstrous, monolithic shape, a slice of darkness cut from pure night, super-heavy like spent plutonium. Above the eyes loom the impression of horns wider than an aircraft’s wings.

He smells it. He retches.

In the seeping black pools around its feet, spider-leg stalks and spastic pseudopods sprout and fade, jutting briefly from the steaming tar and dying back like a time-lapse pict-feed of nocturnal weeds. It is a shadow, straining to exist.

Voices chirp and snigger. Oll hears the voices of people he knows on the wind, and realises they are lies. He hears the voices of people he has not seen alive in thirty thousand years. Lies. Lies.

He hears John’s laugh. He hears Pascal at Verdun, asking for a light. He hears Gaius on the Wall, cursing the rain and praising the virtues of Galician girls. He hears Commander Valis whisper the name of a forgotten god as they both flinch from the nuclear light blooming across the Panpacific horizon. He hears a man question the quality of bronze stirrups in strongly accented Scythian. He hears Zaid Raheem, pinned in his burning T-62, begging to die. He hears the shocktroopers around him moan as the officer tells them that their objective will be the Brumman Hives. He hears Iason and Orfeus, singing together. He hears Lieutenant Winslow dictating his will the night before Copenhagen. He hears Private Labella whistling as she fries beans and eggs the morning after the Socal Basin fell.

He hears his son, five days old, crying lustily in his crib, the day that the Norsemen landed. As if he knew, five days old and knew what was coming.

Oll raises his rifle, slips the toggle to full-auto, and fires.

The advancing darkness ripples as his streaming shots strike it. The darkness absorbs the bright bolts, but spatters too, each wound squirting fluid like milk.

The wounds vanish as fast as he makes them. The lactic blood fades. He cannot hurt it. It knows it, and he knows it. It does not just want him dead, it wants him broken. It wants his soul burned out with misery before it consumes him. It wants to anger him, wants him to feel rage and pain and frustration, and all the other human inadequacies of a thirty-five thousand year long life.

It knows he is a Perpetual.

Oll realises that suddenly, despite the pain robbing him of sense. He is caught up in the death of his son, a loss that took him three centuries to come to terms with, a loss he had pushed to the back of his over-stuffed mind, a loss M’kar has gone straight for, but even so, Oll realises.

It knows he is a Perpetual.

They would all be dead already, otherwise. It does not get to do this very often. It does not get to torment a being with such a great capacity for torment. Oll is a treat, a delicacy. All those heartless centuries of pain and loss and disappointment to tease out and relive, so many more than a human life can encompass.

The pain is going to kill me, Oll thinks. The very thought of me is going to kill me. To remember all I have ever been through will kill me stone dead.

It will not be quick.

He stops shooting. His anger is as spent as his power cell. He throws his rifle aside. He turns his back on M’kar and walks away. He walks back to the others. They are still trying to sing, but it is not working.

‘Keep going,’ he urges, his voice breaking. ‘Keep going… “forgive our foolish ways”… come on! Don’t listen to it! Drown it out! Don’t listen to its lies!’

He hears an old friend in a Dresden shop, chatting as he packs china in newspaper, ‘in case the planes come tonight’. He hears his sisters calling his name from the cages on the caravan. He hears Him, the day they met, recognising a kindred being.

‘The likes of us,’ He says to Oll, ‘the likes of us will leave our print on things down the ages. That is why we were made the way we were. The courses of our lives will not go unmarked.’

‘Mine will,’ Oll assures Him. ‘I have no stomach for the games you want to play with the world. I just want an ordinary life.’

‘My dear friend, you’ll have as many of those as you want.’

It was summer, a meadow beyond the walls of Nineveh. He had never met another Perpetual before. He would never meet another like Him.

Look at him now. After all this time, having turned his back on all those games, and never being a part of any of them, look at foolish old Oll Persson. Crossing the universe on a knifeblade for his sake. Running a fool’s errand through the warp and weft of the cosmos to stop his games from unravelling.

M’kar comes closer, gurgling laughter in the darkness. The voices swirl around him like blossom, the voices of Oll’s life. The pain, the lies.

Oll and his pilgrims are in a circle, their backs facing outwards. Oll’s back is directly to the darkness.

‘Don’t look,’ he says. ‘Don’t listen. Sing up. Drown it out.’

They have stopped singing, though. They just look at each other. Bale Rane is to Oll’s right, Katt to his left. Oll places a hand on each of their shoulders.

‘Don’t look,’ he says. ‘It’s going to be okay.’

It is not, but what else is he supposed to say?

The voices are in his ears. The pain of his life is unimaginable. He knows the others are hearing their own voices too. Bale can hear Neve. Zybes is begging his mother to stop calling out. Krank is crying about someone called Pappi. Katt is just shuddering. Oll does not want to know what she is hearing.

He takes his hand off her shoulder slowly. If there is a chance at all, it is coming and it is going to be miniscule.

‘M’kar!’ she barks, an involuntary sound.

‘Shhhh,’ he soothes her through his tears.

‘Mmmmkk!’ she blurts.

‘Easy,’ he says. He lowers his hand to his waist, to his belt, to the wrapped athame. He can feel the daemon’s breath on the nape of his neck.

The athame is warm too.

One chance. One tiny chance.

‘Maloq!’ Katt squeals, eyes rolling back.

‘Hush now,’ Oll says, taking hold of the dagger.

‘Maloq! Maloq! Maloq!’ she screams. Meaningless. He has lost her. She has gone.

‘Maloq Kartho!’ she cries, and vomits. ‘Maloq Kartho! M’kartho! M’kar!’

He has the dagger. One chance.

He wheels around, blade raised.

[mark: –?]

The thing is gone.

Only ordinary darkness surrounds them. The smell of it has gone, and the heat of it. The tar has vanished.

Only the voices remain, just for a minute or so, receding into the distance like whisperers moving away into a room beyond.

Oll blinks. He realises his mouth is open to scream, so he closes it. He feels sweat on his flushed face. He lowers the blade.

‘I don’t–’ he starts to say.

He looks at the others. Bale is nursing the sobbing Krank. Zybes is sitting on the ground with his head in his hands. Graft has picked Katt up. She is limp.

‘Oh God, no!’

She is not dead, though. There is vomit down the front of her clothes, and blood streaming from her nose.

‘It went back,’ she murmurs, looking up at Oll.

‘Back?’

‘Didn’t you feel it? It was pulled back. It was yanked away from us, from here. It was needed somewhere else, for something more important than us.’

Oll shakes his head. He remembers John’s words. Keep away from it for long enough. It will eventually have to give up and turn back.

‘What in God’s name?’ Oll wonders, out loud.

‘Maloq Kartho,’ Katt says. Graft helps her to stand up. She is not steady.

‘That’s not a human name,’ Oll says.

‘No, it is,’ she insists. ‘I feel it is. A transhuman name, at least. Whoever Maloq Kartho is, Maloq Kartho is why M’kar had to go and leave us.’

‘Then I pity poor Maloq Kartho,’ says Oll.

Katt shakes her head. ‘I don’t know why, but I don’t think you should.’

It has a destiny of its own.

[mark: –?]

Dawn breaks, soft over the thorn wood. The winds rise with it, rustling. Oll takes a bearing. He is pretty sure that the approach of M’kar was shielding them from the winds and prevented them getting a bearing.

The skies are clear, for now at least.

They have still got a long, long way to go, and it is not going to get easier.

‘What do we do?’ asks Zybes.

‘Do we keep going?’ adds Krank. ‘Do we have a route? A… direction?’

‘Boreas,’ Oll tells them, putting the compass and chart away. ‘The north-north-easterly. Boreas, or Mese, to the Grekans, at least. Nordostroni to the Franks. To the Romanii, Aquilo.’

He takes out the dagger and prepares to make the next cut. Their voyage will continue as it has been, like their lives and their destinies, unmarked.

That is why they might succeed.

‘So what do we do?’ asks Bale.

Oll puts his hand flat against the air and starts to cut.

‘We push on,’ he says. ‘Okay?’

I am sorry. I used to have faith. I used to believe that there was more to the universe, that there was more than what we could touch and see, that there was a power higher than all of us guiding us, keeping us safe. I never told you because I knew you would be angry, because you might leave. Now you are gone anyway, and I do not believe it anymore. I am sorry. I was right – there is another world beyond our dreams. I wish I could still believe it was a place of kindness. I do not want to go there.

N

About the Authors

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Guy Haley is the author of Space Marine Battles: Death of Integrity, the Warhammer 40,000 novels Valedor and Baneblade, and the novellas The Eternal Crusader, The Last Days of Ector and Broken Sword, for Damocles. His enthusiasm for all things greenskin has also led him to pen the eponymous Warhammer novel Skarsnik, as well as the End Times novel The Rise of the Horned Rat. He lives in Yorkshire with his wife and son.

Anthony Reynolds is the author of the Horus Heresy novella The Purge, audio drama Khârn: The Eightfold Path and short stories ‘Scions of the Storm’ and ‘Dark Heart’. In the Warhammer 40,000 universe, he has written the Space Marine Battles novel Khârn: Eater of Worlds, alongside the audio drama Chosen of Khorne, also featuring Khârn. He has also penned the Word Bearers trilogy and many short stories. Hailing from Australia, he is currently settled on the west coast of the United States.

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.

David Annandale is the author of the Yarrick series, consisting of the novella Chains of Golgotha and the novel Imperial Creed, as well as the Horus Heresy novel The Damnation of Pythos. For the Space Marine Battles series he has written The Death of Antagonis and Overfiend. He is a prolific writer of short fiction, including the novella Mephiston: Lord of Death and numerous short stories set in the Horus Heresy and Warhammer 40,000 universes. David lectures at a Canadian university, on subjects ranging from English literature to horror films and video games.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Fear to Tread first published in Great Britain in 2012.
Shadows of Treachery first published in Great Britain in 2012.
Angel Exterminatus first published in Great Britain in 2012.
Betrayer first published in Great Britain in 2012.
Mark of Calth first published in Great Britain in 2013.
This edition published in 2015 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS UK.

All cover illustrations by Neil Roberts.

Horus Heresy Collection Volume Five © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2015. Horus Heresy Collection Volume Five, 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 978-1-78251-995-9

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.